This book's invaluable contribution is the demonstration that the sexuality and conjugality of women, particularly African women, were instrumental to global French imperial conquest. Following the deployments of troops recruited in West African colonies to theaters of conflict ranging, over more than a century, from Equatorial Africa to Indochina and Algeria, author Sarah Zimmerman traces these troops’ sexual and domestic relationships with women whether in their communities of origin or in theaters of conflict. Her archival and oral history research, which spans six countries, reveals the central place of marital and gender issues in French colonial administrators’ efforts to extend their empire. The result is a sweeping examination of race and gender in imperial France. Militarizing Marriage's chapters are organized thematically but proceed in rough chronological fashion from the mid-nineteenth century through the empire's final demise in the early 1960s, with each chapter also spotlighting a different geographic area to which West African troops were sent.
The first chapter introduces the famed tirailleurs sénégalais, the corps of indigenous soldiers formed in 1857, even before France officially became a colonial power in Africa. Zimmerman shows the clear linkages between slavery, military service, and marriage for these soldiers. French officers frequently purchased enslaved West African men to bolster tirailleur units’ manpower in the field and drew newly emancipated men into their ranks. They might also make a man's emancipation conditional upon his marriage, usually to a formerly enslaved woman, and saw institutions of African marriage as little different from the outright ownership of women. These conjugal partners (a term Zimmerman prefers to ‘wives’ owing to their unions’ ambiguous and sometimes contested nature) accompanied the tirailleurs into war zones and occupations, initially in other African colonies such as Congo and Madagascar in the 1880s and 1890s. The second chapter examines this accompaniment and its associated entanglements, along with troops’ acquisition of local conjugal partners. French commanders saw the tirailleurs as natural family men and understood marriage as an important means of sustaining their morale and domestic needs, since the military itself was reluctant to bear the costs of their deployment.
As France's colonial empire expanded in the early twentieth century, these troops were essential in extending French control over new territories and populations. From 1912, West African conscripts were sent to the French protectorate of Morocco; roughly one-quarter of them were joined by wives. In this context, examined in Chapter Three, racial segregation came to concern for the first time administrators anxious to maintain boundaries between the categories of ‘Black/African’ troops and ‘white/Arab’ civilians. This concern only grew after tirailleurs and other West African soldiers deployed to metropolitan France during the Great War, as Zimmerman notes in Chapter Four. From 1914 onward, African soldiers’ wives and other dependents stayed behind, necessitating the creation of an administrative system to dispense family allocations and determine which unions were legitimate. The situation was further complicated by the fact that new laws granted so-called originaires — residents of Senegal's ‘Four Communes’ — full French citizenship, qualifying them for more benefits than the indigènes who made up the tirailleur corps. This citizen/subject distinction endured through the Second World War. Chapter Five considers the long-distance and interracial relationships formed by some of the thousands of West African troops who occupied France, North Africa, and the Levant during the interwar years, with race remaining a central prism through which administrators categorized and responded to these relationships.
The final chapter and Epilogue examine decolonization, particularly during conflicts in French Indochina and Algeria. While the French military discouraged liaisons between its personnel and local women (outside of commercial sex at military-run brothels), African troops formed a variety of ties to Vietnamese women; some formed marriages and tried to bring their wives and mixed-race children home. Zimmerman provides insights from interviews she conducted with members of these ‘Afro-Vietnamese’ households in Senegal. West African soldiers, some of them already traumatized by service in Vietnam, also fought for France against Algerian independence, as detailed in the Epilogue. The oral histories collected from these soldiers and their partners add particular richness to the text. Zimmerman considers these men's choices in whether to return to newly independent homelands or to remain in French service. Although the tirailleurs sénégalais were dissolved in 1956, many of its veterans continued to serve the French military through the 1960s, and some of their wives still collected widows’ pensions into the twenty-first century.
Due to its wide-ranging scope, Militarizing Marriage tries to make sense of what might be more historical material than can be adequately incorporated into a single monograph. Nonetheless, it illuminates an aspect of colonial rule and military service that had previously gone unnoticed: the extent to which colonized women bore the weight of the extension and defense of French colonialism.
