Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (review)

In spite of France's claims to universalism and equal rights as foundational republican principles, the "problem" of ethno-racial difference has profoundly troubled the color-blind model of French society and politics for centuries, notably affecting colonial policy and shaping postcolonial struggles about the integration of immigrants into contemporary society. Fogarty's Race and War in France makes a welcome and significant contribution to the history of these contradictions and their legacies in modern France by examining how French attempts to integrate colonial troops into the French Army during World War I deployed ideas about racial difference and in the process exposed the contradictions of the republican model.

World War I was not the first time that the French used colonial troops on French soil (rather than just in the colonies). North Africans served during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, and they were deployed in the south of France to "pacify" crowds during the massive wine producers' demonstrations of 1907. But World War I was the first time relatively large numbers (500,000) fought in Europe. Fogarty has researched scrupulously the racial policies that incorporated North African, Madagascan, and Indochinese soldiers into the war by thoroughly mining an impressive body of archival sources that include French military, colonial, and Foreign Ministry archives, as well as published sources and the contemporary scholarly literature. He has examined not only official, top-down military policies but also has analyzed the letters and tracts produced by soldiers themselves.

The conscious exploitation of racial difference provides the analytical frame of the study. The result is a fascinating and detailed, if occasionally repetitive, investigation of the issues concerning colonials in a supposedly republican army—recruitment (and the distinctions that the Army made between martial and less martial races), conditions of service (most colonials served at the lowest levels and in segregated regiments, with limited opportunities for advancement), linguistic differences (teaching colonial soldiers French intimated both racial prejudice and beliefs in the civilizing power of language), and accommodations to Islam (despite the worry that religious solidarity, particularly with the Ottoman allies of Germany, would take precedence over loyalty to France), and regulations about intimate liaisons with French women and citizenship.

As Fogarty reasonably argues, the fundamental contradiction that disrupted efforts to "republicanize" the Army was that treating colonial soldiers as equal to French soldiers risked undermining colonial relations of domination and subordination. Thus, the Army strongly discouraged and occasionally punished sexual liaisons between colonial troops and French women, seen as harmful to French prestige and possibly leading to racial "contamination." Granting citizenship to troupes indigenes likewise posed serious problems. In the case of Muslims, the "fact of Islam," which included such social practices as polygamy as well as religious observance, militated against citizenship rights; authorities granted only a small proportion of requests for citizenship, despite the fact that after the end of hostilities, colonial troops remained for extra service to occupy the Rhine, exposing them to the unbridled racism of the Germans.

Even as France attempted to integrate "indigenous" troops into the Army and the nation, and proclaimed the "perfectibility" of colonial servicemen, the French alienated those whom they deemed unworthy of full membership. Ultimately it was more important to preserve the status, prestige, and power of France over its colonial subjects. Although Fogarty misses a golden opportunity to analyze how ideas about gender and race mutually reinforced and complicated one another, he has capably conveyed how the French "sense of entitlement to exploit an imperial resource" conflicted with republican ideals and contributed to debates about assimilation and integration that persist to this day (274).