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Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
To secure victory in the First World War the French Army needed as many men as it could muster. And although more than eight million Frenchmen (in a nation of less than forty million) were mobilized between 1914 and 1918, losses were so severe that French strategists feared that these numbers alone would not suffice: France would also have to tap into the vast "reservoirs of men" that the empire represented. Ultimately, almost half a million colonial troops (troupes indigènes) served in the French Army during the Great War, either in combat units or in support positions behind the lines. Yet it is not clear that these men, recruited from West and North Africa, Madagascar, and Indo-China, were deployed to the best strategic effect because racial prejudice so deeply permeated French military thinking as to limit how and where colonial troops were used. This is the fascinating story that Richard S. Fogarty explores in Race and War in France. Based on extensive research in the archives of the French Army and of colonial authorities, he argues that a fundamental tension pervaded French military attitudes towards the deployment of colonial troops during the First World War. On the one hand, republican egalitarianism held that all men were equal; and yet racial (and religious) prejudice prompted military commanders to doubt the loyalty, intelligence, reliability, and martial resolve of many colonial troops. As Fogarty remarks, "commitment to the ideals of universalism and egalitarianism pushed French officials to include troupes indigènes in both national defense and the national community, while racism pulled these same officers back from measures that would make the full integration of colonial subjects into national life a reality" (12).
Racial prejudice and preconceptions influenced almost every aspect of French military thinking. The belief that some colonies were populated by "martial races" and others by less manly types doomed West African troops-praised as fearsome, albeit primitive,...