With more than one million viewers in its first month in theaters, a movie called \u201cTirailleurs,\u201d or \u201cRiflemen,\u201d has touched a nerve in France by bringing attention to a neglected aspect of the nation\u2019s history: the decisive role played in two World Wars by African soldiers, many forcibly conscripted in French colonies.<\/p>\n
Heated debate and public soul searching has surrounded the movie. Much of the action unfolds during World War I in the cold, muddy trenches of northern and eastern France, a climate and a culture utterly foreign to the disoriented African conscripts who take orders from white officers. (In the United States, the movie\u2019s title is \u201cFather and Soldier.\u201d)<\/p>\n
In scenes of mist, mire and mayhem, countless lives are lost for the gain of a few hundred yards or a single hill. The grotesqueness of the sacrifice seems compounded for the Africans dragooned into fighting somebody else\u2019s war. From 1914 to 1918, more than 30,000 of the \u201ctirailleurs,\u201d as they were known, were killed.<\/p>\n
Released last month, the movie, directed by Mathieu Vadepied, stars Omar Sy, a French actor propelled to international fame through his leading role in \u201cLupin,\u201d a Netflix thriller series.<\/p>\n
Sy plays a Senegalese village farmer who enrolls voluntarily in the French forces to watch over a son, played by Alassane Diong, who is snatched from his sunlit rural home by France\u2019s colonial army and made to fight in the war.<\/p>\n
Rising from French trenches, father and son charge into no-man\u2019s lands of shells and bullets \u2014 a form of attritional combat that Europe appeared to have banished before war returned to the continent a century later in the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
For more than a century, from 1857 to 1960, soldiers from Senegal, as well as from Algeria, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa, fought for France in colonial wars in Africa, in the trenches of World War I, in the World War II campaign to defeat the Nazis and in wars in Indochina and Algeria.<\/p>\n
That history was long repressed. Official disinterest, obfuscation, dismissiveness and stereotyping, tinged with apparent racism, accompanied the story of France\u2019s Black soldiers to the point that it was only on the day of the release of the movie that the French authorities acted to remove a last small humiliation inflicted on the tirailleurs.<\/p>\n
The government announced that 37 survivors, men mostly in their 90s who had fought in French wars in Indochina and Algeria, would no longer be obliged to spend six months a year in France \u2014 usually in rudimentary hostels \u2014 to receive their pensions. They could be with their families in Africa as much as they wished.<\/p>\n
Asked on French TV about the timing of this concession, Sy, who is of Senegalese-Mauritanian origin and grew up in France, deadpanned: \u201cYou know, coincidences do exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a Black man now living in the United States, Sy is a natural target for the extreme nationalist right in France. Last month, as the movie was released, he was widely vilified for having the temerity to suggest that Europeans were more sensitive to wars in Europe than in Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe showbiz starlet Omar Sy tries to lecture us when he has never been interested in the wars in Africa,\u201d Julien Odoul, a lawmaker from Marine Le Pen\u2019s National Rally party, said. \u201cWe wish he would either be a little more coherent or just simply shut up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The movie, as Sy made clear at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is one of particular importance to him. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the same memory, but we share the same history,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
By telling the story through a fictionalized filial relationship, and locating the initial part of the movie in Senegal, Vadepied, the director, contrives to personalize the war\u2019s horror for the African conscripts. Their flailing attempts to adjust to the unimaginable is palpable and poignant.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe film is very important because it has already contributed enormously to awareness of this history,\u201d said Julien Fargettas, a French Army veteran and historian.<\/p>\n
\u201cConsciously or unconsciously, we repressed this colonial past,\u201d he added. \u201cBut the fact is, if these African riflemen had not been there in World War II, France would not have been liberated. That cannot be denied.\u201d<\/p>\n
Soon after the liberation of France began in June 1944 with the Normandy landings, another landing took place in the south of the country that has earned little of the renown or recognition accorded the heroes of D-Day, even though it would prove critical to the Allied victory.<\/p>\n
On Aug. 15, 1944, and in the following days, some 370,000 Allied troops stormed ashore in Provence, near the town of Saint-Rapha\u00ebl, many of them Africans, most of them conscripted in French colonies \u2014 as had happened during World War I.<\/p>\n
These were the troops who, alongside American, British and Canadian forces, as well as French fighters from the Resistance, liberated southern cities such as Marseille and Toulon before moving northward. Yet their contribution has scarcely been celebrated.<\/p>\n
