Between metropole and colony: Bordels militaires de campagne in colonial Morocco and France in the twentieth century

Abstract

‘No-one screws more prostitutes than the government’.¹ So read the 1992 poster campaign from the English Collective of Prostitutes calling for the abolition of laws against prostitution. But the sentiment could equally have applied forty-five years earlier when another government screwed hundreds of prostitutes. In 1947, French military and colonial authorities illegally ‘trafficked’ 211 Moroccan women to France to work in military-operated brothels. The term ‘trafficking’ is, of course, a ‘useless category of historical analysis’, according to Julia Laite and Philippa Hetherington.² It provokes meanings that are gendered, racialized and moralized. Yet the moral outrage that ‘trafficking’ is often used to provoke—with associations of a lack of free will, forced migration and economic exploitation—is useful here to refer to a context of racialized, systematic mistreatment. Even though brothels had been banned in France the year before, these women were moved to France because of fears North African soldiers still in the metropole after the end of the Second World War would otherwise seek sex with white women. Often against their will, these Moroccan women were economically exploited by the French Army, forced to do enormous numbers of passes and confined to brothels. This article examines the experiences of these Moroccan women. By bringing out details about their daily lives and how the sex work system in Morocco operated, it seeks to understand the realities of working in a French military brothel and what these women’s lives indicate about racial and gender hierarchies within the French empire.

Scholarship on networks of sex work and migration between France and the empire has been small but significant. In the early 2000s, Christelle Taraud’s thorough treatment of sex work in North Africa first described migrations between metropole and colony to sell sex.³ The same year, Elisa Camiscioli examined immigration from the empire to France and interracial sexual contact in the early twentieth century. She followed this with a study of French sex workers in Argentina that nuanced questions of agency.⁴ Inspired by Camiscioli, Caroline Séquin studied networks of sex migration between the metropole and empire, including the immigration of French sex workers to French colonies, and explored how white sexual labour hardened colonial racial boundaries.⁵ As this scholarship on sex work and migration developed, studies of brothels organized by French military authorities throughout the empire also began to emerge.⁶ Much of our knowledge of these bordels militaires de campagne (hereafter BMCs) comes from Dalila Ennadre’s 2008 documentary, J’ai tant aimé, that bears witness to a Moroccan woman, Fadma, who worked in a BMC in Indochina, raising awareness of Moroccan women who worked in French colonial BMCs overseas. This motivated Mustapha Qadéry, coincidentally from the same village as Fadma and an acquaintance since the 1970s, to delve further into this history. He published a study of Moroccan women who worked in BMCs in Indochina and contextualised Fadma’s experience within a historical study of Moroccan rural prostitution.⁷ Key scholars of sexuality and colonial North Africa, such as Taraud and Todd Shepard, have acknowledged that BMCs in metropolitan France existed without exploring them fully.⁸ Equally, the scale and circumstances of this migration of North African women to French brothels remains understudied.⁹

Most of the existing scholarship on BMCs has explored what they ‘meant’ but not what happened in them, producing discourse analyses of the beliefs of French army officials in order to focus on what BMCs indicate about race relations in France and what they tell us about the masculinity of non-white men. Both sex and sex work are often reduced to metaphor to explain gender or race relations. And yet this approach to the victims of the archive can add another violence, another layer of disrespect. As Saidiya Hartman expresses, this ‘replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon [these women], by requiring that [their] life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history. We all know better’.¹⁰ There is a tension in seeking to understand the significance of these women’s experiences without requiring that their lives serve a further purpose in order to be historically worthwhile. This article argues that recognizing the everyday systemic cruelty of life within the BMCs is enough to make the examination of these lives historically valuable and worthy of scholarly attention. By providing context about how selling sex in Morocco worked and how BMCs in the metropole were supposed to function, I show how sex work would likely have been experienced by women trafficked to BMCs in France. I also explore where these women came from, their living conditions and how likely they were to have been exploited or underage. I have tried to avoid simply recounting colonial beliefs about race. Although awareness of historical racial discourses is important to understanding the construction of race, I am more concerned with the impacts of these racial discourses on the experiences of North African women during their forced migration to France. Addressing these details centres the women at the heart of this story, pluralizing and adding specificity to the hundreds of North African women trafficked to BMCs in metropolitan France who have not previously been explicitly examined in one study.

