Introduction

1It is only very recently that recognition has been given to the massive and possibly decisive contribution made by troops from France’s Empire to its ultimate victory in both World Wars. The ‘rediscovery’ of their role afforded them belated acknowledgement in the commemorations of the centenary of World War One. The original plans for the centenary barely acknowledged the role of colonial troops, an omission challenged by Rachid Bouchareb and Pascal Blanchard who successfully proposed the addition of the commemorative project ‘Frères d’armes’. This rediscovery invites reflection on what factors may have contributed to the long neglect of their participation in combat. This chapter explores the immediate historical context of the deployment of one segment of these colonial troops during World War One: the tirailleurs sénégalais, the soldiers recruited from French West and Equatorial Africa, and argues that the real and discursive boundaries placed around their presence in France were to consign these men to a long-forgotten corner of French social and military history. Once the decision had been made to use troops from France’s African colonies, the civil and military authorities sought to define the ‘place’ of these soldiers – considered to belong to the lower end of the racial hierarchy according to the mindset of the time – within the metropole, the Empire and in the French imaginary. The representations of these soldiers had to reconcile several potentially conflicting ideas: the ‘devotion’ of the black soldiers demonstrated the loyalty of the colonies to the Empire, while the numbers that could be raised proved in turn the value of the colonies to France; brave and capable warriors they nevertheless needed the strong, paternal leadership of the white officers who commanded them; they were children to be guided towards civilisation through the benevolent governance of France; lastly, their presence in France was a potential threat to white womanhood and to the entire colonial structure.

2Focusing on the political and ideological significance of the attempts at ‘resénégalisation’ carried out in the South of France by Dr Maclaud, the chapter explores the complex and evolving representations of the tirailleurs sénégalais as the war progressed and new questions were raised about their postwar return to the colonies: how, after their period in the army when they were lauded as ‘brothers in arms, ’ would they accept a life where they were subject to the discriminatory code de l’indigénat and systems of forced labour? The answer put with increasing force by members of the colonial lobby, anxious to encourage the postwar economic mise en valeur of the colonies, was to assert that fundamental differences distinguished the Africans from European civilisation and necessarily consigned them to a long period of preparation before they could aspire to equal status in the Republic. Countering the assimilationist ideas that had provided a theoretical justification and moral cover for colonisation, they argued that liberation from servitude could only be envisaged ‘in the long run, ’ once the colonised populations had contributed to the economic development that would, in the view of the lobby, benefit both coloniser and colonised. These ‘associationist’ arguments, that acquired considerable prominence in postwar France, contributed to a context in which the participation of the colonial troops in the war effort was downplayed and rarely memorialised, for the ‘place’ of these men had been firmly defined as external to the life of the nation.

Recruitment of La Force Noire

3While advocacy of the use of African soldiers to bolster France’s military strength is closely associated with General Mangin’s La Force Noire (1910), the French army had in fact, for half a century, been recruiting ‘tirailleurs sénégalais’ [Senegalese riflemen],1 so-called regardless of which French West or Equatorial African colony they came from. They had served in many theatres of war and conquest, including in Morocco, Madagascar and in West and Equatorial Africa, for it was a widespread practice to use troops recruited from a conquered territory to advance French colonial expansion. On the eve of the war there were thirty-five battalions of tirailleurs sénégalais, a total of 30,000 men, of whom 14,000 were serving in sub-Saharan Africa and 16,000 in Algeria, Morocco and Madagascar.2 What was different about Mangin’s proposal was that he advocated the use of African soldiers in France, a deployment that to many seemed misguided and beset with problems. The arguments that he advanced in several publications in the lead-up to World War One centred on three main considerations: the demographic weakness of France (with a population of thirty-nine million) in comparison to her German neighbour (sixty-four million and ‘growing by a million every year’); the reduction of military service in France from three to two years in 1905 (though it would be increased again to three years in 1913, a change championed by the Minister of War, Eugène Etienne); and the undoubted martial prowess of the indigenous troops who had already played such an important role in extending French power. Moreover the contact initiated through service in the army would hasten, Mangin claimed, the assimilation of native peoples within Greater France, while the loss of manpower would have little negative impact on the life of the colonies.3

