The election of Blaise Diagne in February 1914 provided a champion for the demand of citizenship rights for colonial soldiers. Diagne represented the Four Communes, the four oldest colonial towns in French West Africa which had won the right to send deputies to the Chamber of Deputies following the 1848 revolution. Within the ideology of the republic, having Africans and Asians fighting in the French Army was proof of the universalism of French civilization which was open to all. The French were the first army in the world wars to have a fully racially integrated armed force, with Vietnamese, Algerian and African soldiers fighting alongside white French ones. Though in practice, there was a color line in France, within the context of the times France was a nation that was relatively open to non-white people with for example the African-American singer Josephine Baker finding a degree of acceptance in France that she never found in her own country. The French called anyone from French West Africa "Senegalese" regardless if they actually came from Senegal or not; many of the "Senegalese" were not from Senegal.