This article uses as its case study 211 Moroccan women trafficked to France to work in BMCs in 1947, after brothels were banned in the metropole. In 1947, military authorities established twenty-one brothels for Moroccan troops stationed in France in an attempt to prevent sexual relationships between Moroccan men and European women, even if strictly transactional. BMCs reveal the fear that French authorities held around interracial sexuality and how far they were willing to go to police the supposed fanatasies of Moroccan men. This was only possible due to an illegal system of indentured sexual labour that exploited Moroccan women to ‘protect’ French women and French imperial power in North Africa. Colonized women from Algeria and Tunisia were also trafficked to France under this system, but my focus here is on Morocco. The primary reason for this choice of case study is accessibility; the French government’s recent decision regarding ‘declassifying’ documents from colonial archives has made researching the French military’s actions considerably more difficult, particularly in Algeria.¹¹ Although this case study is limited to Moroccan women, the hope is that the eventual ‘declassification’ will permit a comparative study with Algerian women.

The archival material on which this case study rests is primarily held at the Archives diplomatiques in Nantes, chiefly a memo specifying the recruitment in Morocco of the women sent to different regions of France for sex work, alongside another document stipulating their living and working conditions. None of the previous scholarship has examined these two memos concerning Moroccan women working in metropolitan BMCs, which reveal the scale of this sexual labour and help reconstruct how it was experienced. These documents are contextualized with material from the Service historique de la défense which provides broader context on BMCs operated by the French military in the French empire in the first half of the twentieth century. I use these documents alongside a 1950 ethnographic study of Bousbir by Mathieu and Maury and early twentieth-century travel writing by French men. Much of this information originates in colonial archives where, as Marisa Fuentes puts it, ‘enslaved women appear as historical subjects through the form and content of archival documents in the manner in which they lived’.¹² Unfortunately, it is a challenge to fully access the truly subjective, personal experiences of the North African women in this story because of how deeply the colonial archive did not care about their personhood. Consequently, there are places where I have had to work with and against the colonial archive, where I am frustratedly forced to jump to other times and other parts of the French empire to infer what was likely, to extrapolate from small scraps of evidence. To emphasize the experience of North African women, I repeatedly return to the life-writing of Germaine Aziz and Mririda N’Ait Attik, who both sold sex in North Africa under the French occupation, and Dalila Ennadre’s documentary about Fadma’s travels from Morocco to Indochina to work in a French BMC.

The first section of the article provides an introduction to the establishment of military brothels in North Africa before explaining how these brothels and the women in them were brought to metropolitan France during the First and Second World Wars; a migration that continued even after the 1946 ban on brothels in France because of the high number of North African soldiers still in the metropole. The final section examines what life was like for the Moroccan women in these brothels to show the systemic exploitation of the BMCs. A final section addresses the relationship between the Moroccan women in the brothels and the Moroccan goumiers who paid for sex, and considers the possibilities for their lives when they returned to Morocco.

I

In Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prostitution was legal and heavily controlled by the French state to protect French citizens from venereal disease, but at the expense of the freedom of sex workers.¹³ This followed the regulationist system first introduced in France from 1800 that relied on three elements: a closed system away from women and children, supervision by authorities and hierarchization of the women and their places of work.¹⁴ Within brothels, sex workers were controlled and subjected to regular medical checks for venereal disease. Any women suffering from venereal disease were confined to prison-like clinics.¹⁵ Much of this system was theorized by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, famous for his posthumously published 1836 study of the Parisian sex industry. Following his previous studies of Paris’ sewers, Parent-Duchâtelet applied the same logic to the city’s sex workers: ‘the authority’s action should be the same for one as the other; its responsibility is to monitor them…to hide them, to relegate them to the most obscure corners and in a word to make them as inconspicuous as possible’.¹⁶ Women working outside the legalized system suffered frequent police arrests and could be forced into brothels. When exported to the French empire, the addition of colonial racial hierarchies to this disregard for women selling sex amplified these misplaced priorities. Historian Christelle Taraud describes the French regulationist system in North Africa as ‘carceral and coercive’.¹⁷ It was built around extracting sexual labour from Moroccan women and providing pleasure for European men.

