17

The Third Republic, with its pluralist parliamentarianism and the rise of a free press, appears retrospectively as a golden age of public free speech. Although members of the military participated in this freedom via newspapers, magazines and books, their speech became more strictly channelled following the Dreyfus Affair and then again after the Great War. However, many of them continued to express their views, often under pseudonyms, and sometimes to the peril of their comrades. As the public started increasingly debating military subjects, the Ministers of War and the Navy increasingly restricted the freedom of expression of the armed services through a succession of increasingly strict regulations building on the regulation of 1924. After the emotion provoked by de Gaulle in his “Towards a Professional Army”, General Gamelin signalled an end to this period with two decrees, in 1936 and 1939, which effectively reduced the free speech of military personnel to zero.