4Mangin’s arguments were, however, countered by many pre-war commentators who voiced fears indicative of the concerns that would linger throughout the war about the short and longer-term repercussions both in France and in the colonies of the use of black troops. In 1911, directly addressing Mangin’s arguments, but in relation to the use of tirailleurs in Algeria, General de Torcy cited the dangers of the economic emancipation of black troops, the growth of ‘syndicalism’ amongst them as they compared their conditions to those of Algerian and French soldiers, and the risks posed to the colonies by the return of soldiers trained for combat – even if one entertained the hope that they would abandon their military past as soon as they were discharged.4 Despite the counter arguments and reservations expressed by de Torcy and others, in 1912 a system of partial conscription of native troops was introduced in French West Africa for a service of four years.

5Although Mangin had envisaged an all-volunteer force,5 around 200,000 tirailleurs sénégalais were recruited, often under constraint, between 1914 and 1918 to contribute to the war effort, of whom Jacques Frémeaux estimates that 130,000 served in Europe. The largest number, some 63,000, were recruited in early 1918, after the highly successful recruitment drive led by the Senegal deputy Blaise Diagne.6 While initially many served in service roles away from the frontline, battalions of tirailleurs sénégalais (BTS) were involved in combat in Europe from the earliest stages of the war: in August 1914 four BTS, outnumbered four to one, stalled a German advance at the river Yser in Belgium.7 As the war drew on and losses mounted, many thousands of tirailleurs fought in re-formed and mixed battalions on the front line. Some 30,000 died in the war and many more were wounded, while others suffered and died from disease in the camps set up to receive men recuperating from injury or wintering away from the fighting, for the Africans, unable to withstand the cold of the North, were withdrawn to camps in the South in winter, a practice known as hivernage. Many camps reserved exclusively for African troops were set up in and around Marseille, Fréjus and Saint-Raphael, and they received tens of thousands of troops for hivernage and for training, to such an extent that the region ‘became a virtual outpost of West Africa in the Var’.8 Other camps were set up in the Gironde where the camp at Courneau near Bordeaux became notorious for insanitary and bleak conditions that led to a very high mortality rate from disease.9 The conditions were not markedly better at the camps in the South: Lucie Cousturier, referring to the camps around Fréjus, described them as ‘sad wooden barracks where half a dozen of our Annamite, Kanak, Madagascan or Senegalese protégés die every day.’10 Blanchard and Boëtsch also report the poor conditions in the camps in this region.11

Forestalling the Dangers of ‘Fraternisation’

6In the early years of the war, African wounded were treated in the same hospitals as the metropolitan troops: ‘No small town hospital without its Senegalese’ wrote Alphonse Séché in July 1916.12 As more African (and colonial) soldiers became involved in combat and the number of casualties increased dramatically, hospitals were set up to care exclusively for these troops and again locations in the South of France were chosen for their warm climate. The opportunities for fraternisation between tirailleurs and locals were clearly much greater in the periods of enforced idleness away from the front-line, during hivernage or convalescence, than they were in the combat zones, a situation that raised concern in some quarters.

7As might be expected in the context of the racial attitudes of the time, the sudden influx of so many colonial troops, concentrated in certain regions of France, raised concerns among the local population, while the civil and religious authorities viewed with particular alarm the increased possibilities for contact between African troops and French women, fearing that their presence would lead to the ‘corruption’ of white womanhood.13 Concern was expressed by the military authorities about the corruption of the soldiers themselves: would they be ‘spoilt’ by the affectionate attentions of their nurses and of the women, known as marraines de guerre, who visited them in hospital, took them on outings or even invited them into their homes? Although the Army encouraged the system of marrainage for its French troops, it soon became concerned about the effects that this female attention might have on the black soldiers. At the end of 1915, military health authorities warned female nursing staff and visitors against showing excessive familiarity and generosity towards their charges; nor should they give the troops photographs of themselves since this might give rise to ‘arrogant self-conceit’ on the part of the soldiers thus favoured.14 Similarly, evil consequences would result from invitations to the homes of French families.15 The authorities were concerned about the consequences for the maintenance of imperial, racial and even class boundaries and for military discipline. Cousturier quotes an officer who vituperates against the French women who laugh and joke with the tirailleurs as saying: ‘What thoughtlessness! What a deplorable lack of dignity! The result? The blacks no longer salute us.’16

