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France, soldiers and Africa
Book Reviews
139
successful, and the quantity of speculation simply swamps the few ‘facts’.‘What then did it mean to feel oneself Arcadian?’ (p.14) must enter the list of spoof Ph.D. subjects with which certain kinds of ancient historian are often teased. One reader at least wanted constantly to interrogate the author to see whether or not the evidence cited really would support the edifice which is erected upon it. Is it really the case that ‘[the Palatine Anthology] is an important source of traditions current among huntsmen and herdsmen’ (p.67) or that, when in (?) the late second century A.D. the sophist Alciphron provides a rather salacious account of courtesans enjoying a rural picnic, ‘his archaizing style and purpose.. .make it safe to assume that he describes a ritual practice whose elements were already well established in the fourth century B.C.‘? On a more mundane level, Apollodorus of Athens is placed in the fourth rather than the second century B.C. (p.192)-how did this get past the translators?and so on. Such quibbles, each more or less unimportant in itself, arise often enough throughout the book to enjoin the unwary and the non-specialist to proceed with caution. Nevertheless, the journey is well worth it: this is an interesting book on a very good subject. This will not have been an easy book to translate, and Atlass and Redfield should have our thanks for making it available to those who do not read French; the translation is in places stilted, but new errors are few [though Menander’s Dyscohs (p. 164) is placed in the fifth century, rather than the fourth, where Borgeaud had correctly placed it]. The translators have made no attempt to update the bibliography; on possession see now W.R. Connor, CIussical Antiquity 7 (1988) 155-89. Richard
Hunter
Pembroke College, Cambridge
France, Soldiers and Africa, Anthony Clayton 1988), xxv +444 pp., cloth, no price indicated.
(London:
Brassey’s
Defence
Publishers,
Anthony Clayton is or has been a soldier, an Africanist, a military and colonial historian, and a francophile; he teaches at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. All these rays of his aureole he now aims at a book on the French military presence in Africa from early colonisation to the present. North and Black African troops figured importantly in the French establishment of an African empire, in the France-Prussian War, in the two world wars, and in the Indochinese struggles after 1945, not to mention in the routine administration of African colonies. Just as the British peacetime army became largely an occupier of India during the nineteenth century, a major share of French forces between 1830 and 1945 served in Africa. Britain’s Indian Army occupied a separate constitutional status, however, while French law made a much weaker distinction among the regular army, the African forces, and the Marines (who became la Coloniale after 1900). Other important distinctions followed: Although the French generally maintained the distinction between metropolitan officers and indigenous enlisted men, segregated colonial from metropolitan troops in organization and function, and indulged in outright racism when it suited them, compared with the British they effected a tighter integration of their colonial armies into the centralised state, and tolerated or even encouraged a far greater assimilation of French to local cultures, as well as vice versa. France, Soldiers and Africa falls into four main parts: a general discussion of French military organisation in Africa, a step-by-step history ofthe deployment of French troops in Africa and of French African troops anywhere, a dense unit-by-unit organisational analysis of the two main colonial forces (the Arm&e d’Afrique and the Troupes de Marine/Armee Coloniale), and a ‘conclusion’ consisting chiefly of a quick review of French military involvement in Africa since decolonisation. The first is to read, the rest to
Book Reviews
I40
consult when necessary. Clayton wants especially to show the fit between the general pattern of French rule and French use of the military, to compare the two of them to British experience in Africa, to bring out the rationale of French colonial military policy, and to emphasise the importance of locally-recruited troops to the French military presence. These aims he accomplishes. Inadvertently, Clayton also helps identify parallels between British testing in Ireland of repressive methods later applied to English workers and French importation to the metropole of African repressive practices and personnel; the putting down of the Parisian insurrections of June 1848 and April 1871 clearly followed African patterns. He