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

Abstract

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 indigoènes) 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