A sailor’s view of early service in the Marine nationale on the eve of the First World War

Chris Madsen

Canadian Forces College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

Conventional naval histories seldom consider the individual experiences of common sailors. Subaltern and other approaches to history from below use new sources to take a different viewpoint. In May 1913, recruit Georges Brucelle arrived in Toulon to start voluntary service in France’s Marine nationale . After completing common training, he specialized in torpedoes and undertook instruction to gain qualification. Assigned to a destroyer minelayer, Brucelle died along with many other of the ship’s crew during operations in 1915. Personal letters sent to his family reveal insights into the working and social lives of a French sailor just before the Great War.

Les histoires navales conventionnelles tiennent rarement compte des expériences individuelles des marins ordinaires. Les approches subalternes et autres de l’histoire par le bas utilisent de nouvelles sources pour adopter un point de vue différent. En mai 1913, la recrue Georges Brucelle arrive à Toulon pour commencer le service volontaire dans la Marine nationale. Après avoir terminé une formation commune, il se spécialise dans les torpilles et entreprend une instruction pour obtenir une qualification. Affecté à un contre-torpilleur mouilleur de mines, Brucelle mourut avec de nombreux autres membres de l’équipage du navire lors d’opérations en 1915. Des lettres personnelles envoyées à sa famille donnent un aperçu de la vie professionnelle et sociale d’un marin français juste avant la Grande Guerre.

Keywords: Matelot torpilleur Georges Brucelle, Casabianca , French Navy, lower deck, torpedoes, Marceau , sailor training, Toulon, 5^th dépot des équipages de la flotte

In the mechanical, nuclear, and digital eras that characterised major navies in the twentieth century, numbers of trained personnel functioned and operated across the naval hierarchy from the lowest sailors right up to the highest admiral. Each possessed specific tasks and responsibilities. The divide between officers and the lower deck derived from historical traditions as well as socio-economic factors of class and background. Those were reinforced in naval establishments, within separate training systems, and aboard ships of squadrons and fleets. Common sailors constituted by far the majority, though they typically receive less attention than higher ranks, who commonly left memoirs, autobiographies, and other records from which broader historical studies draw. Writings on the Royal Navy and the United States Navy remain among the few focused specifically on sailors and enlisted personnel during the early twentieth century.11Brian Lavery, Able Seamen: The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy, 1850-1939 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012); Christopher McKee, Sober Men and True: Sailor Lives in the Royal Navy, 1900-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Simon Mark Smith, “’We Sail the Ocean Blue’: British sailors, imperialism, identity, pride and patriotism c. 1890-1939”, (Ph.D dissertation, University of Portsmouth, 2017); Frederick S. Harrod, Manning the New Navy: The Development of a Modern Enlisted Force, 1899-1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978). The recruitment, training, discipline, and social relations of sailors as a group and individually reflected portraits of lived experiences in a time of immense technological change. No comparable treatment covers France’s Marine nationale , with existing studies stressing resistance to higher leadership and episodes of disobedience and mutiny.22David M. Hopkin, “Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography: some observations on eighteen- and nineteenth-century French soldiers’ and sailor’s memoirs”, Social History 29, no. 2 (May 2004): 197, doi: 10.1080/0307102042000207840; Andrew Orr, “The Myth of the Black Sea Mutiny: Communist Propaganda, Soviet Influence and the Re-Remembering of the Mutiny”, French History 32, no. 1 (2018): 89-90, doi: 10.1093/fh/cry003; Philippe Masson, “The French Naval Mutinies, 1919”, eds. Christopher Bell and Bruce Elleman,Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), 116-120; Matt Perry, “The 1919 Mutinies in the French Armed Forces”, ed. Matt Perry, The Global Challenge of Peace: 1919 as a Contested Threshold to a New World Order (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 8, doi: 10.3828/Liverpool/9781800857193.003.0004; Matt Perry, Memory of War in France, 1914-45: César Fauxbras, the Voice of the Lowly(Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 21. Scholarship dealing with the Royal Navy’s sit-down strike at Invergordon and similar naval “mutinies” purport to present a social history of the lower deck, if only because the concerns of sailors are given voice through grievances and testimony before boards of inquiry and disciplinary proceedings.33Anthony Carew, The lower deck of the Royal Navy 1900-39: The Invergordon mutiny in perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), xviii-xix; Christopher M. Bell, “The Royal Navy and the Lessons of the Invergordon Mutiny”,War in History 12, no. 1 (2005): 84-85, doi: 10.1191/0968344505wh312oa. Availability of sources derived directly from common sailors therefore offers a major impediment to deeper historical research that considers their lives as a whole.

Writing history from below relies on new perspectives and fuller exploitation of ignored primary sources. In France, sluggish reception toward Professor Ranajit Guha’s subaltern studies that emphasised under-classes and human relationships over history written by elites competed with different varieties of social history and study ofmentalités .44Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, “On the ‘Belatedness’ of the Reception of Subaltern Studies in France”, Actuel Marx 51, no. 1 (2012): 150-164, doi: 10.3917/amx.051.0150. Application of the subaltern approach to the naval context however holds much potential. Predominantly working class in origin and separated from officers by rank and training, sailors serving in the Marine nationalerepresented a large distinct group that interacted with each other internally and externally through connections to friends and surrounding locales. Identifiable by the fashionable blue/white naval rating uniform with red pom-pom topped hat, they resided within the navy’s organization during working lives on duty and became renowned for exuberance, romance, and sexual prowess when away on leave ashore.55Andrew Stephenson, “’Our jolly marin wear’: The queer fashionability of the sailor uniform in interwar France and Britain’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 3, no. 2 (March 2016): 157-159, doi: 10.1386/fspc.3.2.157_1. Beyond basic stereotypes, remarkably little is known about their actual habits, concerns, and activities. Most sailors wrote occasionally when time allowed, often no more than commercial picture postcards sent to family, acquaintances, and sweethearts. If the surviving written record is limiting, diaries and personal correspondence from sailors held in formal repositories and archives remain rare.66Matthew S. Seligmann, “’Mass Anywhere on Sea or Land’: Catholicism and the Royal Navy, 1901-1906’, War in History (2022): 2, doi: 10.1177/09683445211068077. Such sources are commonly treated as ephemera with little or no historical merit. The subaltern approach explicitly reclaims the common lives of sailors as significant through the fragments left behind.

The experience of Matelot torpilleur Georges Jules Brucelle (service number 34305-1) provides an interesting frame into the early service career of a French sailor before the First World War. The primary sources for this interrogation are original handwritten letters sent to his mother and sister between May 1913 and September 1914, thirty-eight in total, bought in a private sale from a seller in France.77All translations from individual letters and other sources into English from the original French are by the author. The conversation is necessarily one-sided because other correspondence mentioned by Brucelle in the private letters no longer exists. Family provided emotional attachment, a source of funds, and interested intimate pen pals exchanging news regularly. Brucelle described intake into the 5^th fleet personnel depot in Toulon and passing through the navy’s training system for recruits, the travails of attaining qualification as a rated sailor in the torpedo speciality, and appointment to the destroyer minelayer Casabianca . His general observations at different Mediterranean locations, health ailments requiring hospitalization, and extracurricular activities while off duty, including courting a fiancée at distance, are also recounted. Sadly, Brucelle died when the Casabianca sank on the night of 3 June 1915 in the Aegean Sea due to a mine explosion. The letters are what remain of a young life cut-short during the war, and an otherwise forgotten sailor only remembered and cherished by his immediate family. Sharing Brucelle’s writing and reflections brings a unique lower deck perspective to the working and social lives of a sailor indoctrinated into the pre-war French Navy.