Abstract
Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD, 2008; 374 pp., 10 illus.; 9780801888243, £40.00 (hbk)
In this military history with a commendably broad appeal, Richard Fogarty analyses several key debates surrounding the deployment of colonial subjects by the French Army during the First World War. Approximately 500,000 ‘troupes indigènes’ from North and West Africa, Madagascar and Indochina joined the battle against the Central Powers, many of them fighting on European soil and directly against a white enemy. French willingness to employ colonized subjects as soldiers stemmed from the universalist principles of French republicanism as they intersected with imperial ideology. Thus, Fogarty begins with a tension inherent in the development of the French nation-state: the coexistence of egalitarian political theory and a differentialist racism which justified the ‘civilizing mission’. This paradox was rearticulated in the question of military service for men of colour. If republicanism held that colonized people were French subjects (although not citizens) and fellow members of a universal humanity, then they too were expected to defend the nation of which they were technically a part. But at the same time, the perceptions of French military officials and politicians were filtered through a racial hierarchy which sanctioned the incommensurability of colonizer and colonized. This meant that, within the army, the egalitarian hopes of troupes indigènes with regard to rank, promotion, and possible naturalization went unrealized, while fears of miscegenation and African ‘barbarism’ governed their reception in the metropole.
Fogarty dismisses the idea that men of colour were deployed simply because they were seen as a racially inferior form of cannon fodder. Instead, a mix of ‘pure exploitation’, ‘republican idealism’, and a commitment to the ‘reciprocal duties’ that defined the relationship between Europeans and subject peoples influenced the recruitment of colonial troops. The simultaneous articulation of these motives helps to explain the widespread notion that French society was colour-blind, a reputation that was largely earned during the Great War and with reference to the experience of African-American soldiers in France. Like the French reception of people of colour in general, military policies towards colonial troops were paradoxical: sometimes liberalizing, sometimes blatantly racist, and often both. Moreover, army officials and politicians frequently argued both sides of the same universalist, yet racist coin.
The book persuasively demonstrates how racial discourse guided army policy on colonial soldiers. For example, Fogarty shows how racial stereotypes played a decisive role in determining the duties assigned to troupes indigènes. Authorities recruited most extensively among the allegedly ‘warlike races’, preferring ‘ruthless’ West Africans to the Indochinese soldiers they described as inappropriate for combat in Europe. Of course, in the context of empire, the distinction between ‘warlike’ and ‘savage’ is a fine one, and other imperial tropes, such as intellectual inferiority and the need for European guidance, were invoked to claim that Africans and Asians could not master the specialized tasks of modern warfare. Similar stereotypes were at play as colonial soldiers attempted to scale the military hierarchy; racial difference trumped both republican egalitarianism and the Napoleonic model of army advancement based on merit.
Fogarty’s account covers a lot of ground, including whether and how to accommodate Islam in the French Army – a particularly salient question after the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany – and interracial relationships between colonial soldiers and French women. Religion, women and sexuality are woven into Fogarty’s overall argument rather than introduced as a gesture of tokenism. In these examples, the same vacillation between inclusion and exclusion occurred. To maintain the morale of Muslim soldiers and to offset anti-French propaganda, army officials implemented new policies on burial procedures, holy days and dietary restrictions. Nevertheless, no North African troops participated in the Dardanelles Campaign, where Muslim soldiers would have been pitted against one another. North African Muslims in particular were viewed as fanatical, fatalistic, and potential traitors to the nation, images which were inseparable from the larger debate as to whether their integration might be possible.
The problem of integration culminated in the question of offering French citizenship to veterans of colour. Because citizenship had been linked to military service since the Revolution and its levée en masse, the hesitancy to naturalize colonial soldiers appeared to violate the premise of egalitarian universalism. The debate was framed in terms of cultural difference and focused on North African Muslims. Opponents of naturalization insisted that the cultural practices of colonized Muslims – who remained beholden to Qur’anic law in particular instances, such as those pertaining to the family – were incompatible with becoming fully French. That is, ostensibly private concerns such as polygamy, marriage rights, and divorce had a bearing on the Muslim soldier’s prospects for citizenship, as did the supposedly barbaric treatment of women in the colonies.
According to Fogarty, this is further evidence of a ‘uniquely French interpretation of racial difference’ which downplayed biological essentialism and favoured instead a cultural understanding of race. This, in theory, left room for assimilation on white French terms. While it is difficult to disentangle the biological from the cultural in these discourses – at times they were expressed simultaneously, and certainly culture can be essentialized to such a degree that it acts similarly to biological race – Fogarty offers a suggestive explanation for the apparent contradiction in French treatment of colonized subjects: oscillating between exclusion based on race, and inclusion predicated on the ideals of republican universalism.
Binghamton University