Laying in a hospital bed in Lyon in 1917 after being gravely injured and blinded, ʿAmr (written “Amor” in French documents), a Tunisian soldier in the French Army, found himself far from home. In a sense, World War I was as much “his” war as it was that of French soldiers in hospital beds across the country. Like them, he and tens of thousands of other Tunisians had been called upon to fight France's enemies. The empire claimed that his homeland, a Protectorate of France since 1881 and only nominally autonomous, benefitted from France's tutelage and must therefore partake in its defense. In another sense, his war experience would have been quite different from that of a French conscript: tirailleurs (as colonial soldiers were known) received lower wages, were seldom promoted, and faced segregation from French civilian life.Footnote 1 Several scholars have even argued that colonial soldiers were used disproportionately as “cannon fodder” on the Western Front.Footnote 2
Yet despite the French rhetoric that informed such discriminatory policies, ʿAmr's experience of convalescence presented new possibilities that transgressed the typical boundaries between colonial and metropolitan life.Footnote 3 In particular, he struck up a close personal relationship with his nurse, Berthe Cantinelli. For months, Cantinelli took ʿAmr out on long walks around Lyon, often with other young women who admired how he endured his injuries with dignity. She invited him to dinner at her family's home each Sunday, opening up a window onto a French society that bore little semblance either to the brutal conditions of the trenches or to the rather segregated life he had experienced at home in Tunisia. When ʿAmr eventually succumbed to his wounds in May 1917, Cantinelli organized a burial ceremony attended by a number of local women who laid flowers on his coffin.Footnote 4 It seems in his convalescence and even in his death, ʿAmr's tentative admission into a new community contested his place in the colonial order, so much so that Protectorate officials reacted with a paternalistic anxiety when they discovered that Cantinelli had written directly to ʿAmr's mother in Tunisia to inform her of his death. Cantinelli disclosed, among other sentiments, that “what touched us the most was when ʿAmr told us that he didn't want to tell you that he was blind; alas, Madame, today you know the truth.”Footnote 5
Massive French casualties on the war's Western Front meant that North Africans would face mass conscription into the French army and labor force. Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans made up some 211,000 of the roughly half million colonial subjects sent to work and fight for France, most of them conscripts rather than volunteers. The French public, including many officials, were wary of the presence of so many Arabs on French soil: in the trenches, factories, cafés, and cabarets of the metropole, the fear was that young soldiers and laborers from the Maghrib were liable to not only spread disease and chaos, but also be corrupted by anticolonialism, communism, and other subversive ideas. Military and colonial authorities thus took it upon themselves to ensure that tirailleurs would fight and work like modern, obedient subjects while being kept at a safe distance from the dangerous temptations of French women and the kind of seditious thinking that would question North Africans’ place in the colonial hierarchy. It was concerns such as these that led Protectorate officials to single out Cantinelli's letter to ʿAmr's mother and the subversive relationship it had exposed.
These anxieties led to new policies, informing the creation of hospitals specifically for Muslim North African soldiers during World War I. The “Muslim hospitals” built to contain and rehabilitate these soldiers could have become spaces of great discontent, magnifying the daily inequalities of colonial difference.Footnote 6 Some medical and military officials at these hospitals drew harsh lines of racial difference through orientalist re-education films and surveillance measures aimed at keeping tirailleurs away from French women, attempting to recreate colonial conditions within these exceptional metropolitan spaces—yet this was only part of the story. Wounded North Africans faced a more ambiguous set of circumstances in their encounters at Muslim hospitals in Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles, and even at general hospitals such as the one in Lyon where ʿ Amr spent his last days. Their relationships with French nurses, intense by nature of the very work of healing and rehabilitation, tested the patriarchal demand for a stoic distance separating them. Moreover, North Africans’ self-recognition of their important role in the French war effort prompted new efforts by military and colonial officials to cultivate a “modern but oriental” subjectivity among the wounded. But what was it like for a North African to heal, to learn, and to be cared for within the confines of these hospitals? What led French authorities to establish such spaces? And in light of North Africans’ eye-opening encounters with French civilian life, what can medical spaces tell us about how World War I provoked new understandings of belonging or difference?
Through a critical reading of personal correspondence, photographs, and military and medical records, we can better understand the impact of these encounters within the physical, racial, and gendered confines of French military hospitals. Approached with the analytical tools of historians of colonial medicine and gender, these little-understood spaces reveal how the war marked a significant rupture for North Africans: soldiers’ wartime experiences included a wide array of moments in which they could grasp, question, and even cast aside the harsh sense of difference imposed by French colonial practice.Footnote 7
Scholars have often highlighted how colonial medical projects’ material and personnel shortages could exacerbate the dehumanization of non-European subjects. Despite the grandiose aims of European medical and colonial officials, local concerns and conditions often proved unavoidable. The same medical discourse that Fanon critiqued for its “depersonalization” and “systematic dehumanization” of the colonized could be equally alienating and oppressive when it was applied unevenly or unsuccessfully.Footnote 8 In French West Africa, for example, heavy-handed public health measures informed by racist presumptions and lacking in resources resulted in the violent relocation of entire indigenous communities; meanwhile, yellow fever, malaria, and the bubonic plague persisted through the 1910s.Footnote 9 In India, frugal British development spending throughout the early 20th century meant that psychiatric asylums were critically understaffed and short of provisions, making these spaces at best only occasionally medically effective and at worst up to five times more deadly for their patients than life at home.Footnote 10
Similarly, during World War I, French military and medical authorities faced shortages, significant input (usually unsolicited) from their patients, and conflicting opinions about how policies would take shape on the ground. Yet whereas such limitations in many cases contributed to the inhumane treatment of colonial subjects at the hands of French authorities, wartime contingencies also produced more personal encounters than were normally permitted between French women and North African men. And while the cases I will outline were likely closer to the exception than the rule, they were significant enough to provoke a sustained response from French authorities, offering a glimpse at how the war strained colonial policies towards and discourses about Muslim subjects. In military hospitals, I argue, material limitations and nurses’ and soldiers’ individual motivations created space for humanizing encounters unimaginable in the prewar Maghrib. Such experiences reveal an ambiguous daily reality: North Africans found themselves caught between a newfound sense of affinity with the French public and a starker sense of the boundaries of French colonial practice. These familial, romantic, and platonic encounters, unfolding within the confines of military-medical “colonies within the metropole,” were a precursor to the many Franco-Maghribi relationships that nurtured the anticolonial and feminist politics of the metropole in the 1920s.Footnote 11
This article will begin by establishing the circumstances of North African soldiers’ presence on French soil during the war, with particular attention to how French fears and racial presumptions shaped tirailleurs’ treatment as pathogenic and sexual threats. I then proceed to show how North Africans’ ambiguous encounters with French nurses strained norms of gender and racial segregation, offering to both a space for humanizing interactions not commonly available during peacetime. I conclude by examining how North Africans in Muslim hospitals experienced French authorities’ uneven efforts to isolate and re-educate them, problematizing the notion that military and medical officials, despite their racially informed presumptions, were successful in—or even always interested in—preventing contact between North Africans and French civilians.