When discussing sex work in French-occupied North Africa, finding the right language for women who sold sex is challenging. Although women were not the only gender to sell sex in Morocco, they were the only gender controlled by the French regulationist system, which was hugely coercive and systematically exploitative. Once women were formally registered as filles soumises, their freedom was severely restricted. French police authorities kept Maghrebi women within brothels. They forcibly returned any who escaped, could arbitrarily arrest women accused of selling sex and trap them within this system, and they ignored repeated demands by the women or their families to leave sex work. For these reasons, ‘sex worker’ does not feel a completely accurate term.¹⁸ Because the system was built so that once they entered, they could not leave, I have chosen to describe this way of selling sex as ‘indentured sexual labour’. This also reflects the economic exploitation of the brothel system, where women were forced to accept charges that trapped them in debt. Whilst some women may have entered sex work voluntarily, the French system meant that they were then trapped within it.¹⁹ White French men introduced this system to North Africa and then illegally brought it to France to control the sexuality of colonized people.

Famous for poor working conditions and strict hierarchies, BMCs were common in North Africa from the 1830 invasion of Algeria onwards. These itinerant military brothels in rural areas followed French soldiers supposedly ‘pacifying’ the region. In the chapter on ‘Southern Morocco’ from his 1932 travel guide L’Afrique galante, Roger Salardenne wrote that ‘the military authority created in North Africa what are officially known as B.M.C. (bordels militaires de campagne). These are moving whorehouses that follow troops’.²⁰BMCs were supposed to maintain the ‘morale’ of the French troops in Moroccan regions where they could not buy sex. The number of women working in a BMC was determined by the army’s état-major, who could move women to different camps around the countryside.²¹ The women working in the BMCs were mostly Moroccan and lived in tents distanced from the soldier’s accommodation (see Fig. 1). Constantly traversing the Moroccan countryside, living conditions were poor, the employees were often underage and there was little protection from venereal disease. Salardenne commented that the women ‘lead the hard life of a soldier on the move and their fate is hardly enviable’. He quoted a medic for the tirailleurs marocains who explained that most BMC employees were ‘so young, so kind…Almost all of them are contaminated [with venereal diseases]’.²² Salardenne explained that women were recruited for BMCs from quartiers réservés in Fez or Meknes, as well as from regions of Morocco that the army were trying to ‘pacify’, likely due to the economic instability arising from this ‘pacification’. Moroccan women were constantly monitored by a Moroccan female manager, a patronne, who would punish any women who developed romantic attachments to soldiers and wanted to stop selling sex because ‘discipline is the main strength of the army and of the BMC’.²³ This kind of violence and exploitation were typical of BMCs.

Figure 1

A postcard of a Moroccan BMC near Meknes, from the author's collection.

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Mistreatment was common; women in North African BMCs were overworked and lived in terrible conditions. Germaine Aziz, in her account of her time selling sex in Algeria, Tunisia and France in the 1940s and 1950s, recounts how being sent to work in a BMC was:

the biggest fear of all the girls here, whatever their age or race. These bushbirs,²⁴ set up in Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco, were in the desert. Guarded by the army, they served the soldiers, the troops from Africa and a few wandering Arabs. No girl ever came back, but some men, some old madams spoke about it. Anything was better than this prison.²⁵

Because the work was hard and the conditions appalling, the French army struggled to recruit Maghrebi women for BMCs, resorting to hiring girls they knew to be underage. Few Moroccan women could control where they worked once they had been taken into the French sex work system. The regulationist system ensured they were primarily under the control of pimps, brothel managers and French police authorities. The growing need for recruits, coupled with a lack of autonomy likely resulted in a high number of women and girls coerced into working in BMCs. Few women working in BMCs, where the work was harder than most brothels and the living conditions much worse, would have wanted to be there. This was not lost on French health authorities. In a January 1940 report, Médecin-Capitaine Lépinay admitted that ‘trials of [BMC in Morocco] have had regrettable consequences and ended up with the exploitation of destitute women’.²⁶

