‘Mort pour la France’ : Coercion and Co-option of ‘Indochinese’ Worker-Soldiers in World War One

Faced with early setbacks in World War I battles on the Western Front, alongside a massive attrition of manpower, France began to look to its empire as sources of labour alongside soldiers. Eventually Indochina would supply some 30 per cent of France’s colonial forces alongside even larger contingents of Senegalese, Madagascans, and Moroccans and even, from outside the empire, Chinese. While the lion’s share of the ‘Indochinese’ were Vietnamese, Cambodians also made up one battalion. While the transformative and emotional experiences of the soldier (linh tho) – workers in France has been the subject of at least one dedicated study in English (Hill 2006; 2011a; 2011b), I am equally concerned with the objective experience of the Indochinese en route to the battlefields, their wartime actions, and intellectual responses.