Saviors and Suspects
When World War I broke out in 1914, France debated conscripting young men from its colonies to address chronic shortages of manpower.Footnote 12 Many worried that demanding military service of tirailleurs without granting them French citizenship would provoke their resentment.Footnote 13 Moroccans and Tunisians were technically considered subjects of their nominally “protected” sovereigns. In the army, they were treated much like their Muslim Algerian counterparts who, despite living under direct French sovereignty, remained colonial subjects because of the alleged incompatibility of their Islamic personal status with the French Civil Code.Footnote 14 Whereas all North Africans had once been “Muslims” or indigènes (in the French parlance) on their home soil, their experience on the front and in the factories of France won them praise among military officials as “adopted children,” “heroes” fighting for the cause of their French protectors.Footnote 15 Gilbert Meynier has argued that while Algerians suffered some discrimination at the front, for example, they found the military hierarchy generally more egalitarian than the colonial order, and found temporary purpose in the paternalistic calls for solidarity in the face of a common enemy.Footnote 16
It would seem, however, that French preoccupations with loyalty reflected continued anxieties about how North and West Africans’ position in the French colonial hierarchy might be overturned during the war. For evidence, one need only point to the volume of ink spilled analyzing the Ottoman sultan's call to jihad on 14 November 1916, which ultimately provoked no worldwide uprising of zealous Muslims in defense of their caliph and their God.Footnote 17 Postal censors did note that North Africans, aware of French concerns over their loyalty, developed secret codes to pass along the news of defeats and losses suffered in France and Belgium.Footnote 18 Despite some qualms about the lack of religious facilities and halal foods in Europe, however, North African soldiers were largely indifferent to the pan-Islamic, pro-Ottoman leaflets that circulated in Europe and across the Mediterranean. This was perhaps due in part to their low literacy rates or to the difficulties of circulating propaganda materials under French censorship. More to the point, French authorities vastly overestimated the extent to which these young men felt any sort of attachment to an Ottoman Empire.Footnote 19 While the French administration was cautious in its concern for Tunisians’ loyalty during the war, officials were eager to demonstrate France's capacity to serve as the protector of Muslims around the world in order to justify its international and imperial ambitions, particularly if the Ottoman Empire were to crumble. The loyal Muslim soldier, they hoped, would prove incontrovertibly that France was well-suited to this role, and that it had been recognized as such by its subjects. As Gregory Mann explains, proclamations of tirailleurs’ loyalty became “all but obligatory” platitudes in colonial officers’ memoirs and were later recycled by generations of historians.Footnote 20
While on leave from the front, North Africans were initially free to enjoy the trappings of metropolitan French society. They indulged in the pleasures of this lifestyle alongside European soldiers and civilians, frequenting cafés, cabarets, and brothels—spaces that could offer alcohol, women, and subversive political discussions. Of course, North Africans were no more likely than their French counterparts to seek out or engage in activities deemed immoral or seditious. It was simply that military and colonial officers, informed by their collective wisdom from the colonies, believed they understood the “special mentality” of their Arab subjects in a way that French civilians could not. While officers often dismissed tirailleurs as primitive and harmlessly childlike, they also frequently described them as dangerous and duplicitous.Footnote 21
French medical discourse was deployed in a variety of ways to explain and neutralize these dangers during World War I, tinged in no uncertain terms by the racial or civilizational ideologies of colonial difference and notions of indigenous peoples’ “mentalité.” Richard Keller's study of the development of colonial psychiatry shows that the cutting-edge Algiers School, for example, reinforced a hierarchy of racial distinction in determining that “mentally debilitated” North African soldiers, including those who demonstrated “passivity, inertia, nonchalance,” were in fact “not … inferior to the mean of their race.”Footnote 22 Syphilis, moreover, was described by physician Georges Lacapère as “the Arab disease,” its prevalence in Morocco attributed not to race exactly, but rather to cultural habits and civilizational differences.Footnote 23 Other French physicians produced medical narratives about North Africans as simultaneously “shameless” and “pathologically modest” about syphilis and the difficult efforts to treat it, both in the colonies and among tirailleurs in the metropole.Footnote 24 Their bodies were considered a pathogenic threat to the colonial order: improperly trained and restrained, they could upend the gender relations, biomedical safety, and public order central to French imperial rule.