8These concerns derived from the ambient stereotypes that defined the nature of the black troops, their military aptitudes and motivations, and even the supposed characteristics of the different ethnic groups as laid out in Captain Obissier’s pamphlet of 1903.17 According to the conventional ideas of the time, the tirailleur’s attitude towards his commanding officer was characterised by a dog-like devotion: he fought in order to win the esteem, affection and approval of the man who stood in the position of father and chief. Like the ‘big children’ they were represented to be18 – according to a widespread theory of the time, their intelligence developed only to the age of thirteen, a belief to which Cousturier referred disapprovingly19 – they needed the firm but paternal hand of the officer/father figure. The ‘regrettable compassion’20 lavished on them by women might undermine these exclusive ties to their officers and also the hierarchical racial distinctions on which colonial society depended. Frank Furedi, referring to the British colonial mindset, writes that ‘white prestige’ – the assumption of the intellectual, moral and cultural superiority of the European – underpinned the latter’s justification of colonial rule, while the recognition of this superiority supposedly explained the subservience of the indigenous peoples.21 Anything that undermined this hierarchy, such as excessive familiarity between the races, posed an existential threat to the colonial system. Women were thus viewed by the military and colonial authorities as a potential weak link in the chain of hierarchical and racial command: ‘relationships between troupes indigènes and Frenchwomen represented grave transgressions of racial, sexual and colonial boundaries and engendered anxiety among male French authorities’.22

9As the prospect of their release from service and return to the colonies approached, the problem of the readjustment of the tirailleurs to colonial life became the subject of some debate in the press and in military and colonial circles. In combat the colonial troops had enjoyed similar conditions, rations, ‘comforts’ (alcohol where appropriate, tobacco) as the French troops.23 Had they been so softened and ‘Europeanised’ by such treatment that they would no longer tolerate the traditional food and conditions of the colonies? And had relations between African soldiers and French people (and especially French women) been too easy-going, too close, destroying the natural subservience of the natives to the Europeans? Clearly there was concern amongst the colonial authorities, anxious to return to the pre-war status quo,24 that the soldiers might refuse to resume their place in a hierarchical colonial society where cheap and ‘reliable’ manpower was needed, where systems of forced labour were often in place and where in most colonies the natives were ruled by the discriminatory code de l’indigénat [indigenous code], which imposed penalties including fines and imprisonment at the discretion of local magistrates or administrators for a wide range of offences against the colonial order. The tirailleurs might be all the more unwilling to accept a return to these conditions because they had often been promised during the recruitment campaigns that they would acquire new rights, (‘By spilling the same blood, you gain the same rights’, according to a recruitment slogan),25 or even that they would gain citizenship. Mainly through the campaigning of the Senegalese deputy Blaise Diagne, the originaires – the troops from the original quatre communes of Sénégal – acquired the right to French citizenship in 1916, but they represented only a fraction of the total tirailleurs recruited, some 7,000 men. Although postwar legislation allowed other veterans the possibility of acquiring citizenship, in practice only a tiny minority benefitted from this measure.26

