Race and War in France

Through his meticulous research, the breadth of his study's scope, and his valuable comparative perspective, Fogarty has made an ambitious and enduring contribution to the literature about the French use of colonial peoples during the First World War.

Fogarty... contributes greatly to our understanding of the Great War, colonial policies and French beliefs about the indigenous other.

In his clearly written and well-researched book, Richard Fogarty explains French notions of race and nation by examining French policies toward the half million African and Asian men deployed as troops in Europe during World War I.

A well-written, carefully argued study that advances in significant ways our understanding of the important place of empire in the Great War... It is a sad but important tale that needed to be told, and Richard Fogarty has told it well.

An impressive achievement, one that both supports and advances the historiography of colonial and postcolonial France.

Fogarty's principal strength lies in pointing out that, while racism frequently prevailed, the assimilationist ideal always played a role, and that French officers would always have to respond to it. Showing this basic ambivalence in French culture helps correct a picture, in which racism is often too easily regarded as the only criterion to define relations between Non-Europeans and Europeans in the French Empire.

A welcome and significant contribution to the history of these contradictions and their legacies in modern France by examining how French attempts to integrate colonial troops into the French Army during World War I deployed ideas about racial difference and in the process exposed the contradictions of the republican model.

This is a book about both the promise and the shortcomings of French republican ideals... A vivid portrait of the questions raised by the use of colonial troops in the war.

Fogarty pays particular attention to the experience and opinions of the soldiers themselves. This is, in itself, a significant achievement.

Everyone who wishes to know more about France's complex relations with its colonial subjects and their influence on current French reality should read War and Race in France.

Well written, intelligently conceptualized, and exhaustively researched. Fogarty provides a nicely nuanced portrait of French racial thinking. The fact that he combines both metropolitan and colonial perspectives gives him an especially powerful vantage point on the role played by racial difference in French life. An impressive and valuable example of historical scholarship.

Richard Fogarty builds on a considerable body of scholarship and adds creative research of his own in Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918.