Vous Tirailleurs Sénégalais, mes frères noirs
à la main chaude sous la glace et la mort
Qui pourra vous chanter si ce n’est votre frère
d’armes, votre frère de sang ?
Je ne laisserai pas la parole aux ministres,
et pas aux généraux
Je ne laisserai pas—non ! les louanges de mépris
vous enterrer furtivement. Vous n’êtes pas des pauvres
aux poches vides sans honneur
Mais je déchirerai les rires banania
sur tous les murs de France.
—Léopold Sédar Senghor, Hosties Noires

What I’ve been specifically interested in here is how the idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically—as if black, on the one hand, and avantgarde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing (that, for the sake of argument, Richard Schechner wouldn’t understand) and an assertion that blackness is an avant-garde thing (that, for the sake ofmargument, Albert Murray wouldn’t understand).
—Fred Moten, In the Break

 

Opération Dragoon

On 15 August 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron invited the world to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Provence landing near Boulouris and off the coast of Toulon in Southern France. The operation, with the code name ‘Dragoon’, was the follow-up to the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 and fundamental to the liberation of France from German occupation. According to Le Monde, ‘the majority of the 250,000 or so soldiers in this “B army”, led by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (now known as the “First Army”), came from the colonies’.[1]

Like his predecessor, François Hollande, Macron invited a representative delegation of African presidents for that same anniversary of the Provence landing. Despite the role of the Tirailleurs from Algeria, Cameroon, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal in the liberation of France, despite recent commemorations that shed a dim light on the Tirailleurs, their story remains largely absent from history books, marginalized, or at best coopted for political gestures such as when Le Monde asks: ‘How do you commemorate a piece of shared French and African history at a time when Paris’s policy on the continent is challenged?’[2] Historically, the battle to liberate France in the Débarquement de Provence (the Provence landing) was whitewashed until an open letter by scholars, activists, and journalists was published in Le Monde on 5 July 2019.[3] Yet the presence of the Tirailleurs during the Opération Dragoon and throughout both World Wars not only led to the liberation of France but also helped lay the foundations for the Franco-German relations, inaugurated with the Élysée Treaty signed by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in 1963. While this bilateral relationship today is celebrated through trade agreements, projects like Airbus and ARTE, institutions such as the Franco-German Brigade and the Franco-German University, as well as school projects,[4] the role of the Tirailleurs as a historical entanglement between France and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century is ignored.

It is time to turn the coin and engage in research based on a few questions: What was the role of the Tirailleurs in the liberation of France from Nazi Germany, and further, their role in the liberation of Germany from National Socialism? And what was their role in securing peace in Europe after 1945?

An Audiovisual Entry

In 1969, Idrissa Soumaoro, a young Malian teacher and musician, composed the song ‘Petit imprudent (Ancien Combattant)’ for the Radio Television Office. The song was inspired by an altercation between Filiba Sacko,a retired war veteran, and a disrespectful young man, during which Sacko recounted his biography of warfare in the Second World War: ‘Petit imprudent, provocateur, malappris, moi j’ai fait la guerre mondiale, j’ai tué Allemand, j’ai tué Francais, j’ai tué Tchécoslovaquie, j’ai tué Hollandais …’ (Little imprudent, provocateur, ill-trained, I fought in the World War, I killed German, I killed French, Czechoslovak, Dutch.) Soumaoro was hinting at a little-discussed but violently entangled aspect of the history of France and its colonies, that is of African, Asian, Pacific, and Caribbean men recruited as Indigenous soldiers, Les Tirailleurs, to fight for France in the World Wars.

In 1984, Soumaoro’s piece was plagiarized by the Congolese musician Zao. Unfortunately, because Soumaoro did not receive recognition or compensation for his composition. And fortunately, because Zao’s interpretation of ‘Ancien Combattant’ became a hit in the 1980s all over the African continent and Europe. Zao transformed the piece with a military band intro, perversifying the language, making it danceable, and emphasizing the act of warfare and its aftermath. In his almost comical music video, dressed in military fatigues, he chants of a soldier who needs rice rather than stripes, pointing at the conditions endured by most of the Tirailleurs. Zao’s Tirailleur has lost everything and all he can boast of is who he has killed, revealing not only the physical but also the psychological scars he has to carry. He then goes on to lament the atrocities of war: ‘Tout le monde cadavéré / Quand la balle siffle, il n’y a pas de choisir / Si tu ne fais pas vite changui, mon chéri, ho!’

