Guy Pedroncini

Who was Guy Pedroncini?

Guy Pedroncini was a French academic and military historian specialising in the First World War, and notable as the biographer of Philippe Pétain and for his work on the French army mutinies of 1917. He was born in Paris on 17 May 1924 and died on 11 July 2006, at the age of 82.

An alumnus of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure at Saint-Cloud, Pedroncini worked as a high school teacher in lycées in Tours and in Courbevoie while working on his doctoral thesis. This thesis, on the French army mutinies of 1917, was published in 1967 and was the first to provide detailed statistical analysis of more than 600 courts martial, based on his then unprecedented access to the French military justice archives. Between 1969 and his retirement in 1992, Pedroncini held professorial and decanal posts at the universities of the Sorbonne, Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Maine, Le Mans. He was director of the Institut d'Histoire des conflits contemporains, from 1983 to 1995, and publisher of the Revue des guerres mondiales et des conflits contemporains from 1985 to 1997.