cruits by having troops surround villages and arrest the young men. Another method was to arrest the parents of young men who had fled and only release them once their sons had given themselves up to the recruiting officers.
French colonial officials had first been in favour of recruitment, but, in view of African resistance, they soon changed their minds. In August 1914, William Merlaud-Ponty (1866-1915), Governor-General of French West Africa, wrote to Paris that “there would be extreme enthusiasm if people were informed that the natives were to be given the honour to fight in France”. His successor François Clozel (1860-1918), however, stated only a year later that “The brutal and badly prepared effort demanded by Ponty, aggravated by the officers’ incompetence, has completely disgusted everyone.” In September 1917, Governor-General Joost van Vollenhoven (1877-1918) obtained a temporary cessation of recruitment in French West Africa. Vollenhoven stressed that France should rather prioritise the economic exploitation of West Africa: “This country has been ruined just to recruit another few thousands of men!” Furthermore, Vollenhoven highlighted African resistance against recruitment:
French recruitment practices in West Africa did indeed face countless forms of opposition, ranging from bribery, malingering, self-mutilation, hiding outside the villages or fleeing to Liberia, Gambia, Portuguese Guinea and the Gold Coast, to suicide and even armed rebellions against the colonial administration. Rumours likened the French recruitment missions to the pre-colonial slave trade. From Senegal alone, an estimated 35,000 men fled from French recruiters. War veteran Kande Kamara (c. 1895-?), a Susu aristocrat from Guinea, in a 1976 interview recalled:
In winter 1917/18, when the French government decided to resume recruiting in West Africa, Vollenhoven desperately wrote: “The natives don’t want to supply any more men and we won’t get more by convincing them. If we really need new tirailleurs, we will have to recruit them forcibly, running the risk of a general revolt.” After Vollenhoven’s embittered resignation, the French government appointed Blaise Diagne (1872-1934) “Commissaire de la République dans l'Ouest Africain” with the powers of a Governor-General, to organise the new recruitment campaign. Diagne had been the first Black African to be elected as a deputy in the French parliament in 1914. Like some African American leaders, he considered and propagated war service as a means to obtain rights such as the franchise. By September 1918, he had recruited 63,000 soldiers: many more than expected. The end of the war spared these soldiers from having to fight at the front. However, as from 1919 many of them were stationed as occupation soldiers in the Rhineland, where many became sick or died.
French officials in North Africa were less hostile towards conscription than were their colleagues in West Africa. Charles Lutaud (1855-1921), Governor-General of Algeria, even explicitly announced an expansion of conscription of Algerian Arabs in 1916. In the following year, however, he opposed governmental plans for a premature enlistment of those who would come of age in 1918, arguing that, “even though we managed to suppress last November’s uprising, the tribes’ submission is far from absolute”. Thereupon, the government renounced these plans. The government’s ambition to recruit another 50,000 Algerian Arabs in 1918 by expanding conscription to the south of Algeria, where no working colonial administration was yet in existence, was criticised by colonial officials as unrealistic. When Paris persisted, colonial administrators put the new policy into practice. However, they managed to recruit far fewer soldiers than Paris had hoped.
An important type of passive resistance was desertion. Of those young men who had not managed to avoid conscription, many deserted at the earliest opportunity. For African soldiers who had been shipped to Europe, desertion was hardly an option any longer, given the difficulties of hiding among the civilian p