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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2018
This article explores the social impact of North African soldiers’ experiences in French military hospitals during World War I. In particular, it examines improvised “Muslim hospitals” that were opened in order to isolate North Africans from French civilian society. Colonial and military officials believed that North Africans, presumed to be warlike, pathogenic, and promiscuous, could corrupt and be corrupted by the French public. Yet while existing literature tends to highlight the dehumanization of North Africans at the hands of military and medical authorities, this article, drawing from personal correspondence, photographs, and military and medical records, reveals a more ambiguous daily reality. I argue that the individual needs and desires of wounded North Africans and of French nurses, as well as material limitations and contingencies, created spaces for an unprecedented series of humanizing personal encounters. In military-medical “colonies within the metropole,” these soldiers found themselves caught between a newfound sense of affinity with the French public and a starker sense of the boundaries of colonial practice.
Author's note: I thank Beth Baron, Samira Haj, Clifford Rosenberg, and Febe Armanios for their constant encouragement and for their invaluable feedback on this project. I am grateful for grants from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies and the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d'Amérique that made this research possible. I am thankful to Elizabeth Thompson and my colleagues in the 2014 National Endowment for the Humanities seminar “World War I in the Middle East and North Africa” for their continued support and camaraderie. Special thanks are due to Julia Clancy-Smith, Amy Kallander, M'hamed Oualdi, Megan Brown, and Katrina Wheeler for their helpful suggestions for this article. I thank this journal's editors and anonymous reviewers for their extensive and constructive feedback.
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