10In view of these concerns, a number of measures were adopted in the later years of the war that ‘amounted to a systematic attempt to segregate the tirailleurs as much as possible from both French soldiers and civilians’,27 while in some institutions a more directed effort was made to reclaim those who had strayed from their native condition. The camps in the Midi and the Gironde were situated in isolated locations and the men’s off-base leave was strictly controlled and limited usually to only a few hours a week on a Sunday.28 The founding of the Comité d’assistance aux troupes noires in early 1915 testified to a growing concern to accommodate the specific needs of these troops in terms of entertainment, food and living conditions – a humanitarian mission no doubt but one which also explicitly sought to provide them with distractions ‘which keep them from frequenting the cabarets, so dangerous for their health and for discipline’.29 The Comité d’assistance organized film screenings, the most popular a film shot by Pathé at a cost of 200,000 francs showed animal hunting in Africa. It also ran a ‘native village’ at Roquebrune, near Menton, where the tirailleurs could live ‘a little like in Africa, protected from the annoying solicitations to which they are too often exposed’.30 However it must be noted that there existed very significant cultural, religious, linguistic and social differences between the soldiers grouped under the category ‘troupes sénégalaises’ and one must wonder what eclectic combinations of food and practices were deemed to correspond to those of a ‘native village’; and similarly ask to what common ‘native condition’ such measures sought to restore men whose heads had been turned by ‘the bars and […] easy pleasures of the town’.31 The frequent use of the adjective ‘facile [easy]’ in descriptions of the temptations offered by the town seems to hint by displacement at the ‘easy women’ who led the tirailleurs astray.

Maclaud’s Project of ‘Resénégalisation’

11One of the most concerted attempts at ‘resénégalisation’ – a term coined by Dr Charles Maclaud – took place in hospitals and camps in the South near Fréjus, and most notably at Hospital 52 in Menton, run by Maclaud. Writer and journalist Alphonse Séché (1876-1964) described in some detail the practices in place at this hospital in an article for the Revue hebdomadaire in 1916, republished in his collection Les Noirs in 1919.32 His assessment of the objectives and methods at this hospital, staffed by male personnel, included a comparison with the approach taken in Hospital 223 in Marseille, run by women from the Red Cross and sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny. The Marseille hospital, meticulously clean, light and well-run, struck Séché as being like European hospitals everywhere, though he admitted the shock of surprise provoked in him by the contrast between the clean white environment and the black faces in the beds, ‘shattering harmony’. The sisters treated the tirailleurs maternally, as ‘naïve and affectionate children’, but the patients were also, according to Séché, ‘very cunning’, playing on the sympathy of the nuns to obtain treats and special attention. The hospital at Menton, run by Major Maclaud and all male nurses, had a rather different atmosphere and objective: it undertook not only medical care but also ‘a wholly moral cure’ that Maclaud described as ‘resénégalisation’.33

12Both hospitals were exclusively reserved for black troops, a fact that won Séché’s approval: ‘There they are amongst their fellows, more at home, more confident; they are shielded from contact with the metropolitan troops, a contact whose ill effects were so often seen’.34 It is clear however, from the favourable way Séché reported the practices at Menton, that he supported the need for the more stringent measures taken there and he criticized the over-indulgent way the Africans had been treated in hospitals such as the one in Marseille: ‘The mentality of many Senegalese who were mistakenly allowed to linger in hospitals in the interior is completely warped. They arrive at Menton full of pretention and arrogance. Contact with whites has been harmful to them.’35 Séché reiterated the dangers posed by the ‘deplorable’ influence of women: ‘They soften the Senegalese soldier, they make him vain and ill-disciplined – because they have more or less desenegalised him.’36 He drew a parallel between the need for isolation in the case of certain infectious diseases and a similar need to isolate the Sénégalais, ‘morally intoxicated, ’ from the contagion of contact with Europeans – and also to prevent them from ‘infecting’ other African troops.37 Séché was a journalist, writer and theatre director sometimes heralded as the precursor of surrealism. It is significant that a highly educated man with radical artistic interests shared these stereotypical ideas about the Africans.