Racial hierarchies and boundaries were foundational to BMCs. Barkahoum Ferhati explains how ‘the hierarchy was respected, officers and soldiers were never supposed to be mixed with the “native” contingent’.²⁷ The BMCs generally opened at different times for French and colonized soldiers, or different ‘races’ would use different days.²⁸ Self-styled expert on love and sex in Morocco, André Rebreyend explained that Europeans would visit on Saturdays, for example, Senegalese troops on Sundays and Moroccans on Mondays.²⁹ Roger Salardenne recounted a brothel with two separate entrances, one for the French soldiers and one for the Moroccans or Algerians, with ten women for French soldiers and six for Arabs.³⁰ However, Salardenne remarked that ‘unfortunately’ the sexual segregation was not enforced when the women had too many clients. He quoted a French soldier in Constantine who described it as ‘humiliating for a white to imagine that he has been preceded in the arms of a woman, even a prostitute, by a sidi with questionable health and poor hygiene’.³¹ Buying sex is often considered a homosocial activity, but here it worked to enforce racial boundaries amongst groups of men in North Africa. French men sleeping with North African women was a commonplace occurrence in North Africa where women had historically been heavily eroticized through Orientalism and sexually exploited under the French occupation. Yet the different opening times for white and non-white men were to prevent French and Maghrebi men sleeping with the same woman; sharing the same pleasure with the same female body provoked fears of indirect interracial intimacy between French and North African men.³² Sex with North African men ‘stuck’ to a woman and the thought of this transferring to French men was, apparently, ‘humiliating’.³³ The widespread idea from French health officials that 75–90 per cent of Moroccan Muslims suffered from syphilis added to this idea of infection. French health officials considered the disease a racial characteristic and taught that Muslims were syphilitic because they were Muslim, that Islam produced syphilis.³⁴ Intimacy by proxy provoked a disgust that dictated the management of BMCs.

These racial boundaries were also present in metropolitan France where BMCs staffed with North African women were established during the First World War following the mobilization of North African soldiers. Barkahoum Ferhati cites a First World War army report which explains ‘it seems in fact vital to maintain France’s prestige in the eyes of the “natives” and in the world to avoid as much as possible that they have relations with French women, even prostitutes’.³⁵ The practice of transporting North African women to France to sell sex continued during the Second World War after French military officers expressed concern that sex between Moroccan soldiers and French women (including sex workers) could upset racial hierarchies.³⁶ A 1939 report on the ‘Moral Situation’ of Moroccan troops explained that army authorities wanted the ‘merchandise’ to be ‘native’, complaining that previous attempts had included separate locations but shared staff, meaning that ‘the desired objective: allowing the “native” to have relations with women of his race, has not at all been achieved’. The report identified two related problems. First, lack of access to Moroccan women had resulted in incidents of homosexual activity among Moroccan troops. Secondly, access to French sex workers would threaten White prestige in the empire as ‘returning to Morocco, where the access to European establishments is forbidden to him, [a Moroccan] would be able to boast about having relations with French women’.³⁷ French officials believed that ‘the downsides of the BMC are infinitely less serious than the risk of seeing the goumiers looking to satisfy their natural instincts among the local [French] prostitutes’.³⁸ This included relationships of ‘mutual consent’.³⁹

Military officials also encouraged the recruitment of Moroccan indentured sexual labourers to prevent sexual violence towards white women, partially due to the behaviour of Moroccan soldiers in Italy and Spain. The rape of Spanish women by Moroccan troops during the Spanish Civil War was strategic and well documented.⁴⁰ Moroccan goumiers also established a reputation for their brutal treatment of rural Italian families from 1943 to 1944 as part of the Allied war effort in Italy. The violence of the goumiers was widely decried, although Driss Maghraoui observes that ‘about 13,000 men were collectively tarnished by the acts of no more than fifty-nine goumiers. During the Italian campaign, fifteen Moroccans were executed and forty-four received prison sentences, convicted of attempted murder, rape, and theft’.⁴¹ This widespread fear of sexual violence from Moroccan troops resulted in recruiting Moroccan women to establish BMCs in Europe, particularly since the Moroccan goumiers would travel next to France. From December 1943 to April 1944, at least 141 Moroccan and Algerian women were sent from Algeria to Naples for sex work.⁴² This was immediately followed by a call in April 1944 to recruit 150 Algerian women and 300 Moroccan women, who were supposed to leave for France in teams of ten to fifteen.⁴³ One lieutenant-colonel reiterated these motivations when recruiting dozens more Moroccan women, explaining how a Moroccan man ‘coming from Berber tribes with loose morals’ could not be expected to refrain from sex, so ‘developing the BMCs is, in my opinion, the best way to mitigate rapes or attempted rapes that could take place in this country’.⁴⁴ Such views were based on French racist imperial assumptions that North African men were hypermasculine with enormous sexual appetites and would turn to sexual violence if they lacked sexual opportunities. Qui? Détective magazine recounted a fait-divers in 1947 about two Moroccan men who had raped a Moroccan girl, Aïcha. The police authorities asked what their motive was, adding ‘you have no excuse, since the red-light districts still exist in Morocco’ which suggests that being unable to buy sex would have excused the rape.⁴⁵ Moroccan indentured sexual labourers were thus exploited in BMCs to ‘protect’ European women.

