Militarized women have long born the title “civilian.” Civilian is a deceptive term which often reinforces false gendered distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, as well as trivializing the degree to which women are involved in war.17 West African “civilian” women were auxiliary combatants, sutlers, and domestic laborers while accompanying their husbands to colonial conquest in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, and Morocco through the First World War. The inclusion of African women in these colonial campaigns contradicts common narratives about the masculinization of nineteenth-century Western European armed forces. Historians have shown that women commonly provided essential services to land-based armies prior to the 1850s.18 Afterward, the nationalization and professionalization of North Atlantic militaries led to the erasure of female civilians from state-funded armies.19 These trends paralleled the modernization of the industrial-military complex and the emergence of the male citizen-soldier as an ideal model for civic membership in North Atlantic countries.20 Dominant moral discourses concerning feminine propriety compelled state armies to progressively displace civilian women from military spaces. By the late nineteenth century, North American and western European armies were predominantly devoid of wives and female camp followers.21 These symbiotic male soldier/female civilian relationships continued to exist in the European armed forces on the “fringes of empire.”22 Contrary to this narrative, Militarizing Marriage locates the colonial frontier at the center of late nineteenth-century European military practices. French military officials condoned tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal traditions, which indicates the existence of paradoxes at the heart of military policy and colonial militarization in West Africa. Colonized African women and men lived these paradoxes as they became new members of an expanding French army.
Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices and marital traditions produced African military households. The contravention of premarital heterosexual practices and gender-based violence were among the constitutive processes that produced military households in West Africa and French Empire. The literature concerning forced conjugal association and gender-based violence in contemporary African conflicts offers historians theoretical and methodological tools to reexamine the intersection of warfare, gender-based violence, and conjugality in the African colonial past.23 Contemporary feminist concerns with the globalization of militarism provide models for interrogating French imperial militarism and how the colonial army managed sexual violence and conjugality in war-front interactions.24 Military officers seldom viewed tirailleurs sénégalais’ sexual exploits as transgressing normative sexual behaviors affiliated with the colonial military. In rare, egregious cases, French officers took disciplinary action against West African soldiers for gender-based violence, but those measures did little to protect female colonial subjects from future transgressions. Militarization increased the vulnerability of women and their communities in French Empire. Combined with colonialism, militarization circumscribed female colonial subjects’ and/or their guardians’ ability to hold colonial soldiers accountable for violating local marital customs or normative sexual practices.
The presence of the French colonial army compromised the ability of traditional authorities—relatives and community leaders—to manage sexual relationships between tirailleurs sénégalais and civilian women. This had many consequences. Some communities and individuals encouraged women to enter into conjugal relationships with West African soldiers in order to mitigate the effects of conflict and conquest. Vulnerable and enterprising women could have seen military marriage as a strategy to leave previous marriages or domestic slavery, or to provide some stability in the upheavals accompanying colonial conquest and conflict.25 Military officials became de facto authority figures in regulating the conjugal affairs of local women and tirailleurs sénégalais. Significantly, the military established and maintained state-funded brothels for their troops. In these spaces of transactional sex, they monitored troops’ sexual behavior and discouraged conjugal or romantic inclinations.26 In official correspondence related to soldiers’ conjugality, military officials avoided terms like sexual enslavement or forced marriage to describe tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships. To do so would have opened the colonial army up to civilian, metropolitan, and international criticism.
Throughout much of the colonial period, the French military operated outside international, French, and colonial laws aiming to improve the conditions of women. Antislavery acts in 1848 and 1905, the 1926 Slavery Convention, as well as the French Family Code, the Mandel Decree of 1939, and the Jacquinot Decree of 1951 all aimed to shore up women’s rights—the latter pieces of legislation setting minimum marriageable ages and requiring future brides’ consent to marriage. French military officials often lacked the political will to enforce international and colonial statutes in relation to tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships with female colonial subjects. Instead, they operated through a corpus of marital tradition formed within the military, sourced from African soldiers’ natal communities or from female conjugal partners’ societal norms. The military’s ad hoc application of pluralistic traditions and laws serves as historical prologue for contemporary debates in supranational bodies, like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, that attempt to define, regulate, and adjudicate gender-based violence in recent African conflicts.27
The continuum of consent and coercion is useful for conceptualizing gender-based violence and war crimes in the colonial past. Consent assumes equality among individuals, as well as the ability of those individuals to give consent in contracts—like those pertaining to sexual intercourse or marriage.28 French military officers wielded great authority in adjudicating conjugal disputes between tirailleurs sénégalais and colonized women—none of whom were fully endowed with rights vis-à-vis the colonial state. French military officials enforced the conjugal prerogatives of their military employees, following pervasive assumptions that colonized women were incapable of consent to marriage or of individual choice. Accordingly, female colonial subjects’ “consent” was diffused across members of their lineage group and their community, who policed the boundaries of propriety and social reproduction. Military officials took for granted that fathers and communities maintained patriarchal authority over daughters and that husbands held ultimate authority over wives. Colonialism contributed to the extension of male and state authority over women’s mobility via social institutions like marriage.29 However, the French military frequently allowed tirailleurs sénégalais to violate these social prescriptions.
The use of marital terminology to describe tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal relationships camouflaged the potentially illegitimate (and sometimes violent) means through which these relationships came into being.