August 15, 1944, operation Dragon. Two months after Normandy, a second Allied army landed in Provence. In less than a month, Marseille and Toulon were liberated, before advancing north and joining the troops of the operation. SuzerainUnlike the first amphibious assault on the Atlantic coast, in the Mediterranean, French troops, under the command of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, played a central role and constituted the largest contingent.
A contribution that France was able to make to the allied army thanks to the soldiers from its colonies and protectorates, whose presence represented between 50% and 80% of the 250,000 men of Army B by Lattre de Tassigny. However, these troops have become invisible in history and in the official accounts of the time, particularly in the case of those from sub-Saharan Africa.
“These men were called François, Boudjema, Harry, Pierre, Niakara. Many of them, spahis, goumiers, African or West Indian riflemen, porpoises [infantes de marina] from the Pacific, had never set foot on French soil before being sent to participate in the liberation of France,” declared Emmanuel Macron during his speech at the official commemoration of the landing in Provence in Boulouris-sur-Mer on August 15. spahis These were light cavalry regiments recruited from the Arab and Berber population of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco; goumiersMoroccan soldiers from the auxiliary units of the French Army of Africa.
“France does not forget the sacrifices of the Congolese, the Beninese, the people of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and many others,” the president added. “Officers of the Empire or children of the Sahara, from Casamance or Madagascar. They were not of the same generation, nor of the same faith, and yet they constituted the army of the nation, its most fervent and most diverse army.
Today, it is estimated that around 130,000 people came from Algeria and Morocco, in addition to another 12,000 soldiers who were part of the so-called colonial army and who came from different countries under French domination. Known as tirailleurs sénégalais (in French Senegalese riflemen), in reality they came from all over Africa and from territories in America and Asia.
“In fact, the term colonial soldiers is quite generic, because it can also refer to soldiers from metropolitan France who served in the colonial troops. Those from the Maghreb, on the other hand, served in the African army (Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians were very numerous)”, Anthony Guyon, historian and author of Senegalese Riflemen. From Native to Soldier, 1857 to the Present Day (Ed. Perrin, 2022). “If we focus on these colonial troops, the largest contingents come from French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Indochina and Madagascar.”
After the French defeat of 1940 and the capitulation of the Vichy regime, the Free French Government was organized from London, but also from Brazzaville (current capital of the Republic of Congo). The governors of Chad, Central Africa, Gabon, Congo and Cameroon joined General de Gaulle and these territories supplied a large part of the ranks of the Free French Army. According to the archives, all the soldiers were volunteers, although historians are now trying to clarify the real conditions of their recruitment.
“In his appeal of June 18, 1940, General De Gaulle affirmed that France could count on its empire and it did so. The governor of Chad, Félix Eboué, joined de Gaulle in July 1940,” notes Guyon. “For example, at Bir Hakeim, one of the great battles of Free France in 1942, 3,700 men fought on the French side, including two-thirds from the Empire. Soldiers from the colonies helped the Free French Forces and the Army of Africa to resist and, in August 1944, constituted the majority of the troops landed in Provence.”
A long invisibility
“There would have been no Allied victory without the contribution of other peoples, without foreigners and other African riflemen,” summed up Cameroonian President Paul Biya in his speech during the commemoration of the Provence landings. Despite his contribution to the operation DragonIn the fall, the replacement of sub-Saharan riflemen in the ranks of the Allied armies began to take shape. Members of the 9th Colonial Infantry Division and the 1st Free French Division were sent to the rear in the Midi region. In an official document of September 7, cited by historian Claire Miot, the French general staff explicitly mentions the “rapid transformation” of the “colonial troops” into “totally white units.”
French historians tend to consider that the “whitening” of the army was largely driven by American allies, in a context of segregationist policies within the army and society of their country of origin. And they emphasize that it was a decision that was more “racial than colonial,” as scholars Jean-François Muracciole and Christine Levisse-Touzé argue. For example, when General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division entered Paris, the sub-Saharan and Malagasy soldiers disappeared, while the 1,300 Maghrebis were able to participate.
In his work The liberation of Paris, from August 19 to 26, 1944, Muracciole writes that the Americans were not willing to accept that black soldiers would march as liberators alongside the rest of the troops in the streets of the capital. And he cites a memo from General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, in which he considered it “very desirable that the division be composed of white personnel.”
The position of De Gaulle and his staff regarding this discrimination is more controversial. For the French military, the question of image was also central, but their main concern was not racial but rather the common representation of the Free French Army and the French Interior Forces (the resistance), to symbolize the unity of the country. Finally, De Gaulle obtained the green light from Eisenhower for Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division to enter the capital first, on August 25, 1944, when in reality it did so through the Spanish exiles of the 9th Company, the famous Nine.
Historical and political memory
As a first step to end years of neglect of the role of these colonial soldiers in the Allied victory, Emmanuel Macron asked municipal authorities in 2019 to name streets and squares after them, to “inscribe their indelible mark on our history.” A commission proposed about a hundred profiles. But according to a count by Agence France-Presse published on August 13, only “nine out of a hundred fighters now have their names on streets, and at least four of them already had them before 2019.”
Since the beginning of his first term, Macron has placed issues of historical memory as an important element of his cultural policy. “Looking at history head on, to build a republican memory that can be shared by everyone in France,” the head of state defends. Also in the field of diplomacy; has ordered missions to deepen and clarify the facts related to the Algerian war and the role of the French government in the Rwandan genocide.
However, the decline of French influence in Africa complicates this strategy, as evidenced by the representation of the continent’s states in commemorations of the operation. Dragon. Five African heads of state were present in Boulouris-sur-Mer: Paul Biya of Cameroon, Azali Assoumani of the Union of the Comoros, Faure Gnassingbé of Togo, Faustin-Archange Touadéra of the Central African Republic and General Brice Oligui Nguema, president of the Gabonese transition. However, in August 2014, 12 African presidents had responded to François Hollande’s invitation to the 70th anniversary commemorations.
On this occasion, the Moroccan Prime Minister, Aziz Akhannouch, was also present. After two years of diplomatic tensions, Paris and Rabat have reestablished their relations since the French government announced in July its support for the Moroccan plan for Western Sahara. A decision that also weighed on the absence of the Algerian authorities, opposed to this project and who did not respond to the invitation. Nor did the authorities of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, three countries where coups d’état have placed in power leaders hostile to the French presence.
