UC Berkeley

Living Beyond Boundaries: West African Servicemen in French Colonial Conflicts, 1908-1962, is a history of French West African colonial soldiers who served in French Empire. Known by the misnomer tirailleurs sénégalais, these servicemen contributed to the expansion, maintenance, and defense of France's presence on several continents. The complex identity and shifting purpose of this institution were directly linked to French colonialism, but determined by numerous actors and settings. The men in the ranks of the tirailleurs sénégalais came from France's colonial federations in sub-Saharan Africa--French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. During the twentieth century, tirailleurs sénégalais' deployed to North Africa, the Levant, Indochina, and Madagascar, where their exploits brought them into contact with other imperial populations. Tirailleurs sénégalais played crucial roles in assembling and disassembling French empire. The tirailleurs sénégalais provide a unique West African perspective of France's colonial empire that challenges national and French colonial readings of this colonial military institution.

Tirailleurs sénégalais were colonial soldiers and intermediaries who experienced French colonialism unlike other colonized peoples. As employees of the colonial state, West African soldiers were often among the first populations to experience novel colonial policy. As soldiers, they implemented those policies in foreign colonial populations. However, these men were not simply the conveyors of colonialism. Their imperial assignments in colonial wars evidenced the importance of lateral exchanges of knowledge and experience between colonial populations linked together by France's presence. The tirailleurs sénégalais demonstrate that the core-periphery model of historicizing colonialism, where information and historical causality flow unidirectionally from the French metropole into its colonies, is limited in portraying how people experienced colonialism.

The roles of women and wives in the tirailleurs sénégalais' history attest to the significance of cross-colonial exchange in the French colonial world. West African women followed their soldier/husbands to North Africa and Madagascar. Repatriating soldiers brought foreign wives home to French West Africa from Syria, Lebanon, and Indochina. Regardless of their origin or the setting of their interactions with soldiers, women affected the decisions that West African men made regarding their military service. By accounting for the importance of wives and marriage, this project also illustrates how women and soldiers challenged a secular colonial state to redefine marriage. Soldiers and wives convinced the colonial state to allot family allowances to polygynous Muslim West African soldiers.

By emphasizing the importance of foreign women and cross-colonial exchange in the history of the tirailleurs sénégalais, this project problematizes histories of federal colonial institutions that are circumscribed by the boundaries of modern nation-states. Due to its composition and the range of its deployments, the tirailleurs sénégalais was an international enterprise. When shoehorned into the national history of a contemporary West African country, the tirailleurs sénégalais become a tool for interrogating French colonialism in that West African. These histories overemphasize the hand of France in the histories of West Africans and neglect the global influences on men who made French empire. When viewed through the lens of empire, the tirailleurs sénégalais also challenge the periodization of the colonial period. West Africans fought in the French-Algerian conflict after their home colonies were sovereign nations. The veterans of the tirailleurs sénégalais continue to rely on this historical relationship through the collection of their pensions.

This project is informed by archival, published, and oral sources. They sources provide a nuanced understanding of the various worlds that tirailleurs sénégalais traipsed through in the twentieth century. The first half of this dissertation relies on French archival materials and published memoirs. These written sources were penned predominantly by French men, but the voices and agency of West African troops emerge in critical moments. These sources also portray French biases towards the tirailleurs sénégalais, as well as the ways in West African intermediaries contributed to French knowledge regarding their recruits. Roughly one hundred interviews conducted with veterans and their families inform the second half of this dissertation. Memory and oral history added complexity to the history presented by archival military documents. A source fraught with its own biases and omissions, veterans' memory of the past enriched this dissertation with anecdotal evidence. Their memories also illustrated how the fifty years since independence have influenced how they give importance particular events in their personal histories as soldiers and veterans.