Inverting the Colonial Gaze
The threat of contact between white French women and colonial soldiers appears to have provoked the most apprehension among French authorities. Such encounters could overturn the entire colonial order, an order dependent on patriarchal hierarchies of command in both military and civilian life.Footnote 25 At stake was the “prestige” of white women who, carefully guarded across European empires as “bearers of a redefined colonial morality,” in Ann Laura Stoler's words, were suddenly exposed to indigenous subjects’ perceived promiscuity.Footnote 26 Colonial troops’ circulation of thousands of letters and postcards with photographs of nude French women further threatened to invert the subjection of “exotic” indigenous women to a male European gaze.Footnote 27
Prior to World War I, mixed-race relationships and marriages were exceedingly rare in North Africa. In Algeria, for example, less than a dozen Franco-Algerian marriages per year were reported between 1891 and 1914, reflecting the “mutually self-reinforcing segregation” between the two communities rather than official colonial policy.Footnote 28 In wartime Europe, relationships between colonial troops and European women, ranging from as mundane as nurse and patient to as controversial as husband and wife, exposed North Africans, most of them for the first time, to the highly guarded, intimate domains of white French men and women.Footnote 29 Many soldiers expressed amazement that behind the lines France seemed to be nearly entirely composed of women, with so many men having left for the front.Footnote 30 Others were struck that French women in the metropole appeared much more welcoming than those they had encountered in the colonies.Footnote 31 Marraines de guerre (godmothers of war), French women who wrote letters to soldiers to boost their morale, often built close personal relationships with their pen pals, inviting them to their homes, taking them out to cafés, and buying them gifts; this practice was not limited to white soldiers.Footnote 32
Sometimes these friendships developed into something more: the “nightmare” of mixed-race couples and their progeny was perhaps the greatest embodiment of racial and gendered anxieties.Footnote 33 In official rhetoric North Africans were largely described as seductive and manipulative, with French women dismissed as naïve or even “hysterical” in their “benevolence” towards them.Footnote 34 The Tunisian soldier Salih bin Meneddes, for example, had been engaged to a French woman named Lucienne Bernard, whom he had met during his recovery at a hospital in Bordeaux. Bernard's letter requesting information about his well-being in January 1919 prompted a report from Tunisian Protectorate officials describing him as a criminal despite his apparently clean record.Footnote 35 In a similar case, one Maria Ayroles requested information about the family of her fiancé, a wounded Tunisian soldier named Muhammad Boukali. In their reply officials suggested that she had little concept of what a “painful life” she was in for among the indigenous people of her fiancé’s hometown, the Berber-speaking mountain village of Sened, nor of the “intolerable” laws of the Muslim religion. They recommended that she distance herself from Boukali.Footnote 36 While these two examples concerned Tunisians, in documents from the hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois, Lyon, and Moisselles, French officials often lumped together soldiers of different North African origins as simply “North African,” “Maghribi,” or “Muslim.”
To mitigate concerns over mixing with Europeans, military authorities subjected North African soldiers to a series of initiatives aimed at limiting their contact with French society, and with French women in particular. Jean-Yves Le Naour has argued that colonial soldiers, confined to barracks and hospitals under the watch of the military, were subject to far stricter measures of isolation and control than colonial workers in the metropole.Footnote 37 Tyler Stovall has also noted that by the end of the war, French officials prioritized their efforts to limit contact between French women and colonial subjects and were often successful in doing so by imposing fines, censoring mail, and even forbidding certain interracial marriages.Footnote 38 While on leave, North African soldiers fell increasingly under heightened levels of surveillance by the Service de l'organisation des travailleurs coloniaux. They were often restricted to “Moorish cafés” in military depots, and prevented from visiting French families.Footnote 39 Moreover, as early as September 1914, North Africans’ standard red and blue uniforms were replaced with khaki uniforms and chechias (the Maghrib's ubiquitous red caps), such that tirailleurs could be easily distinguished from European soldiers.Footnote 40 West and North African sex workers were even hired to fill military brothels to prevent nonwhite soldiers’ encounters with French civilians.Footnote 41 Great pains were taken to “keep the indigènes in their barracks or units, sheltered from the temptations of the metropolitan cities”—a common refrain in French officials' correspondence.Footnote 42 Such prophylaxis, it was hoped, would mitigate the dangers tirailleurs supposedly posed to French society, while sculpting obedient subjects out of them.
Within the confines of military hospitals, however, the nature of these restrictions was more complicated. With regard to medical treatment and re-education efforts, the hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois, Lyon, and Moisselles did offer potent avenues for experimentation with racial theories and policies of colonial difference. Yet in the course of daily life for recovering tirailleurs, wartime contingencies meant that such efforts were unevenly applied or often skirted completely, opening the way for encounters even more transformative than what these soldiers might have come across in France's cafés or brothels. Between the presence of female nurses, French lessons and vocational training, and opportunities to claim recognition for their important role in protecting France, North Africans found ways to cross colonial boundaries and experience French society in ways unimaginable before the outbreak of war. It is with such a rupture in mind that we now turn to the personal encounters between wounded North African soldiers and French nurses.
Nursing Transgressions in a Mixed Hospital
The attempts of some officials to isolate North Africans from civilian French society were simply confounded by the circumstances of war.Footnote 43 As casualties mounted, male nurses and doctors struggled to keep up; the need for more doctors at the front led to the “demedicalization” of both the colonies and France behind the lines.Footnote 44 Meanwhile, women joined the workforce in droves, with some 100,000 French women—many of them middle-class Red Cross volunteers with little more than a couple months of training or experience—serving as nurses by the end of the war. And while French officials often pressed for more stringent training and qualification requirements for nurses, the sheer extent of wartime need, combined with women's ardent desire to contribute to national service, took precedence.Footnote 45 It would be a mistake to understate the extent to which women, despite certain officials’ misgivings, were widely considered to play an invaluable role in the French war effort.Footnote 46 Still, nursing in France was far from the established “feminine profession” that had begun to take shape in Britain and elsewhere, in part because female nurses had not been allowed to work in military hospitals until 1907.Footnote 47 In their relative novelty, women nurses drew both praise and criticism, colored by the expectation that they act as heroic, selfless, and saintly “mothers.” But failing this, nurses could be accused of frivolity and sexual impropriety, their feminine presence supposedly softening the will of the nation's soldiers.Footnote 48
French authorities were not all in agreement about limiting contact between French women and North African men, both within and beyond hospital walls. Center-right parliamentary deputy Albin Rozet, for example, supported a policy of “association between the two races,” arguing in June 1915 that French families should be allowed to host tirailleurs on leave. Director of the Service de santé militaire Justin Godart, by contrast, allegedly responded to soldiers’ “misinterpretations” of their nurses’ care by calling in 1916 for female hospital personnel to be prevented from giving direct care to Muslim soldiers. Some medical officers listened: one Dr. Maclaud in Marseille sent away his female contingent of nurses from the Red Cross. But women remained an important part of the care given to North Africans at many other hospitals.Footnote 49
