The introduction identifies the preliminary outline of French military protest in 1919, in terms of the events and the historical literature. The introduction outlines the new approach being taken to the mutiny of 1919, seeking to reconceptualise how historians might think about consciousness. Scholars from different disciplines have declared successive paradigmatic shifts in aspects of, or related to, consciousness and this research aims to encompass these sensory, spatial, emotional, linguistic and cognitive ‘turns’ into a holistic approach to individual and collective consciousness. Consciousness therefore offers a terrain to reintegrate the fragmentary dynamics and advances of the scholarship in these fields. This is not to assert that this is the only way that such a connectivity can be established, but it is the one that is appropriate to the source material available in this study.