Stéphanie Soubrier, Races guerrières. Enquête sur une catégorie impériale, 1850–1918, CNRS Editions, 2023, 448 pages

1 This book is based on a dissertation undertaken at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University under the supervision of Dominique Kalifa and Sylvain Venayre. Its endeavor—“to study an ethno-colonial category with imperial scope” (p. 15)—is ambitious. Although the category of “martial race” has a presence in British historiography, it had been overlooked in French scholarship. This gap is now filled. The book draws on extensive documentation, including rich and original iconography. Although she claims otherwise, Stéphanie Soubrier adopts a chronological approach that encompasses the origin and development of this category up to the First World War and the subsequent questioning of it. What therefore emerges is a military ethnography that sketches out a human geography of the empire in which “martial races” and “nonmartial races” are distinguished. This opposition is what makes the work original. The author demonstrates how these notions fit into the “taxonomic obsession” of nineteenth-century social and human sciences (p. 115). However, in the French case specifically, they did not have the systematic nature that they did in the British Empire during the same period.

2 For French colonial officers, the category of “martial race” was a tool intended to improve recruitment, which, until the the First World War, was theoretically based on voluntary service. West Africa, the birthplace of the Senegalese Tirailleurs, which were established in 1857, was the area where this concept was prioritized. The difficulties encountered during France’s conquest here belatedly gave rise to the idea that certain populations possessed martial aptitudes that others did not. This was the case for the Bambara, described by Captain Marceau in 1911 as “Africa’s top martial race.” Yet when defining this group, utter confusion prevailed; it came across more as a colonial construct than an ethnic reality. In fact, as Soubrier notes, their aptitudes were primarily based on “their willingness to enlist as soldiers serving France” (p. 188). In 1910, Colonel Mangin made an initial attempt at theorizing this notion in his work La Force noire (“Black Forces”), the product of an extensive survey conducted in French West Africa at the request of Governor-General Ponty. Mangin employed a battery of physical, physiological, and social criteria in support of the thesis that West Africa was a veritable “land of soldiers” and therefore an inexhaustible reservoir of fighting men. The novelty of Mangin’s thinking lay in his envisaging their deployment in a European conflict. However, Soubrier broadens the discussion by examining the motivations of these men who became colonial troops (p. 169 onward). In some important passages, she demonstrates that enlistment became a means of redefining one’s place in colonial society (many were former captives) and was therefore accompanied by an adherence to the notion of the “martial race.”

3 In Chapter 9 (p. 187 onward), Soubrier examines the category of “nonmartial races” based on the stereotypes that were constructed around populations from French Equatorial Africa, Indochina, and Madagascar. In Indochina, “the comparison with African populations worked to the detriment of the Indochinese, whose military qualities were inversely proportional to their level of civilization.” Conversely, the populations of Equatorial Africa were deemed too “primitive” to provide good soldiers. Soubrier’s study of the representation of “martial races,” which includes a welcome methodological clarification, is remarkable (p. 270 onward). She demonstrates the ambiguity of these images, which needed to suggest both the tirailleur’s “savagery” and the traits of civilization instilled by the colonizer. In passing, she highlights that the aim was not to assimilate these men but to turn them into effective auxiliaries.

4 The First World War marked the ultimate test in terms of either validating or refuting Mangin’s thesis. By 1914, many military figures were already attacking it. Indeed, as the war dragged on, the reservoir of “warriors” became depleted, forcing the army to call upon “nonwarriors” who ultimately demonstrated equal aptitude in combat. In this final chapter, the book’s contribution is its search for “the voice of the tirailleur” by examining operational and war diaries (p. 390 onward). Soubrier concludes that “overexposure to the violence of the battlefield seems to have had the same consequences on these soldiers as it did on their European comrades” (p. 397). Moreover, these men were not “deliberately sacrificed, though their losses were considered infinitely less important” than those of the French (p. 399). By the time the war ended, Mangin himself was questioning the distinction between “martial races” and “nonmartial races,” on the basis that the “French military crucible” produced disciplined soldiers regardless of their origins.

5 Stéphanie Soubrier’s book enriches our understanding of the colonial situation and its contradictions while highlighting the distinctiveness of the French experience. The only criticism one might level at it is the surprising absence of an index, something particularly puzzling for a work destined to become a reference text in the field.