Lhe rule of opinion has unexpected consequences. Beliefs replace knowledge, we knew that. More surprising is the absence of measure and method. Talking nonsense is okay, making mistakes is part of learning, and part of life. On the other hand, deliberately recovering untruths to turn them into controversy is the opposite of intellectual probity.
Omar Sy, main actor of Skirmishers, probably did not wish to hurt by implying that the French were not affected by the wars in Africa while their army has been deployed there for several years. He was giving an interview, speaking without measure, spontaneously, it happens. It did not take forty-eight hours for elected officials to abound in this direction by evoking, for example, a “righteous anger” (about what? for what reason?) when the actor was visibly not in anger.
READ ALSOTirailleurs: “Give a place to this little-known story! »
The film comes out tomorrow. Parade for months of polemicists, politicians, sociologists, who will detail, at length of foolishness, the Senegalese skirmishers, will remind France of its past, will overwhelm a so-called official history, will demand that the nation recognize its errors. . Once again, they will feel like they’ve discovered the moon when they haven’t actually read any books. Over the past year, considerable and accessible work has appeared on Senegalese skirmishers. Anthony Guyon has devoted a masterful work to them (History of Senegalese skirmishers: from native to soldier) and a reference journal, Wars and History, devoted a dossier to colonial armies. So what were the Senegalese skirmishers?
160,000 Senegalese skirmishers mobilized in 14-18
In 1857, General Faidherbe ordered the recruitment of soldiers capable of fighting on a continent, Africa, where the French soldiers suffered from the climate. Recruitment along the Senegal River is akin to coercion, but it is seductive. The pay is not bad, and the signing bonus, 50 francs, is not negligible. If they show themselves capable of overcoming the harshness of the profession, they benefit, something new, from a right to a career. These soldiers exceed the expectations placed on them, show themselves to be loyal, disciplined, courageous, and cheap. The cost of a skirmisher is not equivalent to that of a soldier, say metropolitan, it even goes from simple to double. The system proved its worth, and the numbers increased: 500 in 1857, 8,400 in 1900.
Charles Mangin, who commands the Senegalese skirmishers, convinced that they should be entrusted with the defense of the colonies to compensate for the lack of manpower, imagines the creation of a “black army”. In 1910, the same Lieutenant-Colonel Mangin provoked a controversy by publishing The Dark Force, an essay in which he dreams of Africa as a “reservoir of tomorrow’s French power”. The idea is simple: demography, in mainland France, is collapsing, why not replace whites with Africans? And thus build an army capable of confronting Germany, which no one doubts anymore wants to attack France. In Berlin, people are indignant: a civilized nation, theirs, does not have to face barbarians. In Paris, we get carried away. For good and bad reasons, the idea does not appeal. Business lobbies fear that Africans, cheap labor, will join the army instead of working for French companies; the metropolitan army sees in it a kind of unfair competition; as for Jaurès, he refused to “throw onto the battlefield a praetorian army in the service of the bourgeoisie and of capital”.
READ ALSOSenegalese skirmishers: a journey through the Republic
1914, the war begins and, with it, conscription. In Africa, resistance is numerous and violent. Village chiefs, who had sometimes even been favorable to the creation of the corps of skirmishers, organized desertions and encouraged revolt. Somehow, more than 160,000 Senegalese skirmishers were mobilized from 1914 to 1918, more than three quarters of whom fought in Europe. After the war, the promises made to black soldiers were few and poorly kept. The myth of “cannon fodder”, according to which the skirmishers would have been sacrificed, aggravates the anger. The figures show, however, that the price paid by them, for being extravagant, was not higher than that of the white soldiers. Regardless, the Great War will remain as a missed opportunity between the metropolis and its colonies. Even if the Empire emerges strengthened from the conflict, the credibility of Paris is called into question, the incidents multiply, the bitterness grows. No one realizes it, but decolonization has begun.
Rift Mirror
The Senegalese skirmishers, or the broken promise of the Republic? There is some truth in this assertion. Senior officers wanted, no doubt with sincerity, to make the army the concretization of the colonial project, the meeting place between the Republic and the peoples it claimed to assimilate. This will have been, alas, only the mirror of the moral and political flaws of the intellectual aberration that was colonization. The project was originally flawed. Moreover, there was nothing original about the thing insofar as the army itself had been thought out, in mainland France and throughout the 19th century.e century, as the natural counterpart of citizenship. The virtue of the company stops where the ulterior motive of colonization begins, that is to say, to believe in a civilizing mission when one is content to accomplish a project of conquest.
However, it is enough to look at the reaction of the Germans during and after the First World War to be convinced that in terms of racial equality, France was not the worst pupil. There are countless testimonies of German soldiers scandalized at being watched, as prisoners, by black soldiers. In my fight, Hitler himself refers to it when he writes that France is “destined to become an African-European mulatto state filled with an inferior race”. Who will be surprised to see, in 1940, 1,000 Senegalese skirmishers shot by the Germans when they had the right to prisoner of war status?
READ ALSOOn the skirmishers: “It seemed necessary to me to tell their story, which is also ours”
Reference article, journal, book
Anthony Guyon, History of Senegalese skirmishers: from native to soldierParis, Perrin, 2022.
Wars and HistoryOctober 2022, issue 69.
Jean-Loup Saletes, “Senegalese riflemen in the Great War and the codification of ordinary racism”, World Wars and Contemporary Conflicts2011, number 4.