13Although Séché spelt his name as Maclau, the Chief Medical Officer can be identified as Joseph Edmé Charles Maclaud (1866-1933), a naval doctor who had already given many years of colonial service in Indochina and French West Africa as an explorer, naturalist and administrator. Indeed he came from a senior administrative post in Senegal, where he was Administrator of Casamance from 1904-1914, to run the hospital at Menton. In articles that appeared in early 1916 and 1917 in La Dépêche Coloniale Illustrée, Maclaud explained the reasoning behind his hospital policy: to reclaim men who, ‘intoxicated by the exaggerated praise, the excessive indulgences, the misplaced familiarities’ that they had experienced in the interior, had become ‘frankly unbearable’. It is clear, from the context of this passage, that amongst ‘misplaced familiarities’ he included those bestowed on the soldiers by women. His colonial mindset is further and crucially revealed in his fear of the ‘disastrous consequences’ that could result from the return to West Africa of ‘such “emancipated” men’.38

14It is in order therefore to accomplish the necessary ‘moral vaccination’, to dispel ‘the unwholesome dream of the uprooted’,39 that Maclaud recreated in his hospital a Senegalese environment: ‘the atmosphere is fully African’ wrote Séché, clearly reassured that here the African soldiers were in their place, at one with their environment; here the harmony broken at the Marseille hospital was restored.40 African food was served, the tirailleurs played traditional games: l’awali and draughts, they slept on the floor, smoked pipes and dealt in the production and commerce of chewing tobacco. The notices in the hospital were in Bambara, or simultaneously in French, Bambara and français-tirailleur. More pejoratively termed ‘français petit-nègre’, this form of French was taught to the African troops as a simplified means of communication, on and off the battlefield. As a photograph of the canteen shows, slogans on the walls exhorted the soldiers to remember their patriotic duty to France and their place within its Empire: ‘Vive la France. Vive l’Afrique Occ [identale] Française’.41 The wards were named after colonial generals or towns of the empire; paternalism reigned: by being friendly but firm the Major had won the respect even the love of the soldiers, wrote Séché, echoing the widespread cliché that the African soldiers fought in order to earn the affection and approval of their officers.

15Another white observer, but one who developed a much closer relationship with the black troops, Lucie Cousturier, cast a rather different perspective on the African soldiers she met, on their motivations, their ‘devotion’ to their officers and their experience of resénégalisation. Cousturier was a neo-Impressionist painter with radical views who lived near Saint-Raphaël in the South of France during the war. In Des Inconnus chez moi (1920) she described, in a resolutely open-minded and unprejudiced way, her relationship with the many African soldiers who became her pupils and friends. She gave them art classes and lessons in standard French, since she believed that the use of français-tirailleur contributed to the impression that the soldiers were children. Many became regular guests in her home and when they left for the front she corresponded with them. Her refusal to accept the prevailing stereotypes is apparent already in the preface where she challenged the justification of the use of the generic appellation ‘Noirs’ with all the negative connotations that it carried.42 Cousturier also rejected the term ‘tirailleur sénégalais’, arguing that it evoked the image of a ‘militarized devil’.43 She confronted her own prejudices and assumptions, acknowledging the fears that surrounded the arrival of African soldiers in the sleepy villages in the vicinity, although she noted that the local women, by identifying the blacks as ‘children’, thus echoing the representation promoted by government propaganda during the war, soon came to accept their presence.44

16Cousturier explained the supposed close attachment of the Africans to their officers as the natural result of the situation into which they had been thrown: taken from their family and community at a young age to a totally unfamiliar place, they were completely dependent on their officers for favours, approval, indeed for their very survival. The men interviewed by Lunn described the disorientation experienced by the tirailleurs on their arrival in France.45 Cousturier did not share the view that their attachment to their officers was based on affection and dog-like loyalty – rather she reported conversations with her tirailleur friends that revealed this relationship to be based on fear, resignation and the reality of army discipline. With her characteristic bluntness, Cousturier summed up the process of resénégalisation as the reinstilling of fear: ‘What’s called resénégalisation, one might call the reinculcation of fear’.46 Indeed she may supply here the answer to the question posed earlier concerning the nature of the common ‘native condition’ to which resénégalisation was to restore the black soldiers: that of subordination to white authority, whether military, colonial or racial.