The experience of ʿAmr, the wounded and blinded Tunisian soldier cared for by nurse Cantinelli in Lyon as described in the introduction, gets to the heart of these charged encounters. The intimacy of ʿAmr and Cantinelli's relationship is suggested by the latter's personal letter to ʿAmr's mother which sits squeezed in between pages of a Protectorate official's report at the diplomatic archives in Nantes. In the handwritten letter, Cantinelli wrote that ʿAmr's “death has been truly felt in our house, where ʿAmr came regularly to eat on Sunday for the past three months.” ʿAmr was taken by Cantinelli on walks around the city, and he might also have learned some French and participated in leisurely activities and games. The kind of intimate contact already dangerous within the confines of the hospital could prove even more so when it moved to the civilian spaces of France. Cantinelli wrote to ʿAmr's mother that “once I got to know your little ʿAmr, I became interested in him; I took him out myself twice a week, and other days … other young girls and I all adored him and learned to admire his beautiful nature which suffered nobly through his disabilities.” The nurse assured ʿAmr's mother that he was well taken care of, surrounded by “affection”: she held his hands in hers, ensuring his good spirits right up until his death. His final words, according to Cantinelli, were: “Tell my brother never to go off to war.”Footnote 50
Cantinelli's letter was perhaps only preserved because it had drawn the attention of the civil controller of the Tunisian province of Kairouan, who was dismayed by this “touching” but ill-conceived and naïve gesture.Footnote 51 The report, notably sent directly to Tunisia's highest authority, Resident General Gabriel Alapetite, acknowledged first that Cantinelli's letter would “certainly provoke [ʿAmr's mother's] deep gratitude.” The agent went on to note that “one can only be moved when reading it, and be filled with admiration and respect for these women who follow with so much gentle devotion, even in witnessing death, the noble path to which they've been drawn.”Footnote 52
From there, however, the report turns to its ultimate purpose: to warn the head of the Tunisian Protectorate of the unintended dangers of nurse Cantinelli's transgressions. She had bypassed the established protocol for notifying kin of fallen colonial soldiers. No doubt the civil controller would have been caught off-guard if ʿAmr's family had come unexpectedly to claim their son's pension, Cantinelli's letter in hand. The report noted a series of indiscretions: informing ʿAmr's mother that her son had been blinded, sending along his remaining possessions directly (including a watch and chechia she had given him), and arranging a burial with flowers and a palm laid on the coffin by “pious and maternal Catholic women,” as she had put it. The latter, the civil controller noted, was bound to “produce unease and anxiety instead of the desired effect.” His report went further, revealing the deep apprehension evoked by the representatives of the French colonial system:
The signatory of this letter would perhaps be sorry to hear my criticisms, however convinced I am of her sincerity and of the goodness of her intentions; but this is precisely because these women do not know the mentalité and the habits of the indigènes, whom they risk misunderstanding or being misunderstood by.Footnote 53
What French officials held to be “misunderstandings” were, in this case, a dramatic reconfiguration of colonial understandings.Footnote 54 While it is not clear whether Cantinelli was a career nurse or an inexperienced volunteer, the civil controller's report seems to suggest that her misconduct was accidental and common to many of “these women” who served during the war. It is also evident that nurses like Cantinelli were not always steeped in the discourses and policies of colonial and racial difference. “Mentalité,” for example, was a frequent refrain in French writing about the indigenous mind, among both colonial administrators and academics. The term was often deployed to explain all manner of non-European cultural practices (as in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's 1922 work La mentalité primitive).Footnote 55 It was also used to explain away indigenous resistance to European policies and practices. If the civilizing mission was meant to bring order and reason to non-European peoples, then would not a rejection of such a mission amount to irrationality, or even insanity?Footnote 56
In this case, Cantinelli's failure (willful or otherwise) to adhere to colonial and military protocols was precisely what had humanized her encounter with ʿAmr and his family. In writing her letter, she had presumed a certain rationality in and parity with ʿAmr's mother, whom she may have seen as her counterpart. To Protectorate officials, however, ʿAmr's mother was at risk of reacting harshly to news of her son's blindness, death, and non-Muslim burial. Certainly ʿAmr's grim warning to his brother would not have inspired confidence in the French war effort. But more than this, the intimacy of Cantinelli's and other European women's relationships with wounded tirailleurs were best not exposed to North Africans back home. The point here is not to determine whether the nurse's care for ʿAmr arose from romantic, maternal, or pious sentiment; at any rate, her true emotions or intentions are unknowable to the historian. Rather, what is significant is that Cantinelli's expression of such intimacy and compassion in a letter to ʿAmr's parents amounted to an act of transgression.
Cantinelli's letter (and the reaction it provoked) was not an altogether exceptional occurrence. Nurses frequently pledged their love for and admiration of these soldiers who claimed to have “saved France,” leading one officer to suggest that tirailleurs be reminded sternly and in the presence of nurses that they had been mobilized to defend their own homes as much as they were to defend France.Footnote 57 It was enough that these soldiers had begun to feel that a certain debt or elevated status was owed to them, to say nothing of the blow to French masculinity symbolized by the need to recruit non-European soldiers. French authorities had already faced calls from figures as influential as Blaise Diagne to extend greater political rights and even French citizenship to colonial soldiers.Footnote 58 While tirailleurs were paid less than their French counterparts, injured veterans of North Africa (regardless of race, religion, or political status) were eventually granted equal pensions in a 1919 law. The orphans of indigenous Algerian soldiers, moreover, became the center of much debate over the empire's responsibility for repaying the “blood tax.”Footnote 59
Much has been written about the important psychological and emotional roles played by nurses in military hospitals during World War I. Similar to soldiers, nurses felt the need to live up to certain patriotic ideals—in their case, the “ministering angel” who approached the wounded with a stoic compassion.Footnote 60 Through such care they consciously sculpted their roles to mimic those of soldiers’ sisters and mothers, often acting as the wounded's only emotional link to home, or in the case of Cantinelli, literally opening their homes to soldiers.Footnote 61 Given the incredible physical and psychological burdens nurses faced in their daily work, moreover, I propose that the professional, stoic distance demanded by French authorities may not always have been possible. In Ana Carden-Coyne's reading of Paul Fussell's seminal work on World War I literature, just as men's physical strength had been bested by the emergent technologies of heavy artillery and machine guns, so too had their ability to “penetrate” and “thrust” through enemy trenches.Footnote 62 In other words, the unprecedented nature of this war had wrought male impotence on a mass scale. Carol Acton explains that British nurses and wounded soldiers were brought into an interdependence through the fulfillment of their gendered roles at war, men wearing the “badges” of their wounds and women dutifully dressing those wounds, restoring men as best they could to their masculine physicality.Footnote 63
Whereas such a reading of the interdependence of British nurses and soldiers points to an overstepping of gendered boundaries, the interdependence between French nurses and North African soldiers could violate both gendered and colonial boundaries. In such an encounter, what other dynamics did the nurse–patient relationship assume? First, it seems that the intimacy of nurses’ and soldiers’ close quarters sometimes gave way to romance and even sex. Military authorities lamented that wounded colonial soldiers, often hospitalized for months on end, found themselves pampered by nurses while they “malingered.”Footnote 64 French reports, citing incidents of “sexual favors” given to the wounded, criticized the “hysterical folly” of the nurse-mondaine, the “emancipated woman” who had brought her assertive sexuality out of sequestration and close to the front.Footnote 65 Of course, nurses had their own various reasons for building relationships with their patients (sexual or otherwise), be they out of compassion, patriotism, religious devotion, or romantic desire. Furthermore, nonwhite men and French women, both disenfranchised and facing inequalities and disciplinary measures, shared the fact that they were outsiders suddenly asked to perform duties central to the preservation of the French nation.
