Grand Quartier Général ( 1914 – 1919 ) The ' ( abbreviated to ' or in spoken French ) was the general headquarters of the French Army during the First World War . It served as the wartime equivalent of the and had extensive powers within an area defined by the French parliament . The was activated by parliament on 2 August 1914 , after the violation of French borders by German military patrols , and remained in existence until 20 October 1919 . The was commanded by the Chief - of - Staff , assisted by a varying number of subordinate generals , and had representatives to the French government and president . The physical headquarters of was originally at Vitry - le - François in the Marne department but rapid German advances in the early stages of the war forced its withdrawal to Chantilly , near Paris , by November 1914 and it remained there for much of the rest of the war . General Joseph Joffre served as the first Chief of Staff of from the start of the war until December 1916 and his replacement by General Robert Nivelle . Nivelle himself was replaced in May 1917 after the failure of his Spring offensive and his successor was General Philippe Pétain , who retained command of until its dissolution in 1919 . In April 1918 the was established under General Ferdinand Foch as an equivalent organisation with authority for all allied operations in France . Origins and structure . The had its origins in the reforms instituted by France after their defeat in the Franco - Prussian War . The position , and supporting staff , of the Chief of Staff of the French Army was created with responsibility for training and mobilisation in peace and the formation of the army high command in times of war . The establishment of in 1911 formalised this situation , with becoming the wartime counterpart of the and the vice - president of becoming the chief of staff of the . The received extensive military powers within an area defined as the zone of army control ; control of the remainder of the armed forces was retained by the Minister of War . GQG was activated upon the mobilisation of the French Army by parliament , who also defined the zone of army control . The chief of staff was assisted by an , who ran the general staff of around 50 officers and saw that the commander - in - chief ' s orders were carried out , and two aides - majors with responsibilities for the individual departments of GQG . was originally organised into four bureaus ( or departments ) . The First Bureau was responsible for organization , personnel and equipment ; the Second Bureau for intelligence , information and political affairs ; the Third Bureau for the planning of military operations and the Fourth Bureau ( sometimes called the " - Directorate of the Rear [ lines ] ) for transportation , communication and supply . The Third Bureau was considered by far the most powerful as it had control of active military operations . Its staff consisted mainly of liaison officer s , embedded with individual unit headquarters . Though these officers were junior in rank to the generals commanding the armies they held significant power over their careers through the reports made on their operations to . One officer from the Third Bureau was tasked as liaison to the French government and another to the president , they were said to wield " considerable political power " . The Fourth Bureau had a wide remit , with responsibilities for the management of military railways , motor vehicles , water transport , financial offices , post offices and telegraphy and its chief was sometimes called the " ( director of the rear [ lines ] ) . In addition was responsible for co - ordination with any allied armies . First World War . Activation of GQG . The French Chief of Staff , General Joseph Joffre , was convinced of the inevitability of the outbreak of the First World War and , on 30 July 1914 , began organising the personnel for his GQG staff . Joffre persuaded the French government to enact mobilisation on 1 August and at 14 . 00 the next day parliament , following the violation of the French borders by German military patrols , gave Joffre full wartime powers and activated the . The zone of army control was initially limited to just 8 departments of France , but on 10 August was expanded to 33 departments out of 86 in Metropolitan France . Upon activation the of was General Emile Belin and the two aides - majors were General Henri Berthelot and General Céleste Deprez . Each aide - major had responsibility for two of the bureaus ; Berthelot oversaw the Second and Third Bureaus , Deprez oversaw the First and Fourth Bureaus . Each bureau was under the day - to - day control of a lower ranking officer , upon activation the Third Bureau was headed by Colonel Ferdinand Auguste Pont , the Fourth Bureau by General Étienne Édouard Laffon de Ladébat and the president ' s liaison officer was General Pénélon . The other officers were generally selected by Joffre from those who had excelled at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre ( French Army staff college ) . Representatives from the allied powers were also present within the GQG structure and at various times included officers from the United Kingdom , Russia , USA , Japan , Italy , Belgium , Serbia and Romania . The GQG established its physical headquarters at Vitry - le - François , in the Marne department , on 5 August . The staff had the use of a detachment of the 8th Engineer Regiment , a company of the 19th Railway Squadron , two companies of the 68th Territorial Infantry Regiment , a company of Forestry Chasseurs , two anti - aircraft sections , up to two carrier pigeon units , a unit of cyclist messengers , a medical detachment and a military police escort squadron . GQG during the war . GQG played a key role at the start of the war . Due to illness Belin had delegated much of his role to Berthelot , further increasing the power of his influential Third Bureau . The officers in that department , particularly the recent staff college graduates who were known as the Young Turks , favoured strong offensive action . They were key in persuading Joffre to attack the exposed German right flank during the Great Retreat from Mons . Joffre also used his new authority to exclude the press and his own government ' s parliamentary commission on military affairs from his zone of control . As a result of the German advances in late 1914 GQG was forced to relocate its headquarters progressively westwards . It moved to Bar - sur - Aube on 31 August , Châtillon - sur - Seine on 6 September , Romilly - sur - Seine on 28 September 1914 and , on 29 November , to Chantilly , within the Paris metropolitan area , where it was to remain for the next few years . This location was suited to GQG operations due to its proximity to the seat of government and the ministries in Paris . Joffre found his new command difficult ; while he was