17While the hospital at Menton may have seen the most deliberate and systematic attempt at resénégalisation, the camps where the tirailleurs passed the winter or convalesced from injury, largely isolated from the local communities, were also a form of segregation designed to ‘protect’ the troops from the harmful effects of excessive contact with the French population. Cousturier wrote: ‘The wounded and sick Senegalese are now parked in Fréjus in dirty brick or wooden cattle-sheds, well protected from any French contamination’.47 Amongst the aims of the isolation of the black troops was that of turning their minds away from the white women (and prostitutes) that had become available to them, and back towards the women they had left behind.48

The Colonial Lobby

18The attempts at resénégalisation undertaken by Maclaud at Menton represent one of the more explicit responses to the range of concerns raised by the use of black troops to wage war in France. Maclaud’s justifications for his policy echoed the fears expressed in the pages of La Dépêche Coloniale Illustrée by Jean-Paul Trouillet (1855-1919), Pierre Mille (1864-1941), Eugène Etienne (1844-1921) and Joseph Chailley (1854-1928) amongst others, that the experiences of the troops in France might liberate the men from the ‘natural’ subservience on which the projects for postwar mise en valeur of the colonies depended. Most of these writers were grouped in and around the Union Coloniale Française, of which Joseph Chailley was for more than twenty years the Secretary–General; he was editor of La Quinzaine Coloniale from 1897 to 1914 and advocate of a ‘Greater France’ stretching across the colonies.49 Pierre Mille, a colonial novelist sometimes described as the French Kipling, journalist and administrator, was ‘one of the pillars of the French colonial party’.50 Eugène Etienne, founder of the Groupe colonial in the Chamber of deputies in 1902, was the uncontested leader of the parti colonial.51 These men had strongly advocated before the war the economic mise en valeur of France’s African colonies: they lobbied Parliament for the passage of bills favourable to the development of French-dominated capitalistic agriculture52 in a political context where colonization was under scrutiny from both the conservative and royalist right and the socialist and dissenting left.53

19Since at the end of the nineteenth century the ‘colonial idea’ was far from accepted by French public opinion, the colonial lobby sought as a central objective to win public support for their policies :54 Etienne and Jean-Paul Trouillet (editor of La Dépêche Coloniale Illustrée) founded the Ligue coloniale française in 1907 to forge a mass movement in favour of colonisation, but it gained little popular support or resonance before the war.55 World War One presented an opportunity to highlight to a wide audience the potential economic and military utility of the colonies, by lauding the merits and loyalty of the tirailleurs as servants of France. But even as these writers extolled the virtues of the colonial troops, they warned against the erroneous, utopian thinking – dating back to the Revolution wrote Chailley – that might wish to bestow democracy or citizenship on men who were so clearly incapable of exercising such rights. Indeed Chailley argued that even the limited forms of representation in place should be reviewed after the war.56 The ‘indigenous policy’ advocated by Chailley57 was oriented towards ensuring the co-operation of the natives in the economic development of the country, seeking not to offer them an equality from which, he claimed, they could not benefit but to associate them in the modernisation of their colony which would become the supplier of raw materials to France and a market for French goods.

20In the pages of La Dépêche Coloniale Illustrée – a lavishly illustrated bi-monthly magazine designed to appeal to a non-specialist readership – these writers sought to circumscribe the literal (geographical) and metaphorical place of Africans in the French nation and imaginary: within the metropole they were to be welcomed on the battlefield and in support roles, but they were not to install themselves on the territory. Geographical segregation intersected with the hierarchies of race and sexual taboos to delimit the ‘place’ of Africans in France. Séché’s discomfort at seeing the black faces in the white hospital – the rupture of harmony that suggested to him – can be taken as an allegory for the presence of Blacks in France: they were out of place there. These writers also sought to define the place of the Africans within ‘Greater France’: their return to the colonies was to be policed, their role determined and bounded. Only after ‘long and conscientious efforts’ in their own country might they be allowed to ‘penetrate ours’.58

