MILITARIZING MARRIAGE: AN ORIENTATION
Militarizing Marriage is chronologically and geographically organized to take account of tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal practices across eighty years of military service in French Empire. Collectively, the following chapters track the evolution of African soldiers’ conjugal traditions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. West African troops and their households heralded the onset of French colonialism and outlived its formal demise. As Myron Echenberg writes, “rather than being a caricature of colonialism, African soldiers were, perhaps more than any other groups, a mirror of colonialism and a reflection of its more basic contradictions.”90 By focusing on the French colonial military’s treatment of African soldiers’ conjugal partners and households, the gendered contradictions of colonialism come into fuller view. The women affiliated with tirailleurs sénégalais reveal how the universalism espoused by French Republican governments wavered at the intersection of gender, race, and colonial subject status. African military households result from legal exception and parallelism. The following chapters account for idiosyncratic themes salient to policy and practice specific to time and place in French Empire.
The governor of Senegal, Louis Faidherbe, inaugurated the tirailleurs sénégalais in 1857 at a time when Napoleon III’s Second Empire dedicated more resources to spreading France’s influence in Africa and Asia. The French Third Republic (1871–1940) used these troops to expand France’s modern empire. This constitutional government inherited the universal principles of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, and fraternity), but did not extend these values to the new imperial populations of French Empire.91 The contradictions inherent to Republican colonialism are at the foundation of the early expression of tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal traditions in nineteenth-century West Africa. Chapter 1 highlights the French colonial military’s reliance on domestic slavery and coerced labor in France’s conquest of inland West Africa during the 1880s and 1890s. The recruitment of tirailleurs sénégalais and soldiers’ acquisition of female conjugal partners contravened a major goal of colonialism in West Africa—slave emancipation. In para- and postconflict settings, French military officials maintained an ambivalent stance toward the means through which these soldiers obtained conjugal partners, formed households, and improvised marital legitimacy. In the swirl of colonial militarization, women’s vulnerability heightened and consensuality became moot. Tirailleurs sénégalais’ conjugal traditions formed at the confluence of these trends, which served as the shifting foundation for military policies and practices concerning the legitimacy of tirailleurs sénégalais’ households for decades to come.
During the final decades of the nineteenth century, West African military employees extended France’s rule in Congo and Madagascar. Chapter 2 interrogates how geographically distant settings affected tirailleurs sénégalais’ ability to establish and maintain conjugal households. Long-distance migration and military officials’ perceptions of sociocultural similarity and difference affected African military households’ marital legitimacy. In an era when the French metropolitan army discouraged the presence of civilian women in official military spaces, the colonial military funded the relocation of West African women and households to new frontiers of empire. The military also encouraged tirailleurs sénégalais to engage in conjugal relationships with Congolese or Madagascan women. Outside of West Africa, concerns around soldiers’ conjugal and marital legitimacy increased. Military officials perceived African military households composed uniquely of West Africans as legitimate. In foreign lands, these households became more dependent on the military for their survival, welfare, and repatriation. In Congo and Madagascar, tirailleurs sénégalais’ inter-African or socioculturally heterogeneous conjugal households inspired multiple stakeholders to contest their legitimacy. Many of these inter-African military households followed prenuptial practices typical to West African conquest. As these practices moved into African empire, observers described tirailleurs sénégalais’ sexual and conjugal practices with a vocabulary related to sexual assault and female enslavement.
The French military deployed West African soldiers and their West African wives—mesdames tirailleurs—in Morocco from 1908 to 1918. Morocco was one of the final territories integrated into France’s overseas empire via military conquest. The debates surrounding the use of African military households in North Africa demonstrate that the French Third Republic believed in racial difference and hierarchy within empire. Chapter 3 examines how perceptions of racial difference influenced military officials to police boundaries between “North” African women and “sub-Saharan” African soldiers. They promoted mesdames tirailleurs as essential members of villages nègres. These “Black Villages” were racialized, segregated, and surveilled quarters within French military encampments in Morocco.92 French military officials justified the deployment of West African military households in Morocco with references to the abid al-Bukhari—a historical Moroccan military institution made up of dark-skinned Moroccan military families. The comparisons drawn between the abid al-Bukhari and the tirailleurs sénégalais balanced upon perceptions of their shared sub-Saharan African origins, slave ancestry, and martiality. The Moroccan campaign, despite its contradictions, convinced the French Ministries of the Colonies and War to permanently invest in the tirailleurs sénégalais—on the eve of the Great War.
Chapter 4 examines critical transformations in French West African soldiers’ marital traditions between 1914 and 1918. More than 170,000 West Africans mobilized in the war effort—conspicuously without their conjugal households. Instead, their wives remained in West Africa and dealt with new bureaucracies of wartime assistance. Citizenship status determined military wives’ access to the state’s resources. Senegal’s first black deputy to the French National Assembly, Blaise Diagne, introduced wartime legislation that guaranteed French citizenship to a coastal Senegalese demographic minority—originaires. Originaires’ wives and children were eligible to receive the same benefits as metropolitan French soldiers’ families, while the majority of West Africans remained colonial subjects, served in the tirailleurs sénégalais, and received fewer benefits. Soldiers’ citizenship/subject status and their polygynous practices challenged the French state’s extension of social welfare into the colonial military. French military officials examined and debated the similarities and discrepancies among customary, Muslim, and French marital practices. Ambiguities in marital policy and family allocations extended into the interwar period.
After the Great War, tirailleurs sénégalais served as occupying forces in North Africa, Madagascar, and France’s newly acquired League of Nations mandate territories Syria and Lebanon. During the interwar period, tirailleurs sénégalais increasingly expected administrative assistance for their households at home and abroad. Chapter 5 examines evolutions in how military officials supported long-distance West African households and cross-colonial households. After 1918, the colonial military provided West African soldiers with a means to maintain households across long distances via separation indemnities, tax abatements, and other allocations. Cross-colonial households were interracial and made up of conjugal partners from different French territories who often possessed different politico-legal statuses. Imperial authorities debated jurisdiction and relevant marital customs for recognizing the legitimacy of these hyphenated military households. Evidence in this chapter demonstrates that the military found interracial military marriages irksome and that some cross-colonial households were more undesirable than others. In the aftermath of World War II, the military (in coordination with civilian government officials) used its control over oceanic travel, communication, and law to prevent mainland French women from joining their demobilizing conjugal partners in West Africa.
In stark contrast, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Vietnamese