:Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918.(War/Society/Culture.)

Abstract

This subtle and extraordinarily informative book explores the interaction of republican ideology and race, in the tradition of scholars such as Alice Conklin and Tyler Stovall. Richard S. Fogarty argues that republicanism in France needs to be taken seriously in understanding the formulation of two broad avenues of colonial policy: assimilation and association. Assimilation spoke to the principles of 1789 and to the eradication of politically significant difference. One fine day, according to an assimilationist teleology, the empire would simply become “Greater France,” populated by politically commensurate Frenchmen (women of any color being kept to the political sidelines). Association, in contrast, sought to strike some form of cultural and political compromise between colonizer and colonized, by reconciling colonial rule with respect for indigenous difference. Yet both assimilation and association carried within them logics that seemed to undermine the colonial enterprise itself. Assimilation implied a truly “color-blind” France, which Fogarty and Stovall (among others) have shown, hardly existed as an aspiration, let alone a reality. Association also posed the uncomfortable question of just how to adjudicate and evaluate “difference” between colonizer and colonized. Indeed, if the empire was about respect for difference, why should there be an empire at all? What was an empire based on association about besides extraction?