Despite the possibility of sex and romance, more innocent dynamics were usually at play between French nurses and Tunisian soldiers. First, although republican officials had begun efforts to secularize hospitals by the turn of the century, the pious commitment of nurses from religious congregations remained central to the broader character of nursing in France.Footnote 66 Secondly, nurses often took on the character of “nurse-as-mother” for wounded soldiers who were far from home, and referred to their patients with terms of endearment such as “boy,” “my dear little one,” and so on.Footnote 67 North and West Africans were in fact regularly described by officials in such an infantilizing manner, as in the popular “Y'a bon!” slogan of Banania advertisements which played on the image of the smiling, harmless West African, or the more general characterization of colonial soldiers as “adopted sons.”Footnote 68 Perhaps then a familial relationship could flourish where a sexual or romantic one could not. In other words, these relationships could afford the sort of safe distance expected between North African men and French women in such a setting while still provoking a moment of exploration that pushed, but did not quite breach, the normative racial and gendered boundaries of colonial difference. This innocent kind of affection fell, or could appear to fall, within the scope of a nurse's duties.
Historians of emotion have rightfully warned against attempting to determine the true emotions or “gut feelings” of historical subjects; we can only interpret the historically mediated expressions of those experiences. Analysis of emotional expression, Nicole Eustace explains, “requires critical attention to the contemporary ideas about emotion that defined the message conveyed by the expression (or omission) of emotion in any particular historical context.”Footnote 69 In the case of Cantinelli's letter, close attention to the trajectory of the text itself also offers a compelling window into the historical stakes of both expression and omission. That is, the letter itself represented a certain expression of her sentiments, shaped of course by her personal feelings, but also by nurses’ social and gendered expectations, and by the norms of writing such a letter of condolence. In turn, officials’ dismay that this expression had not been omitted reflects wider French anxieties about Islam, colonial and racial difference, and political stability.
Thus while we lack the biographical details that might allow for a more substantial exploration of the role of emotions in this encounter, the textual evidence suggests that nurses such as Cantinelli and patients such as ʿAmr could find themselves in relationships marked by varying degrees of romantic, familial, and pious intimacy. It is clear, moreover, that encounters between French nurses and wounded North African soldiers could provoke an overturning of the colonial order and of the polite fictions of patriotic duty on which it insisted. Such provocations also laid bare for tirailleurs that they could, to a certain extent, attain aspects of a “French” life. For seriously wounded soldiers like ʿAmr, finding oneself taken into the familial domain or quite simply feeling the touch of a nurse like Cantinelli went beyond official recognition of their sacrifices at the front line.
The “Muslim Hospitals” at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles
Would ʿAmr and Cantinelli's encounter have been different within the confines of a “Muslim hospital” such as those at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles, in contrast to the general hospital in Lyon? On the one hand, the wartime spaces that afforded such boundary crossing were for the most part short lived and tightly policed. Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles, designated specifically for Muslim North Africans, offered French officials an opportunity to better isolate and re-educate their subjects along lines deemed more appropriate to colonial interests. On the other hand, it would be an exaggeration to think of France's wartime Muslim hospitals as prisons, despite the disciplinary methods of surveillance and control they featured.Footnote 70 Rather, one might think of them as colonies within the metropole, in the sense that they too often lacked funding, supplies, personnel, and a coherent vision for their operation. Such wartime contingencies meant that Muslim hospitals allowed and even produced the spaces in which otherwise-proscribed encounters between North African soldiers and French women could take shape.
Specialized hospitals were not constructed solely for North African Muslims. Senegalese soldiers were brought to isolated hospitals in southern French towns such as Fréjus for the winter, where it was hoped they could recover from weather-related afflictions while being “re-Senegalized” and reminded of their colonial status.Footnote 71 Similarly, the Jardin Colonial at Nogent-sur-Marne housed perhaps the largest and most diverse group of colonial soldiers at the time, its Hôpital bénévole serving over 300 wounded tirailleurs. The Jardin Colonial's “oriental” architecture, prayer spaces, and non-Christian cemeteries reflected its role as a flagship for French propaganda, which had been one of the grounds’ primary functions since hosting a colonial exposition for the Société française de colonization in 1907. The massive Brighton Royal Pavilion, built to evoke an imperial Indian grandeur, served a similar role on the southern English coast during the war.Footnote 72
French efforts to establish Muslim hospitals during World War I were unprecedented. It was not until 1935, after a controversial decade of planning, fundraising, and political negotiations, that the well-known Franco-Muslim hospital would be built in Bobigny, outside Paris.Footnote 73 Amidst the turmoil of war, the Muslim hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles were established much more haphazardly. Neither complex was built for the occasion, both having been repurposed for their new roles in 1915. Carrières-sous-Bois, located a few miles north of Paris, had been a sanatorium prior to the war. Moisselles, situated just beyond Paris’ western suburbs, had been a civilian psychiatric asylum. While studies of the Jardin Colonial and the Brighton Royal Pavilion may reveal much about how colonial soldiers factored into the international politics of colonialism, the smaller and decidedly lesser-known hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles, through documents preserved in Tunisian and French archives, reveal more about how North Africans encountered, contested, and constituted those politics on a daily basis.