21What of the experience of the tirailleurs themselves in France, trapped in a series of prisons: linguistic (Cousturier described français-tirailleur as a ‘verbal prison’),59 military and racial? La Dépêche Coloniale Illustrée published letters from the soldiers and from their families, but since all without exception wrote of their devotion to the cause of France and their hatred of the Boches, we may suspect that in addition to the normal military censorship a careful selection had taken place.60

22The colonial discourse spoke for them, representing their feelings in terms of their predetermined role in support of the French war effort: incantatory references evoked the tirailleurs’ limitless loyalty, their ‘inextinguishable devotion’ according to Pierre Mille.61 They were, moreover, very frequently referred to as ‘our Senegalese’ and ‘our Black troops’ as in the title to Mille’s article and that of Eugène Etienne62 and throughout the articles examined here. The possessive adjective carried paternalistic and proprietorial overtones but also seemed designed to forestall ambient doubts as to the loyalty of these men. Were these writers perhaps aware of the ‘numerous revolts’63 that forced recruitment had provoked in several African colonies and that had been forcibly put down? In a postwar report, Colonial Inspector Demaret recalled the brutal methods used prior to Blaise Diagne’s recruitment tour to AOF in 1918 and the resistance they incited.64

Conclusion

23In the years immediately prior to World War One, write Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, the parti colonial and the colonialist movement as a whole had ‘lost much of its earlier élan’; no immediate issue of imperial rivalry offered the opportunity to mobilise a French public opinion that was still far from won over to the colonial cause.65 The war, however, offered just such an opportunity, not only to celebrate the capture of German-held territory in Africa but also to contribute to the postwar ‘colonial consensus’,66 by focusing on the colonies’ contribution of both men and material to the war effort. Foregrounding the ‘utility’ of the colonies (a term central to Etienne’s arguments) posed, however, the problem of how the utilitarian role assigned to subject peoples would be both enforced in practice and ideologically justified.

24The period of the war saw a shift in ideology that would become apparent postwar, away from the doctrine of assimilation towards the practice of association, although as Raymond Betts argues, it is important to recognize that elements of both assimilation and association characterize any colonial rule, only the balance between them shifts.67 The former doctrine supposed the rapid integration of people of any creed or colour within the Republic; despite the discriminatory practices in place across the Empire, the idea that Africans (like other indigenous peoples) could rapidly become equal citizens in the Republic had provided a theoretical justification and moral cover for colonisation. The proponents of association argued on the other hand that differences in custom, belief and intellectual development made ‘gallicization’ only a remote prospect.68 Association might represent itself as a concern and respect for African traditions, this was the case that Maclaud made in justifying his creation of a Senegalese environment in his hospital69 and that Chailley made in his advocacy of an indigenous policy that would respect native practices and beliefs.70 But it also meant that a focus on the differences between the races, and in particular on the gulf that separated the Africans from European civilisation, became more pronounced. Alice Conklin notes ‘a new [postwar] emphasis in the rhetoric of French officials on how different Africans were from French and how important it was to keep the two races separate’.71

25The discourse surrounding the practice of resénégalisation and the other measures taken during the war to isolate and ‘protect’ the tirailleurs both reflected and contributed to this shift in the understanding of the role of Africans within ‘Greater France’. The usefulness of the colonies to France would only be realized if the African supplied the manpower necessary for infrastructural and economic development, as the ‘model native, ’ ‘humbly making his contribution to the construction of his own destiny, a destiny that was ultimately being decided by the colonizer’.72 He must stay in his place in both a geographical and hierarchical sense: political domination and economic and military exploitation of the colonies supposed a docile workforce and population where only a few évolués tutored in the French language would escape from the condition of ‘native’ to serve the colonial administration. The challenge was to convince the tirailleur that after the war, as Maclaud wrote in his justification for the establishment of his ‘colonial’ hospital: ‘it is still serving France to work for the prosperity and riches of French West Africa’.73

26Note

27In my article ‘Contested Sites of Memory: Commemorating War and Warriors in New Caledonia’ published in Volume I of this series, Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 189-204, an error occurred at the publication stage when the definitions of ‘Kanak’ and ‘poilu’ were combined in footnote 1.