Diagne won French citizenship for Senegalese originaires by trading military recruitment for legal status.

Evidence

Diagne’s first success was to convince Parliament to pass a law on October I9, I9IS, which allowed the originaires of the Four Communes to serve in the French army rather than the separate colonial troops into which the rest of France’s subjects were being drafted. A year later, Diagne sponsored a second law, whose purpose was ostensibly to extend the provisions of the I9IS decree to the originaires’ descendants living outside the Four Communes. This second law included an important clause absent from the first: “The natives of the communes de plein exercise of Senegal and their descendants are and remain French citizens subject to the military obligations contained in the law of October I9, I9IS.” Parliament also passed this law, unaware of the important legal implications and political repercussions that “are and remain French citizens” would have in West Africa. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 535

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the causal logic the reader is tracking: republican universalism conceded citizenship to reward recruitment service, a dynamic central to understanding forced republicanism in West Africa.