Living Beyond Boundaries chronologically, and geographically follows tirailleurs sénégalais' imperial engagements in Morocco, Syria-Lebanon, Indochina, Madagascar, and Algeria. The West Africans in this dissertation were soldiers in the employment of France and large-scale conflicts act as the chronological framing device of this dissertation. Each chapter takes place in different imperial locations, but each analyzes recurring themes that illustrate how West Africans experienced the French colonial military and how they maintained empire.

Chapter One introduces tirailleurs sénégalais and situates them within several genres of historical literature and accounts for the institution's nineteenth-century history. Chapter Two analyzes their deployment in the Moroccan "pacification" campaign, between 1908 and 1914. Tirailleurs sénégalais' deployment in North Africa was an experiment that served as the springboard for subsequent deployments in French empire. The Moroccan campaign tested the adaptability of West African servicemen to military life in temperate climates, as well as challenged the French assumptions about their sub-Saharan African troops. The outbreak of the Great War brought the tirailleurs sénégalais to France.

Chapter Three deals with pivotal legislation that reshaped the tirailleurs sénégalais. The Blaise Diagne Laws of 1915 and 1916 passed as result of the crises of the Great War. These laws secured citizenship for a minority of West Africans, who became obligated to service in the French military. The renegotiation of citizenship for military service led to the bifurcation of West African soldiers in the French Armed Forces--West African citizens served in the French metropolitan army and West African subjects in the tirailleurs sénégalais. Their experiences as soldiers diverged after the ratification of this legislation.

After the armistice in 1918, tirailleurs sénégalais were diverted from France to serve in recently acquired French mandate territories--Syria and Lebanon. Chapter Four takes place in the interwar period, when the tirailleurs sénégalais' role in empire was redefined as they fought in small-scale conflicts in the Levant and Morocco. The financial crisis of the 1920s and 1930s negatively impacted the colonial military's effort to improve and professionalize the tirailleurs sénégalais. The "hollow years" witnessed important processes in thetirailleurs sénégalais. The French military's attempt to professionalize the tirailleurs sénégalais was also thwarted by their paradoxical move to reestablish racial hierarchy in empire.

The outbreak of World War II brought schizophrenia, paranoia and fratricide to the tirailleurs sénégalais. Chapter Five studies the division of empire into factions aligned with Free France and Vichy France. The tirailleurs sénégalais existed on both sides of this divide and found themselves facing one another on the battlefields of Syria when Allied forces attacked Vichy forces there. French Indochina fell under the authority of neighboring Japan and West African soldiers relied on romantic relationships with Indochinese women to survive the war. The reversals of World War II encouraged postwar challenges to France's authority in several of its colonies. Tirailleurs sénégalais' participated in these events as colonizers and colonized peoples.

The conclusion of hostilities in France were eclipsed by the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. Chapter Six addresses the nine-year guerilla war in Indochina, where tirailleurs sénégalais found themselves overwhelmed by the intimacy and violence of close fighting quarters. This chapter is informed by veterans and their widows' memories, which illuminated the personal and psychological characteristics of this conflict. This was the first large-scale anti-colonial war where evidence suggests that tirailleurs sénégalais questioned their role in French colonialism. Deserters abandoned the French army for political reasons and for love. The romantic relationships between soldiers and Indochinese women led to the international migrations of inter-racial families to West Africa. West African communities dealt with the aftermath of the French-Indochinese Ware as their sons' families integrated into their households.

After the conclusion of the Indochinese conflict in 1954, some tirailleurs sénégalais were redeployed immediately to the battlefields of Algeria. Chapter Seven uses the French-Algerian war as a backdrop for troops' demobilization and West Africa's decolonization. The French Constitutional Referendum in 1958 launched West African independence. West African soldiers became caught up in the extrication of France from West Africa, since both entities desired trained troops. As a result, tirailleurs sénégalais remained in France's employment after their natal countries were sovereign nations. West African soldiers' dual allegiance to France and their country of origin challenged the meaning and finality of political independence. The Conclusion takes this argument further by analyzing the contemporary relationships between tirailleurs sénégalais veterans, West African states and France.