brings to the effort a concrete sense of military organisation and a vast fund of local lore. Clayton’s obvious sympathy with military officers does not keep him from recognising the seamy side of their activity: the toleration of rapine, the use of torture, the proclivity for brutal and ostentatious repression of dissidence. He argues, indeed, that addiction to glory in Africa and compensation for military ineffectuality in Europe encouraged the metropolitan French to look the other way when their fellow citizens under arms massacred, plundered, raped or took bribes in Africa. The use of African troops in the reconquest of African colonies and the liberation of metropolitan France, he also argues, increased the resistance of the French military and many of their civilian supporters to postwar decolonisation. Even today, the Foreign Legion remains a symbol of French military prowess, panache, and power. Clayton does not link changes in French policy toward its African armies-for example, the unwillingness of Third Republic legislators to send conscripts to Africa-very clearly to domestic and international politics. Nor does he trace the commercial ties of France to her colonies, the construction of Gallic cities and civil administrations in colonial areas, the establishment of European agriculture in North Africa, the financing and supplying of colonial armies and regimes, variations in military, commercial, and political fortunes among areas of different ethnic composition within Africa, or the generation of large flows of cheap labor from Africa to France. He sticks, in short, to military history, broadly conceived except for its near-exclusion of logistics and finance. A reader who is not already well informed of the context should complement his study of Clayton with perusal of Eric Hobsbawm’s magnificent Age of Empire and consultation of a standard French political history. Charles
Tilly
New School for Social Research
Paris, A Literary Companion, Ian Littlewood 246 pp., $16.95, cloth.
(New York: Franklin
Watts,
1988), viii +
Reading this book in Paris, where almost every street secretes its literary memory, I found myself wondering, as many other readers will, why I hadn’t assembled it myself. Ian Littlewood has stolen the march on the rest of us Parisophiles: he has gathered his Taride, his Hillairet, his scissors, his pastepot, and his nostalgic enthusiasm for the City of Light to produce a luminous scrapbook of literary memories. For six large sections of Paris (The islands, the Seine, and its bridges; central Paris; the Marais and the East; the Left Bank; Western Paris; Northern Paris), he recalls resident authors, descriptions from memoirs, letters, and travel books, literary events, and scenes from fiction or poetry taking place in their neighborhoods. He pastes in long quotations from relevant works, in uniformly
139
successful, and the quantity of speculation simply swamps the few ‘facts’.‘What then did it mean to feel oneself Arcadian?’ (p.14) must enter the list of spoof Ph.D. subjects with which certain kinds of ancient historian are often teased. One reader at least wanted constantly to interrogate the author to see whether or not the evidence cited really would support the edifice which is erected upon it. Is it really the case that ‘[the Palatine Anthology] is an important source of traditions current among huntsmen and herdsmen’ (p.67) or that, when in (?) the late second century A.D. the sophist Alciphron provides a rather salacious account of courtesans enjoying a rural picnic, ‘his archaizing style and purpose.. .make it safe to assume that he describes a ritual practice whose elements were already well established in the fourth century B.C.‘? On a more mundane level, Apollodorus of Athens is placed in the fourth rather than the second century B.C. (p.192)-how did this get past the translators?and so on. Such quibbles, each more or less unimportant in itself, arise often enough throughout the book to enjoin the unwary and the non-specialist to proceed with caution. Nevertheless, the journey is well worth it: this is an interesting book on a very good subject. This will not have been an easy book to translate, and Atlass and Redfield should have our thanks for making it available to those who do not read French; the translation is in places stilted, but new errors are few [though Menander’s Dyscohs (p. 164) is placed in the fifth century, rather than the fourth, where Borgeaud had correctly placed it]. The translators have made no attempt to update the bibliography; on possession see now W.R. Connor, CIussical Antiquity 7 (1988) 155-89. Richard
Hunter
Pembroke College, Cambridge
France, Soldiers and Africa, Anthony Clayton 1988), xxv +444 pp., cloth, no price indicated.
