page_title: Black Horror on the Rhine
section_title: Political dilemma of citizenship for French colonial soldiers
hierarchical_section_title: Black Horror on the Rhine / French use of colonial troops / Political dilemma of citizenship for French colonial soldiers
caption_attribution_description: drapeau du 7e RTA en 1917.
context_page_description: The Black Horror on the Rhine refers to a moral panic which was aroused in Germany and elsewhere concerning allegations of widespread war crimes, especially sexual war crimes, said to be committed by Senegalese and other African soldiers serving in the French Army during the French occupation of the Rhineland between 1918-1930. Die schwarze Schande or Die schwarze Schmach were terms used by right-wing press as German nationalist propaganda in opposition to these events. The colonial troops referred to were soldiers from Senegal, Vietnam, and Madagascar. The majority of colonial African soldiers were accused of committing rape and mutilation against the German population. The campaign reached its peak between 1920 and 1923, but did not stop until 1930. Adolf Hitler blamed Jews for bringing the Senegalese into the Rhineland.
  Along with phrases like "the black scourge" and "black horror", these terms were used by campaigners in different countries beyond Germany, such as the United Kingdom, United States and Canada.
  The term "black horror on the Rhine", coined by E. D. Morel, was mostly used in the English-speaking world. Children of mixed parentage were known as Rhineland Bastards.
context_section_description: One of the products of the French revolution was a concept of the nation linked to citizenship and military service. The levée en masse or forced mass military conscription was introduced in 1793 during the French Revolutionary Wars. This gave rise to the demand that by serving in the French Army, colonial subjects should gain full French citizenship. However, whilst military service provided a very clear expression of political allegiance to the state, French society had developed the idea of the statut personnel by which particularly French Muslims would have a distinct status, being governed by Koranic law administered by local religious authorities. As the norms of Islam permitted polygamy, this created what were considered insurmountable problems by those who defended an assimilationist viewpoint. Many of the assimilationists saw the culture and civilisation of France as something far superior to what they regarded as the barbaric customs of their non-European subjects. Another political current, the associationists advocated something along the lines of indirect rule  as practised by the British Empire. They saw the colonised subjects as having to find their own path to civilisation and relied on local elites to manage the colonial system on the ground. Both, however, viewed the subject peoples as being in debt to their conquerors, who by dominating them offered the allegedly profound benefits of French culture. Thus, despite the egalitarian ideology of the French Third Republic – which would theoretically exclude any color line – the development of French colonies created a quite different reality.
caption: Soldiers of the 7th Algerian Tirailleurs Regiment in 1917
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