able to dismiss army commanders at will ( he limogered 54 generals by the time of the First Battle of the Marne ) he seemed unable to remove officers from GQG . The reasons for Joffre ' s lack of action are unknown but historian Alistair Horne speculated that it was due to the vast power granted to the GQG staff or to Joffre ' s desire not to be upstaged by his staff . The GQG officers , isolated from the direct effects of the war , engaged in intrigue on a grand scale and there was little co - operation between the rival departments . The Second Bureau maintained an inadequate means of calculating German casualty figures , simply assuming that for each two Frenchmen killed in battle three Germans must have fallen . In reality the figures were almost the reverse . By means of such estimations they calculated that Germany would run out of manpower reserves by early 1916 . Thus the Third Bureau found itself directing French generals to undertake military operations based on wholly inaccurate assessments of the strength of opposing units . French set - backs in 1915 forced Joffre to reorganise GQG — on 11 December he replaced Belin with General Noël de Castelnau — and expand its remit . Three entirely new bureaus were formed , that of the North Army ( ) , the North - East Army ( ) and for external theatres of war bringing GQG direct control of French armies in the field . Two major - générals were appointed , General Maurice Janin for the two army bureaus and General Maurice Pellé for the Bureau for External Theatres of War . The Second Bureau was also reformed with its censorship , counter - espionage and intelligence gathering duties being passed to a new Fifth Bureau ; though the Second Bureau retained some of its former intelligence responsibilities . Despite this reorganisation GQG remained dysfunctional with the Second Bureau , described as " perennial optimists " by Horne , again responsible for providing deceptive assessments of German casualties , at one point in the Battle of Verdun simply adding " a hundred thousand or thereabouts " every fortnight to the figures . The confused responsibility for intelligence between the Second and Fifth Bureaus , the Ministry of the Interior and the police also led to delays in providing intelligence to the armies in the field during the battle . The Third Bureau was responsible for withdrawing two and a half batteries of artillery from the fortresses of Verdun in the months leading up to that close - fought battle , despite receiving requests for reinforcements from the local commander General Frédéric - Georges Herr , who stated he could not hold if attacked in force . The autonomy and power afforded to GQG worried Minister for War Joseph Gallieni and after his death , one of his successors , Hubert Lyautey , ordered a reorganisation of GQG by ministerial decree on 13 December 1916 . Joffre was sidelined to a position as " technical adviser to the government " , with few defined responsibilities , which led to his resignation on 27 December 1916 and replacement by General Robert Nivelle . Such was Joffre ' s fall from grace that , entitled to take three staff officers from GQG with him to his new post , he could find only one volunteer . The North Army and North - East Army were also removed from the direct control of GQG . This course of action was justified by the Ministry of War as an essential step in restoring the independence of the two armies , a key pre - war policy that had been established in a ministerial decree on 28 October 1913 . Nivelle ordered his own reorganisation on 1 January 1917 , returning control of external theatres to the Ministry of War . In February the 2nd and 5th Bureaus were re - united , though there remained an informal division and intense rivalry between the officers of the " old " and " new " 2nd Bureau . This division remained until the arrival of Georges Clemenceau as Prime Minister and Minister of War in November 1917 . Nivelle moved the GQG headquarters forward to Beauvais in Picardy on 10 January and to Compiègne in Oise on 4 April . At this stage the GQG staff numbered 450 officers and 800 enlisted personnel . However , the failure of the Nivelle Offensive of April 1917 led to his downfall and replacement by General Philippe Pétain on 17 May . Pétain expanded GQG ' s operations , establishing a new Section for Relations with the Civil Authorities and a Bureau for Aeronatics , Telegraphy and Aviation . He later reformed the Second Bureau , absorbing into it the newly formed section for relations with the civil authorities and a new responsibility for cryptography . A minor change in February 1918 saw the expansion of the Third Bureau , gaining telegraphy and liaison from the Bureau for Aeronautics and cryptography from the Bureau for Special Services . In March the Bureau for Aeronautics gained control of anti - aircraft matters and the army medical departments under their own Bureau of Health Services . This organisation would last until after the armistice with Germany in 1918 . At 19 . 00 on 16 February 1918 the offices of the Third Bureau on Algiers Street in Compiègne were hit by a bomb from a squadron of three German bombers . Serious damage was caused to the building and two officers were killed , Commandant Mathis and Captain Mallet . The dead officers were buried at the Saint - Jacques Church in Compiègne . Fourteen additional officers were injured by flying glass , two of whom were hospitalised . The headquarters moved further eastwards to Provins in Seine - et - Marne on 26 March 1918 . After the armistice moved to Metz in the newly reacquired Moselle department on 1 December 1918 and returned to Chantilly on 29 January 1919 . was dissolved on 20 October 1919 in accordance with a request from the War Ministry on 14 October which also abolished the zone of army control . The powers previously delegated to were returned to the chief - of - staff of the army . During the Second World War the German army took control of the First World War archives and sent many of the most secret documents to Berlin for analysis . These documents were recovered by the USSR at the end of the war and taken back to Moscow for processing . They were not returned to France until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s . Equivalent bodies in the other nations of the war were the General Headquarters ( GHQ ) of the British , Italian and American armies , the of the German army and the Stavka of the Russian forces . Though one was allowed for in the constitution , the Japanese army did not operate a General Headquarters during the war . After April 1918 all Allied troops on the Western Front were placed under the command of the , a multi - national general staff that developed from the Supreme War Council . The was on similar lines to the and came under General Ferdinand Foch , who had overall command of all Allied troops .