Zao’s ‘Ancien Combattant’ is the reason that most of those who grew up in West Africa in the 1980s learnt of the Tirailleurs: not from school, not from the libraries, and not from the museums, which many never had access to.

A Historical Entry

Though the Tirailleurs Sénégalais were formed as the First Battalion of African soldiers (from French West and Central Africa) in 1857 by the military governor of Senegal, Louis Faidherbe (1818–1889), and became an integral part of the colonial army, the Tirailleurs came from a wide variety of French colonies: the Tirailleurs Algériens from French North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco), the Tirailleurs Malgaches from Madagascar, and the Tirailleurs Indochinois from French Indochina, including Annam, Tonkin, and Cambodia. The predominantly young men recruited, both by compulsion and volunteerism, were given the impression that they would get some remunerations—if not in cash via salaries and pensions, then through citizenship or a ticket into that realm of fraternity, liberty, and equality. What they all had in common was that they would end up as cannon fodder of the French army, and redefine what the avant-garde meant, as they fought in both World Wars and many other colonial counterinsurgency operations, with regiments of Tirailleurs used for conquest and security in West Africa and in other colonies by the end of the nineteenth century.[5]

It is with the publication of La Force noire by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mangin (1866–1925) that the Tirailleur project became not only politically but also racially conceptualized, spurring the expansion of recruitment in West Africa and the first steps towards formal conscription.[6] Mangin argued for the usage of this combat-capable ‘inexhaustible reservoir of men’ to guarantee French security not only in the colonial empire, but in Europe in the event of war. According to Mangin, the enlistment of Indigenous colonial peoples was part of the ‘civilizing mission’ of French colonialism, thereby conceptualizing French republicanism and colonial theory grounded in ‘white supremacy’.

The German Entry

Then came the First World War, during which an estimated 170,891 Tirailleurs fought at the fore of the French army, and approximately 30,000 of them were killed. Interviews and memoirs reveal that many were not even aware of what they were fighting for. At the same time, the war revealed for many the weaknesses of the white man, who, like everyone else, would scream for his mother when dying. It is said that in Senegal, more than a third of all males of military age were conscripted into becoming Tirailleurs. In Mehdi Lallaoui’s film Les Poilus d’ailleurs, veterans talk of the gruesome impacts of war—toxic gases, wounds, inhumane treatment, little or no pensions—and descendants from the Pacific, North and West Africa, and the Caribbeans search for their missing relatives, who were expected by the French state to pay for the repatriation of their remains.[7] In these wars, the Tirailleurs fought not only the Germans during the winter, they were also battling extreme racism within their own army, and became ‘disposable’ bodies for medical experiments. After the First World War for instance, Tirailleurs in Germany were dubbed the ‘Black Shame’ (‘Schwarze Schande’ or ‘Schwarze Schmach’) and racist propaganda about rape was spread that continues to circulate today.[8] Recruitment slowed in 1917 due to Indigenous resistance and the socio-economic strains but increased again in 1918 under Prime Minister and Minister of War Georges Clemenceau, who sent Blaise Diagne to lead recruitment.[9]

Soon enough, in the face of the imminent Second World War, France was in need of Tirailleurs again. In 1940, more than 200,000 Black people were recruited to fight and approximately 25,000 were killed. Many who did not die in battle became prisoners of war in German concentration and labour camps where they were tortured or executed by the Nazis that saw them as ‘subhuman’. Although Black, Brown, and white soldiers fought together against Nazi Germany, the French army under General de Gaulle with Allied support chose to ‘whiten’ the troops by replacing the Tirailleurs, who made up around two-thirds of the Free French Forces, with white Frenchmen.

