France reinstated forced conscription despite prewar abolition assurances

Evidence

Compulsory enlistment by voie d’appel, which had been halted before the outbreak of war, was reinstituted in I9I5 to ensure that the General Command’s stated goals would not only be met but repeatedly surpassed. Senegal and the sedentary populations of Upper Senegal-Niger provided proportionately more men early on, whereas the southern colonies of Ivory Coast, Dahomey, and Guinea were tapped heavily in the second and third recruiting drives in the fall of I9I5. The nomadic populations in Mauritania and Niger were considered insufficiently pacified for recruitment and were spared altogether. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 505

Categorization

• XREF: The distinction between recruited sedentary populations and ‘insufficiently pacified’ nomads echoes patterns in many colonial regimes of governing through control over settled agriculture vs. mobile peoples.