One of the leading campaigners to align history, which is based on facts, and memory, which is selective, has been A\u00efssata Seck, 39, granddaughter of one of the tirailleurs. An elected official in the hardscrabble Seine-Saint-Denis area north of Paris, she said that she had been moved by encounters with the neglected veterans, often living in appalling conditions, to embark on a decade-long campaign to restore their dignity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has been a form of racism and denial and ignorance that I could not accept,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cThe movie constitutes a decisive step in spreading awareness because more than a million people have already seen it. Teachers will be able to use it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seck prodded Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, then the president, to naturalize 28 of the African riflemen in 2017. A presidential statement at the time said that it was time for \u201crecognition of the courage\u201d of the tirailleurs who had fought for France.<\/p>\n
But recognition hardly flowed. It was Seck again in 2019, on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, who pushed for some equivalent recognition of the Provence landing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI called the \u00c9lys\u00e9e several times,\u201d she said, referring to the official residence of the French president. \u201cI discovered that nothing was planned. Nothing.\u201d She added that she had been forced to \u201cpublicly exhort\u201d President Emmanuel Macron to hold a commemoration.<\/p>\n
Seck was behind a collective letter from historians, journalists and others that was published in the newspaper Le Monde on July 5, 2019, saying that the Provence landing had long been \u201cwhitened.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was time, the letter\u2019s authors wrote, to face history and overcome forgetfulness. As the letter noted, of the 235,000 members of the French Army who participated in the Provence landing, some 90 percent were \u201ccolonial troops.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Macron duly made a major speech at Saint-Rapha\u00ebl on Aug. 15, 2019, noting that the landing on that date 75 years earlier had been \u201cthe second act of our liberation\u201d and that \u201cthe very great majority\u201d of the army that liberated France \u201ccame from Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n
He asked: \u201cWho among you remembers their names or their faces?\u201d<\/p>\n
A presidential initiative to name or rename French streets and squares after some of the African fighters has made only faltering progress.<\/p>\n
Those men were long nameless. Gaspard Mbaye, a Senegalese immigrant who arrived in France in 1988 and 20 years later founded an association dedicated to the memory of the tirailleurs, said that he had been appalled to discover that in the Trabuquet Cemetery in Menton, southern France, about half of the more than 1,100 graves of Africans killed in World War I bore no name. He has worked to rectify that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe movie has had some effect, which is good, but we are still far from full recognition of these men,\u201d Mr. Mbaye said in an interview. \u201cThese men have children and grandchildren who should be able to move freely between their countries and France.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Fargettas, the historian, said that among the worst forms of mistreatment of African soldiers came in 1944 in what he called \u201cthe whitening\u201d of the army as it moved north from the Provence landing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe tirailleurs were forced to give their uniform to young resistance fighters,\u201d he said. \u201cSome were even obliged to wear German uniforms.\u201d So was the myth consolidated that France\u2019s army of liberation was all white.<\/p>\n
In Dakar, the capital of Senegal, a massacre followed on Dec. 1, 1944, as Senegalese troops demanded of the French colonial authorities that they be paid in full, including a demobilization bonus.<\/p>\n
Alleging a \u201cmutiny,\u201d French forces opened fire at Thiaroye, a town in the suburbs of Dakar. \u201cThere may well have been 300 dead, but France only officially acknowledges about 35,\u201d Mr. Fargettas said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTirailleurs\u201d may never achieve full redress for the lack of acknowledgment of the crucial African contribution to France\u2019s wars in Europe, but it has already made a significant difference.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter this battle, you will no longer be Indigenous, you will be French!\u201d one officer promises his African riflemen in the movie as they prepare to rise out of the trenches. \u201cIndigenous forces\u201d was a term used by the French Army for its African conscripts. But that pledge, like so many made to the Black men who fought for France, proved empty.<\/p>\n
For Sy, as he wrote in The New York Times last year, stories in movies can create \u201ca collective movement that can shift lines.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hard lines of French history may be shifting. De Gaulle liberated France. So did the African dead in Menton and Thiaroye. The French Army was not white. It was whitened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The success of \u201cTirailleurs,\u201d set in the mire and mayhem of World War I, has helped resurface the often neglected story of colonial soldiers forced to take up somebody else\u2019s fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":26405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,12],"tags":[7,30,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-26408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-entertainment","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-entertainment"},"yoast_head":"\n