(London:
Brassey’s
Defence
Publishers,
Anthony Clayton is or has been a soldier, an Africanist, a military and colonial historian, and a francophile; he teaches at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. All these rays of his aureole he now aims at a book on the French military presence in Africa from early colonisation to the present. North and Black African troops figured importantly in the French establishment of an African empire, in the France-Prussian War, in the two world wars, and in the Indochinese struggles after 1945, not to mention in the routine administration of African colonies. Just as the British peacetime army became largely an occupier of India during the nineteenth century, a major share of French forces between 1830 and 1945 served in Africa. Britain’s Indian Army occupied a separate constitutional status, however, while French law made a much weaker distinction among the regular army, the African forces, and the Marines (who became la Coloniale after 1900). Other important distinctions followed: Although the French generally maintained the distinction between metropolitan officers and indigenous enlisted men, segregated colonial from metropolitan troops in organization and function, and indulged in outright racism when it suited them, compared with the British they effected a tighter integration of their colonial armies into the centralised state, and tolerated or even encouraged a far greater assimilation of French to local cultures, as well as vice versa. France, Soldiers and Africa falls into four main parts: a general discussion of French military organisation in Africa, a step-by-step history ofthe deployment of French troops in Africa and of French African troops anywhere, a dense unit-by-unit organisational analysis of the two main colonial forces (the Arm&e d’Afrique and the Troupes de Marine/Armee Coloniale), and a ‘conclusion’ consisting chiefly of a quick review of French military involvement in Africa since decolonisation. The first is to read, the rest to
Book Reviews
I40
consult when necessary. Clayton wants especially to show the fit between the general pattern of French rule and French use of the military, to compare the two of them to British experience in Africa, to bring out the rationale of French colonial military policy, and to emphasise the importance of locally-recruited troops to the French military presence. These aims he accomplishes. Inadvertently, Clayton also helps identify parallels between British testing in Ireland of repressive methods later applied to English workers and French importation to the metropole of African repressive practices and personnel; the putting down of the Parisian insurrections of June 1848 and April 1871 clearly followed African patterns. He brings to the effort a concrete sense of military organisation and a vast fund of local lore. Clayton’s obvious sympathy with military officers does not keep him from recognising the seamy side of their activity: the toleration of rapine, the use of torture, the proclivity for brutal and ostentatious repression of dissidence. He argues, indeed, that addiction to glory in Africa and compensation for military ineffectuality in Europe encouraged the metropolitan French to look the other way when their fellow citizens under arms massacred, plundered, raped or took bribes in Africa. The use of African troops in the reconquest of African colonies and the liberation of metropolitan France, he also argues, increased the resistance of the French military and many of their civilian supporters to postwar decolonisation. Even today, the Foreign Legion remains a symbol of French military prowess, panache, and power. Clayton does not link changes in French policy toward its African armies-for example, the unwillingness of Third Republic legislators to send conscripts to Africa-very clearly to domestic and international politics. Nor does he trace the commercial ties of France to her colonies, the construction of Gallic cities and civil administrations in colonial areas, the establishment of European agriculture in North Africa, the financing and supplying of colonial armies and regimes, variations in military, commercial, and political fortunes among areas of different ethnic composition within Africa, or the generation of large flows of cheap labor from Africa to France. He sticks, in short, to military history, broadly conceived except for its near-exclusion of logistics and finance. A reader who is not already well informed of the context should complement his study of Clayton with perusal of Eric Hobsbawm’s magnificent Age of Empire and consultation of a standard French political history. Charles
Tilly
New School for Social Research
Paris, A Literary Companion, Ian Littlewood 246 pp., $16.95, cloth.
(New York: Franklin
Watts,
1988), viii +
Reading this book in Paris, where almost every street secretes its literary memory, I found myself wondering, as many other readers will, why I hadn’t assembled it myself. Ian Littlewood has stolen the march on the rest of us Parisophiles: he has gathered his Taride, his Hillairet, his scissors, his pastepot, and his nostalgic enthusiasm for the City of Light to produce a luminous scrapbook of literary memories. For six large sections of Paris (The islands, the Seine, and its bridges; central Paris; the Marais and the East; the Left Bank; Western Paris; Northern Paris), he recalls resident authors, descriptions from memoirs, letters, and travel books, literary events, and scenes from fiction or poetry taking place in their neighborhoods. He pastes in long quotations from relevant works, in uniformly