Yet this trafficking continued after the end of the war when regulated prostitution officially came to an end in metropolitan France. Following the 13 April 1946 laws banning regulated brothels, French brothel owners were suddenly forced to close their businesses. Named after the councillor for the 4th arrondissement in Paris, former sex worker and First World War spy, the ‘Marthe Richard laws’ meant that a total of 1400 brothels were closed, 195 of which were in Paris.⁴⁶ The law targeted brothels and ‘pimping’, with at least six months imprisonment for anyone found taking money from prostituting another person (which could mean living in the same home as someone engaging in sex work without proof of a separate income) and two years if that someone was the mother, father, spouse or guardian of the sex worker, or if the sex worker was underage. Publicly soliciting was punishable with six months to five years in prison.⁴⁷ However, these laws were introduced when there were still thousands of North African soldiers in metropolitan France. North African soldiers were supposed to have been repatriated by 1 July 1946, but a lack of boats meant that there were still 30,000 men waiting to be transported in 1946.⁴⁸ Colonial soldiers awaiting demobilization lived in camps with limited food and poor conditions, prompting many to complain that life was better as German prisoners of war.⁴⁹ There were still more than 20,000 Moroccan troops in France as late as June 1947. The presence of such a large population of colonized troops awaiting demobilization who were unable to buy sex began to be considered threatening to the local French population. Consequently, army officials continued to recruit hundreds of Moroccan women for sex work in France.

They were able to recruit these women in Morocco because the Marthe Richard laws only applied to the French metropole and not to the empire.⁵⁰ Government-controlled brothels remained legal in parts of the empire, including North Africa, where colonial health ­authorities paternalistically felt the regulationist system was still necessary. The doctor responsible for establishing Bousbir, the red-light district in Casablanca that was the largest in North Africa, explained in the medical journal Maroc médical in 1950 why Moroccan prostitution still had to be regulated by the French government: ‘we need to wait for profound changes in morals and customs, in minds too inclined towards laziness and corruption. We need everyone in Morocco to have acquired a new basis of moral and social beliefs.’⁵¹ The inequalities between French and Moroccan laws meant there were hundreds of brothels in Morocco where women could be found to be sent overseas to work in France. The French army, with the consent of the Minister of War in France and the Direction des affaires politiques in Morocco, consciously chose to break the laws recently passed in metropolitan France by sending hundreds of Moroccan indentured sexual labourers to France because they believed ‘protecting’ French women from the supposed desires of colonial soldiers to be more important than upholding these laws.

II

Although maisons de tolérance had been outlawed in France, the Ministry of War decided in May 1947 to establish brothels ‘made up of a team of North African women…exclusively available for North African soldiers’.⁵² These indentured sexual labourers were assigned to a military unit in the metropole with Algerian, Tunisian or Moroccan troops. The sexual and racial segregation continued within these brothels, where North African women were assigned to a unit from the same North African country. The corresponding nationalities of these sexual encounters was considered a high priority (Moroccan women with Moroccan men, Tunisian women with Tunisian men, etc).

As Table 1 shows, in 1947, a total of thirty-two new BMCs were established for North African men. Some twenty-one BMCs employing 215 Moroccan women were created for Moroccan troops;⁵³ nine BMCs employing seventy-five Algerian women were set up for Algerian soldiers; and two BMCs containing ten Tunisian women were established for Tunisians.⁵⁴ From 9 June 1947, 211 Moroccan women were therefore recruited by the French army to be sent to metropolitan France. Recruited from four different Moroccan cities—Casablanca, Fez, Meknes and Marrakech—they were based in the BMCs established by the French government for Moroccan troops. The memos ordering this migration reveal the scale and extent of this trafficking.