One article in France-Maroc, a monthly review aimed at publicizing French national and economic interests in Morocco, marked these hospitals as part of an effort to honor North Africans’ sacrifices in the name of French civilization. These “tough children of Africa” would not have to suffer their own presumed fatalism:
It is a fact that the dispositions common to the French cannot be entirely applied to these brave indigènes so different in spirit, manners, language, religion, and race, and the political and military statuses which unite them with the metropole are distinct, according to whether they come from our colonies or protectorates in Africa, Asia, or Oceania. It is above all recommended to the hospital directors to ensure that the natives receive the same care and are surrounded with the same solicitude as the soldiers of the mother country [France].Footnote 74
At least in such a promotional statement, the care provided to colonial soldiers would have to be equal to that given to French soldiers, yet the methods of such care were said to depend on the race and civilization of the patients in question—such contradictory logic was commonplace in colonial rhetoric. The author of the report went on to highlight a few observations on daily life during his visit to Moisselles, including the varieties of food served: French dishes cooked with butter or oil (rather than pig lard), and couscous served every Thursday. The Ramadan fast was facilitated for those who wished to observe it; burial rites and other religious affairs were administered by North African imams.Footnote 75 The hospital at Carrières-sous-Bois had a total of 150 beds, but it is unclear from this or other reports just how many patients or staff were present at Moisselles or Carrières-sous-Bois at any given moment, or what types of injuries or illnesses were most prevalent. We see from photographs that doctors at Moisselles used electrotherapy, a controversial but increasingly popular practice during the war.Footnote 76 We also learn from one report that between June 1916 and July 1919 thirty-eight tirailleurs at Moisselles died of their wounds, twenty-nine of whom were buried in plots on the grounds of the hospital; the remains of six others were repatriated after the war.Footnote 77
Despite being designated specifically for Muslim North African soldiers, the hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles included women on staff, most of them nurses with the Red Cross. The sheer shortage of available men meant that women had to fill such roles even where they were not preferred by officials, particularly at such ad-hoc institutions as these.Footnote 78 Yet the presence of female nurses might also suggest a more practical and open-minded approach to providing care to North Africans. French officials should not be taken as a monolith on this subject, as it is likely that the value of well-supervised nurses’ work outweighed the potential risks that some associated with their presence. Considering that wartime photographs were often (but not always) posed and arranged deliberately, two images taken by Tunisian photographer Albert Samama-Chikli of the French Army's Section photographique et cinématographique suggest that despite their misgivings about the proximity between nurses and North Africans, some medical and military officials were more optimistic about nurses’ important role in ensuring that soldiers remained healthy, happy, and loyal.
Much like Cantinelli's letter, these photographs offer few biographical details about their subjects. Nonetheless, when closely examined, they reveal some clues about the possibilities for intimate daily contact between tirailleurs and French nurses. In Figure 1, two nurses stand relaxed and smiling among a group of wounded but well-humored North Africans. The nurse on the right, in particular, appears comfortable and accessible as she leans against a balcony and looks fondly at a standing soldier, their backs to the Seine. Segregation is not evidently a factor; in fact, daily intermixing almost appears to be celebrated by the army photographer. Similarly, in several other photographs from this particular visit, nurses are portrayed seated at the level of colonial soldiers while male French staff are most often standing, perhaps reflecting the different gendered roles and hierarchy expected in such a medical-military setting.Footnote 79 For all the rhetoric and policies surrounding the perceived threat of interracial intimacy, in this “Muslim hospital,” gendered roles ironically set French men apart from North African men, while women, presumed to have a greater capacity to provide comfort and support, found themselves right alongside tirailleurs.
“Military Hospital for African Troops at Carrières-sous-Bois,” 25 October 1916, photo by Albert Samama-Chikli, courtesy of l’Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense (hereafter ECPAD), SPA 32 L 1724D.
The scene in Figure 2 is decidedly more somber. It features an injured soldier tended to by a doctor and two nurses; another official stands to the side taking notes. Particularly striking in this photograph is the nurse who sits on the hospital bed closely alongside the soldier. She holds his hand which, exposed below a bulging swath of bandages, appears to be heavily swollen or perhaps artificial. The nurse, who wears white gloves, looks down solemnly at his hand in her lap. Without speculating about the specific circumstances of the scene depicted, it is worth considering the importance of the physical touch which “can be said to open up the body at a more intimate, affective level.”Footnote 80 While nurses’ hands were involved in the most gruesome and taxing aspects of wartime surgery and amputation (often without anesthesia), there were many cases like the one pictured here in which nurses’ hands did the enduring work of steadying and reassuring the wounded. Touch could be tender, but it could also be violent and bruising, a tactile witness to the “frenzied grips” of a soldier in physical or emotional pain.Footnote 81 In this sense, this single image dramatically encapsulates the ambiguities of this charged encounter, its distances and proximities, and its understandings and humanity. One wonders about the importance of touch for ʿAmr who, robbed of his sight at the front, would have held many a hand during his final months in Lyon.
“Military Hospital for African Troops at Carrières-sous-Bois,” 25 October 1916, photo by Albert Samama-Chikli, courtesy of ECPAD, SPA 32 L 1708.
Education, Recreation, Difference
The hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles played host to various efforts to proactively re-educate its patients, as officials were concerned with more than just North Africans’ encounters with French women. In fact, one function of the hospital at Moisselles, as described by its head doctor, was to teach North Africans to read and write French (Figure 3). Although this decision might appear to contradict the widely expressed desire to limit rather than promote North Africans’ access to French civilian life, it had tactical advantages: closely monitored lessons for a small number of noncommissioned colonial officers could help compensate for the utter lack of French officers who understood Arabic.Footnote 82 North Africans were sometimes taught by teachers from a local public school, one of whom described his half dozen students as “applying themselves well, very attentive, and making marked progress,” though there were not enough French teachers available to teach more than about three hours per week.Footnote 83 Once again, the exigencies of war sometimes demanded practical actions that permeated the stricter boundaries of colonial rhetoric.
“French Classes, Moisselles, Muslim Hospital,” Seine-et-Oise, 8 May 1918, photo by Edouard Brissy, courtesy of ECPAD, SPA 87 D 5172.
