Richard S. Fogarty

Demobilization in British and French Africa at the End of the First World War

This article reconsiders important aspects of African participation in the First World War, both in Europe and in Africa itself, as part of the British and French empires. More specifically, it explores demobilization at the end of the war in comparison with that process in Europe, paying close attention to the particularities of the colonial context. The article argues that, although French and British Africa were integrated significantly into their metropole’s war efforts between 1914 and 1918, the experience of demobilization in these colonies does not conform to George Mosse’s ‘brutalization’ thesis, which has been so influential in understanding postwar events in parts of Europe. Africans who participated in the British and French war efforts did not emerge from their experiences to roil the political landscape with discontent and violence, even if the effects of the war were still important in many areas of the continent. Further, the story of demobilization in Africa demonstrates the importance of attending to the specific context of the colonial ‘peripheries’, even as we recognize the important links that connect them to the metropolitan ‘centres’.

Race and Sex, Fear and Loathing in France during the Great War

In April 1916 Sergeant Hao, an Indochinese soldier serving in the French army on the Western Front, wrote, ‘On Sundays, we go strolling with [French] women, as we would do in Indochina, with our own women at home’.1 Sergeant Hao may have been surprised by the very ordinariness with which some French people treated such interracial contacts, and even more intimate relationships, between non-white soldiers (colonial subjects in the French army, known as troupes indigoenes) and white French women, but these contacts were anything but ordinary. They ranged from simple strolls in the park to sexual liaisons of more or less short duration, to friendships, even to pregnancies and marriages. The women with whom these men became involved ranged from prostitutes, to nurses, to daughters of respectable bourgeois families. For many in France, particularly those in positions of authority, these relationships were deeply troubling, challenging ‘the prestige of the European woman’, as one military censor put it, by transgressing sexual mores and racial and colonial hierarchies.2 The attitude of this official, and that of many other French military, political, and colonial authorities, confirms Benedict Anderson’s description of the racist imagination, which ‘dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations’.3

Medical Climatology in France: The Persistence of Neo-Hippocratic Ideas in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In interwar France the Lyonnais physician Marius Piéry undertook an ambitious Neo-Hippocratic research program to study how atmospheric and terrestrial environments influenced health. Lyon had a number of institutions linked to the colonies and was a center for the training of military physicians. Colonial physicians had a long tradition of contending with the diseases of tropical environments, and their ideas and many returned colonials circulated in Lyon and its region. Piéry was a physician during World War I and published on military medical topics. He also included colonial and military health concerns in his more mature works from the 1930s. An advocate of the close study of the physical sciences, he investigated the radioactive gases of health spas and the effects of altitude on pulmonary tuberculosis, and he directed a meteorological observatory.

We did not speak a common language

During the Great War, the French army deployed some 500,000 colonial subjects as soldiers on the Western Front. Known as troupes indigenes, these men came from across France’s worldwide empire, with North and West Africa, Indochina and Madagascar providing the largest contingents.1 Of course, these men did not speak French as their native language, and in fact the vast majority of them spoke little or no French upon their induction. This presented the army with a serious problem. Language barriers and misunderstandings could be inconvenient during training, and could be lethal in combat. Moreover, language had a tremendous importance in French culture, an importance that carried over into the colonial arena in a particular way. Republican colonial ideology held that educating indigenes, particularly in the use of the French language, was part of France’s ‘civilizing mission’ to uplift subject populations. As official French propaganda put it during the war, referring directly to soldiers from the colonies, ‘knowing better our language, the sentiments which unite us will only be strengthened’.2 Language, then, played a key role both in practical terms, communicating in the ranks, and on a broader ideological and cultural level, uniting France and its colonial subjects in a common national struggle for survival in the face of German aggression.

Eugenics in Europe

This article surveys the history of eugenics in Europe, noting its origins in the growing comprehension of the power of science to understand the human body and in the increasing ambitions of the state and the social and scientific elites to exert control over the social body. The article then surveys major events and personalities of the eugenics movement in various European countries over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, placing the movement firmly in its political, social, and cultural contexts.