KS4 / GCSE History: Overcoming racial stereotypes in World War One

World War One pulled men from all over the globe to the Western Front…

But one of the most telling meetings between different races and cultures came not in the trenches, but in the South of France far from the bullets and artillery.

Frejus with it’s warm climate was one of those places where black soldiers, Africans recruited in the French colonies of West Africa were sent to rest and recuperate during the winter.

The French army was convinced that Africans simply couldn’t survive the cold winters of Northern France.

Frejus was also home to a young French artist who met the Africans who got to know some of these men who had come from so far away to try and save France. Her name was Lucie Cousturier.

Lucie Cousturier was a Paris based painter who moved to Frejus to escape the war.

She found a town going through a period of remarkable change.

Historian Alison Fell explains…

Alison:
Frejus was a very small town in the first World War of about 8000 people and there’s about 40,000 French African soldiers who spent the winters here.

David:
And so this small town on the Cote d’Azure suddenly has an army camp four, five times the size of it. With men from Africa.

Alison:
Absolutely, it must have been absolutely transformed and the vast majority of the population would never have seen a black man before.

David:
The population of Frejus was armed with the prejudices of the time.

So Alison what stereotypes about Africans and African soldiers were common at the time in France.

Alison:
Before the first World War the common stereotypes were of savage, cannibalistic, highly sexed, certainly for for for African men. And there was a nervousness about the presence of black African troops on French soil in the first World War.

The West African soldiers were known as tirailleur sengalese – Senegalese Infantry.

The French authorities set out to reassure their citizens that they had nothing to fear from them. They presented them as loyal, simple children.

Alison:
One of the main ways that they propagated this image was through an advert for a drink called banania. There is a very famous advertisement with a grinning Tirralleur and the slogan is, y’a bon, which was the slogan that was most associated with the Tirailleur Sengalese.

David:
At that’s part of the language, the simple version of pigeon French that the Tirailleur were taught by the French army?

Alison:
Absolutely they were taught a form of pigeon French… so y’bon in standard French would be c’est bon so it’s good.

David:
It’s like baby talk.

Alison:
It’s like baby talk, absolutely and they were taught a very very limited set of set phrases. So it also really limited their ability to, to express themselves beyond the most basic daily needs.

David:
When the black soldiers came to Lucie Cousturier’s house looking for odd jobs and scrounging for cigarettes she struck up what was for the times an unlikely friendship with them.

Roger:
They asked her perhaps for a glass of water or something like that and she invited them in and gradually she realised that all they could speak was a kind of military jargon which had been imposed on them for reasons of understanding military orders. The military were producing people who could not communicate with the people for whom they were fighting.

Alison:
She taught them French, she taught them writing and reading and erm, it was through her work with them in a way that some of these stereotypes then were unmasked as the as the racist assumptions that they were.

Lucie Cousturier:
If I have been swayed by the opinion commonly held that the intelligence of negroes develops only until the age of 13 and decreases after that I would never have set out to teach a 28 year old to read and write and one who had practised for seven years the muddled jargon of the Tirailleur.

Roger:
She really befriended them and found that underneath the different colour of skin, underneath the ignorance of the French languagethey were human beings, they had the same feelings, they had the same family attachments. They had the same total bewilderment at being in a totally alien environment.

She’s an extraordinary woman. Really quite extraordinary for her period.