Still, recovering North African soldiers faced the daily iterations of French notions of colonial and racial difference. Officials and physicians around the French Empire often expressed that moral uplift was central to economic development and public health projects.Footnote 84 Doctors and support staff at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles believed their mandate to be both medical and moral. Because few North African conscripts could read, magazines and books typically enjoyed by European soldiers were nearly useless to all but a “very small elite.” Doctors tried to introduce a variety of French lawn games, but they were met with little success, confounding French authorities who presumed that such games would be enjoyed universally: “Arabs have in effect a childish mentality, and, like children, break their toys after having a moment of fun. In any case, they are not used to this type of recreation and do not appreciate its charm.”Footnote 85 Cards, dominoes, and other indoor games were slightly more successful in officials’ eyes but were still marred by gambling and fighting. Moisselles soldiers went on supervised walks through the neighborhood during the midday “free quarter” on Thursdays and Sundays, but if they were caught drinking, they often found themselves imprisoned for this proscribed practice. It would not be a stretch to imagine that similar scenes played out in countless other European barracks or hospitals, yet embedded in such descriptions of North African soldiers was the presumption of a primitive or childlike mentalité.Footnote 86
Despite these initial efforts, morale was a continued concern; officials reported that North Africans still exhibited all manner of “dark ideas,” “critical attitudes,” and “boredom,” which doctors attributed to their many injuries, to inactivity, or to “quasi-religious qualms.”Footnote 87 Consul General M. Piat, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, supported an initiative that brought theatrical performances and film screenings to hospitals in and around Paris; Moisselle's staff hoped that this approach would address North Africans’ morale problems.Footnote 88 Medical officials were particularly proud of the army's efforts to re-educate their colonial soldiers through cinema, a cutting-edge approach increasingly used by both the Entente and the Central Powers. Such screenings at Moisselles were a major occasion for all involved; even the head doctor, “despite his many duties,” would attend these three-hour sessions before dinner on Sunday.Footnote 89
The head doctor noted proudly that not one wounded soldier had been forced to attend these screenings, but that sheer curiosity had given way to increased interest in the films, with fewer and fewer North Africans choosing to leave the building on their days of permission. Neither “by threat nor by punishment,” but rather by “gentleness, by persuasion, and above all by example,” the French had “imposed [their] authority and safeguarded discipline. We have often come to hear one of the wounded saying to a comrade who had made a mistake: ‘don't do that, the head doctor won't be happy.’” Helpful in this regard was a Tunisian interpreter named Mustapha ben Saïdane (Mustafa bin Saʿidan), who had been wounded in action and was “of an elite class of North African society and of an education far superior to his coreligionists.” Reports described him as having kindly volunteered to help explain the films to his North African comrades, often leading to prolonged discussions about topics ranging from agriculture and natural history to the appreciation of cinematography itself.Footnote 90 Pharmacist G. Louchet's report reveals that screenings were held on Thursdays and Sundays, chosen precisely because these were the soldiers’ days of leave: the goal was “keeping [them] in the hospital. Have we succeeded? Certainly yes; the great number prefers the cinema to the cabaret.”Footnote 91
The educational promise of film went further: according to Moisselles’ head doctor, the goals to be fulfilled by propaganda films included, in the following order, “the reestablishment of discipline through healthful distraction,” “education and the development of intellect and artistic sense,” “attachment to [France] and to their native country in particular,” and “physical re-education.”Footnote 92 The films featured a variety of scenes from the war effort, many of them aimed at reinspiring and “bringing them back” to the front. Popular naval and air scenes were interspersed with pastoral views from France, “to make them know, esteem and love their country of adoption.”Footnote 93
Such cinematic scenes complemented carefully supervised tours of daily life in France: one report describes a tour of a factory, expressing the hope that the visit would provide North Africans with an alternative image of French society, outside of the trenches and brothels, which “did not represent France in sum.” Rather, in the factories, tirailleurs would be able to “judge that the majority of France and the French were workers, and that it was only by their intelligent labor that they acquired themselves well-being and wealth,” adding that “their trust in us [the French] has been strengthened, and they haven't failed to communicate this to their comrades in the hospital and the trenches.”Footnote 94 Paternalistic views of colonial subjects were never far beneath the surface: Louchet's report concludes by praising the effects of this propaganda on wounded soldiers who, “like large children,” were making strides towards “correct[ing] vicious attitudes” that had resulted from their various injuries and maladies.Footnote 95 It was thus an image of a benevolent French tutor, rather than access to French life itself, that films and tours of this nature would extend to North Africans—a France untarnished by the terrors of trench warfare, compromising encounters with French women, and other potentially disturbing aspects of the wartime experience.
Film-based re-education efforts also integrated physical activities. At a plot of land near Moisselles hospital, for example, wounded North Africans learned how to cultivate crops and use agricultural equipment. These lessons would be accompanied by twice-weekly instructional films. The initiative reflected a “physiocratic” approach to artisanal and agricultural retraining favored by French authorities at the end of the war.Footnote 96 There remains a larger question, however, about the sort of “modern but oriental” subjecthood the French hoped to inculcate in convalescing North African soldiers—a question to which we now turn. If tirailleurs were not to be corrupting, subversive pathogens to the colonial body, what would they be?
North Africans at Moisselles reportedly preferred films with scenes of landscapes and cultural traditions from Carthage, Tunis, and the like—“this was their native soil.”Footnote 97 The aim was not just to “evoke dear memories,” but to remind them of the resources and advantages offered to them by their “native lands” so as to discourage the threatening possibility that North Africans might wish to stay in France after the war. Here was where the tactical need for loyal and satisfied soldiers aligned with the strategic need for a return to the prewar colonial status quo.Footnote 98 As one report explained:
The Orient which exalts their religious ideas or fanaticism has an attraction very particular to them. Some exaggerated or even willingly falsified stories have portrayed the Orient as a sort of dreamland, the marvelous and famous country of Scheherazade's ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’ An easy life, lucrative commerce, abundance and riches—this, for them, is to be the land of promise … The Arab of our North African possessions is indispensable to French prosperity in these regions, and it is our duty to try, by any means possible, to keep it that way.Footnote 99
With great faith in the allure of such a fantastical image of the Orient, French propaganda films mobilized these willfully fabricated visions to counteract what authorities saw as North Africans’ dissatisfaction with and corruption by industrialized European life. Similar educational films at Carrières-sous-Bois were, according to one report, the “only way suitable for these illiterates” to learn. Soldiers were to begin a transition from “primitive and traditional” to “real and rational methods” of work.Footnote 100 In each case, racialized and civilizational hierarchies were deployed to relegate North Africans to their “proper” position in the colonial hierarchy. This wishful thinking, confidently deployed in racialized terms, held that tirailleurs were better suited to a pastoral lifestyle far from the metropole. If successful, the effort would fulfill the French need for a placated overseas labor force untainted by access to a French life offered by compassionate nurses and civilian families.