The history of the Tirailleurs is one of fighting, relating and dis-relating France and Germany, but also a history of acquaintance with resistance and liberation. Decolonial movements were directly and indirectly enabled by the number of ills that some of the Tirailleurs had witnessed at the hands of the French during the wars and the injustices they faced after the wars. Many played an important role in the Senegalese national liberation movements, and the fact that many of them were instrumentalized by the French to fight against their kind in the French counterinsurgency war in Algeria in the 1950s (against which many Senegalese troops had protested) further aggravated the situation. Maybe the most prominent link between the Tirailleurs and decoloniality, politically, but also intellectually and artistically, is embodied by Léopold Sédar Senghor, who was a Tirailleur Sénégalais and a prisoner of war during the Second World War, as well as a renowned poet and avant-garde Négritude movement co-initiator who in 1960 became the first president of independent Senegal.

In this project, we wish to take both Senghor’s and Moten’s questions and proposals seriously, and together with artists, film-makers, thinkers, musicians, and activists, deliberate on and imagine the Tirailleurs as avant-garde, not only in military terms, but also in terms of resistance, in terms of their contributions to breaking racial barriers, helping to liberate the European Jews from the savagery of twentieth-century history, constructing a free and united Europe, and advancing decolonization.

We respond to the question Senghor posits to his Tirailleur brothers—‘Who can sing for you if not your brother in arms, your brother in blood?’—with: Present! To sing with, of, and through the Tirailleurs, who sacrificed body and soul for us, Black and white, to be where we are today.

The term avant-garde stems from the French military long before it became first a political, then an art notion. Just like the French army that took over Paris on 25 August 1944, the notion of the avant-garde has been similarly whitewashed over time. On all counts, the Tirailleurs do not need to become avant-garde, they already are. And that is how they embody Fred Moten’s understanding when he writes that ‘the avant-garde is a black thing … and an assertion that blackness is an avant-garde thing.’ The Tirailleurs are an epitome of this statement.

Maybe there is a possibility to understand the history of the Tirailleurs as avant-garde, vanguard, après-garde, to not only Franco-German relations, but most especially African-European relations. Against all odds.

 

[1] Morgane Le Cam, ‘On 80th anniversary of Provence landings, Macron’s African memorial headache’, Le Monde, 15 August 2024, www.lemonde.fr/en/le-mondeafrica/article/2024/08/15/on-the-80th-anniversary-of-the-provence-landingsemmanuel-macron-s-african-memorial-headache_6715712_124.html.

[2] Le Cam, ‘On 80th anniversary’.

[3] Le Monde Tribune, ‘75e anniversaire du débarquement de Provence : il faut rendre hommage aux combattants venus d’Afrique’, Le Monde, 5 July 2019, www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/07/05/75e-anniversaire-du-debarquementde-provence-il-faut-rendre-hommage-aux-combattants-venus-d-afrique_5485576_3232.html.

[4] Federal Foreign Office, ‘Germany and France: Bilateral relations’, 7 March 2025, www.auswaertigesamt.de/en/aussenpolitik/france/209418.

[5] Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 8–11.

[6] Charles Mangin, La force noire (Paris: Hachette, 1910); Marc Michel, L’Appel à l’Afrique. Contributions et réactions à l’effort de guerre en AOF 1914–1919 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982).

[7] Les Poilus d’ailleurs, Mehdi Lallaoui, film, 2013.

[8] Following a mass sexual assault incident on New Year’s Eve 2015, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Focus Magazine published covers which showed a white woman being groped by a Black hand (SZ) and several Black handprints (Focus), following reports that the assaulters had a North African background. SZ Editor-in-Chief Wolfgang Krach backtracked and apologized on social media after a shitstorm. He said the illustration perpetuated stereotypical images of the ‘Black man’ harassing a ‘white woman’s body’ and could be interpreted as objectifying women and suggesting that sexual violence is linked to skin colour. Focus defended their decision to publish the cover. The subsequent debate echoed framings of sexual violence that could have been straight out of the 1930s, the time in which the propaganda of the ‘Schwarze Schmach’ campaign sought to discredit France precisely by racializing sexual violence and targeting the Tirailleurs, a majority of whom were from North Africa.

[9] Mike Thomson, ‘Paris liberation made “whites only”’, BBC News, 6 April 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7984436.stm.