French colonial subjects were exploited as mass-produced cannon fodder for national defense

Evidence

The result of this daring enterprise was a particularly brutal exploitation of overseas possessions for the sake of the nation. All theories to the contrary, the French Empire actually was evaluated from the point of view of national defense, and the colonies were considered lands of soldiers which could produce a force noire to protect the inhabitants of France against their national enemies. Poincaré’s famous phrase in 1923, “France is not a country of forty millions; she is a country of one hundred millions,” pointed simply to the discovery of an “economical form of gunfodder, turned out by mass-production methods.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 354

Categorization

• XREF: Colonized peoples as expendable military labor resonates with necropolitics and with later discussions of Muslim soldiers in European armies; also parallels the ‘sacrifice’ theme of how states commodity human bodies.
• SEED: The ‘force noire’ as mass-produced gunfodder — a concrete case study for an essay on how colonial subjects were converted into expendable military infrastructure for the metropole.