Much like the response of Kairouan's civil controller to Cantinelli's letter to ʿAmr's mother, these methods reflected the tendency of French officials to use terms such as mentalité to explain away the grim realities of the European war and France's discriminatory policies towards North Africans. Officials turned instead to vague explanations of the unintended consequences of tirailleurs’ encounter with modern technologies. Algiers-based psychiatrist Antoine Porot, for example, suggested in 1918 that “profoundly ignorant and gullible” North African conscripts had been taken from their “free, peaceful, and archaic lives” and exposed instead to “a life where the most scientific and infernal inventions loomed before their eyes, which had only known the calm serenity of infinite horizons.”Footnote 101 French colonial discourse was not alone in this respect; a similar trope took hold in Britain's colonial imagination of Africa: while the dreams of “paradise regained” were seen as unattainable in an industrialized England, “the open vistas of the non-European world seemed to offer limitless possibilities.”Footnote 102 In the case of the films shown at Moisselles and Carrières-sous-Bois, however, French medical staff and military authorities envisioned for wounded tirailleurs not a wholesale return to a timeless, oriental lifestyle, but rather a selective hybrid that would balance North Africans’ supposed primitiveness with a limited education that would produce obedient and productive colonial subjects.
Conclusion: “The Ambiguous Adventure”
In French military hospitals, North African soldiers witnessed a confluence at which many of the tensions of French colonialism came to a head. The wounds of colonial violence, institutionalized hierarchies of racial difference, gendered transgressions, and shifting labor ideals all marked the life of a convalescing North African soldier during World War I. At “Muslim hospitals” such as Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles, and even at the mixed hospital in Lyon where ʿAmr and Cantinelli were treated, North Africans embraced new types of intimate relationships, learned new trades and languages, and came to articulate their value and contribution to the French enterprise. In the calm behind the lines, however painful their wounds, they were mostly free to test the limits of their colonial confines. That they were considered inherently different from French citizens had been made apparent enough in their discriminatory treatment at the front lines, if not earlier. Once wounded, this difference was further driven home in their medical seclusion, through propaganda films, restrictions to their movement and activities on leave, and isolation from the “corrupting vices” of life in France. Yet this isolation was never complete. Lawn games, long walks, and Sunday dinners with French women and their families offered North Africans a taste of what it meant to belong to metropolitan society. Relationships with French women, though exceptional, presented to North Africans the possibility of an inextricable link forged through war despite—or rather, as partly a result of—the colonial inequalities that had brought them to France in the first place.
For better or worse, World War I had produced a set of spaces and encounters not seen by North Africans prior to 1914, opening the doors to new articulations of self and of the colonial relationship. Future research on the medical spaces explored here might examine the link between experiences in military hospitals and postwar political developments in North Africa, the latter marked by not only a rise in nationalist sentiment but also other emergent forms of identity, from communism and socialism to Francophile cosmopolitanism. One might also look to evolving forms of masculinity, reading letters and photographs from the collections surveyed here for evidence of new homosocial bonds across class and religious lines among non-European soldiers.Footnote 103
If the Muslim hospitals at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles really were like colonies within the metropole, they were as imperfect as any colony in terms of French authorities’ ability to control and re-educate their subjects, and as experimental and contradictory in nature as other colonial spaces understood as “laboratories” for the technologies and ideologies of European empires.Footnote 104 To be sure, colonial medical institutions and discourses often sought to reduce their colonial subjects to biological or statistical objects, or even to vectors of disease themselves. And indeed, France's novel Muslim medical colonies at Carrières-sous-Bois and Moisselles were designed to address threats of miscegenation and racial corruption while experimenting with new ways to sculpt obedient subjects of a paternal French order. On the other hand, while historians of colonial medicine have underlined how material limitations often exacerbated the conditions of de-humanization, the cases explored here reveal how such contingencies could also produce spaces for humanizing and intimate encounters that strained racial and gendered boundaries. Wartime shortages of space and personnel, as well as the individual desires of those who lived and worked in these spaces, meant that such efforts bore limited or unintended results: North Africans still mixed with French women, enjoyed the benefits of metropolitan life, and increasingly demanded recognition or even a measure of political and social parity in exchange for their sacrifices.
The direct political consequences of North African soldiers’ encounters with French women would be difficult to measure, but there is a conspicuous postwar context for mixed-race marriages: the apparent preponderance of relationships between French women and the hundreds of thousands of male North African laborers who migrated to France during the 1920s and 1930s. By some accounts, these mixed couples outnumbered North African couples in the metropole. This phenomenon can be explained by factors such as the disproportionately male North African population in France, the commercial and cultural expedience of partnering with French women, and perhaps the wartime losses of white French men.Footnote 105 But these relationships also had political import, as famously attested by the relationships of at least two North African nationalist leaders. In 1925 Habib Bourguiba met Mathilde Morrain (Moufida Bourguiba, after her conversion to Islam), a law student in Paris, and the two married in 1927. It was also in Paris that Messali Hadj (Hajj), Algerian founder of the nationalist group Étoile Nord-Africaine, met his future wife, anticolonial labor activist Émilie Busquant. Much as white French partners and wives played a salient role in the political activism of Paris's anti-imperial “black colony,” so too did they in North African circles, whose colony in France was much larger and more prevalent in the industrial sectors most prone to political engagement.Footnote 106 The occurrence of Franco–Maghribi encounters and relationships in France under the emotionally trying circumstances of World War I, then, might well have paved the way for the kinds of mixed-race unions in which all manner of political sentiments later flourished.
