Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918. By Richard S. Fogarty

Abstract

This is a book about both the promise and the shortcomings of French republican ideals. Richard Fogarty builds on extensive research in the archives of the French army, colonial ministry and foreign ministry—including everything from official doctrine to personal letters and photographs intercepted by wartime postal censors—to paint a vivid portrait of the questions raised by the use of colonial troops in the war. Fogarty organizes these issues intelligently around themes such as deployment, military hierarchy, language policy, Islam, sex and citizenship. A conclusion highlights the ‘paradoxical blend of tolerance and intolerance on display in French use of troupes indigènes’ (p. 287). Previously used exclusively in colonial campaigns, troupes indigènes were deployed on European battlefields for the first time during the First World War, when some 500,000 colonial subjects served. Recruitment exemplified the two-faced nature of colonial rule: On the one hand, republican ideology held that colonial subjects, like citizens, owed France a ‘blood tax’. On the other hand, while some populations were subject to systematic conscription, recruitment often abandoned standard procedures in favour of coercion, collective punishment and even bounty payments. Republican ideology was also compromised by the ways that ideas about race affected deployment. Soldiers were organized as troupes indigènes, rather than integrated into the French army, and assumptions about which populations were ‘warrior races’ also greatly affected deployment. West Africans and Moroccans were regarded as particularly fierce, and thus more likely to be used as shock troops, while Indochinese and Malagasy (whom Fogarty refers to as Madagascans) were perceived to have fewer ‘warlike’ qualities. One of the many consequences of such stereotypes was that over 80% of the Moroccans deployed in August 1914 were dead by September of that same year (p. 79). Despite a perceived need for segregation, military leaders also felt that ‘nonwhites … were incapable of withstanding the rigors of European warfare on their own’ (p. 72) and so required their accompaniment by whites.