Conflict and Community in the Trenches: Military Justice Archives and Interactions between Soldiers in France’s Armée d’Afrique, 1914–18

Abstract

Abstract This article demonstrates the methodological value of using military justice archives to explore how soldiers navigated the multi-ethnic French army during the First World War. It focuses on Armée d’Afrique units containing high concentrations of colonial subjects and uses crime records to consider the implications of this unprecedented level of diversity. Emphasizing the experiences and voices of men otherwise scarce in the historical record deepens our understanding of how discrimination and inequality functioned within the supposedly egalitarian structures of the French military and foregrounds the complex ways in which race intersected with other markers of identity to structure combatant experiences.