These 211 Moroccan women were recruited to sell sex to the 20,760 Moroccan troops still in France following the Second World War. Table 1 is copied directly from a government memo of 9 June 1947 from Général Marcel Carpentier, commandant supérieur des troupes du Maroc. Carpentier was promoted to a grand officer of the Légion d’honneur in the same year that he approved these orders in support of trafficking. Copies of this memo were only sent to Meknes, Casablanca, Fez and Marrakech, as women were only to be recruited from these cities. The towns Agadir, Rabat and Oujda are all crossed out in pen in the original memo, indicating that it was not considered necessary to inform those regional authorities if no recruitment was needed there, an attempt to limit this knowledge to the towns from which women were recruited.

The sécrétariat politique’s response to this request was also based around discretion. When asked to recruit prostitutes, Colonel Hauteville made sure to ask the sécrétariat politique at the Residence générale if he had approval for this. The reply was that ‘it seems that there is no reason to raise any objections considering the small numbers concerned’.⁵⁵ Another report sent from France to Morocco in August 1947 provided guidelines for the daily lives of the Moroccan women being transported to the metropole, including how much their meals should cost, the clothes they should be provided with and how to send their post. The report commented on the necessity of the BMCs, noting that ‘the closure of brothels in France needs a temporary solution until the troops leave, through the recruitment of BMCs’.⁵⁶ French authorities were aware that ‘the reopening on the Metropolitan territory of BMC for the use of North African soldiers’ was considered an ‘infringement’ (entorse) of the Marthe Richard laws. For this reason they urged that recruitment be undertaken ‘d’urgence’ and that it ‘be carried out with the utmost discretion and not be discussed outside any military spaces responsible for recruiting staff’.⁵⁷

This attempt at discretion failed.⁵⁸ The brothels became an open secret, as did the exploitation within them. One account of metropolitan BMCs in the French press from 1948 stipulated that these brothels were authorized by the military, who had directly ignored civilian authorities to establish brothels ‘for the use of the North Africans of the Paris garrison’.⁵⁹ A journalist from the crime weekly Qui? Détective also described the BMC in Camp Gallieni at Fréjus and the fourteen women working there just weeks after the 1947 decision, taking pains to stress that it was ‘forbidden for Europeans’. Here the BMC was open from 5pm to 9pm for les hommes du troupe and from 9.30pm to midnight for sous-officiers. A photo shows three Moroccan women standing in the open air surrounded by piles of luggage, wearing thick winter coats and their hair covered by headscarves. The article includes a description of what BMCs looked like in France after brothels were outlawed. The barracks contained a small cabine prophylactique, with plenty of potassium permanganate for both parties to wash themselves after sex and perhaps a few condoms, a lounge with a bench and wooden counter, as well as a long corridor onto which the different rooms opened. The writer described women sleeping half-naked and a girl reading a novel in a corner. He then reminisced about his experience drinking tea with the women in BMCs in the Atlas Mountains. His description was full of Orientalist imagery. Yet although he relished the women’s exoticism, he was unhappy to see in this brothel in France the continuation of what he had witnessed in Morocco, particularly ‘young Berber girls, their chins tattooed… exchanging their miserable caresses for a packet of tea, a block of sugar or a bit of wood’.⁶⁰ The author appears uncomfortable that what seemed so exotic and exploitative in Morocco could also take place in Southern France. He admitted that this was, ‘for the government, an act of pimping (proxénétisme) or even human trafficking’.⁶¹

Much of the coercive, ‘trafficking’ element of this migration came from how the women were recruited. Of the Moroccan women sent to BMCs in France, 40 per cent were recruited from Casablanca (likely because of its reputation for sex work and high numbers of women selling sex), 30 per cent from Fez, 19 per cent from Marrakech and 13 per cent from Meknes. These women were primarily recruited from Moroccan brothels where they were unable to leave sex work once they had been registered as a prostitute. That 40 per cent of the women came from Casablanca, where Moroccan women and their families repeatedly submitted requests for their freedom that were denied by French authorities, shows how the coercion present in selling sex in Morocco was extended when these women were brought to metropolitan France. Furthermore, journalist Joachim Joeston suggested in 1955 that la police des moeurs in Rabat and other cities had ‘systematically picked up women for the purpose of sending them to military brothels’, a fact apparently confirmed by the police chief in Salé.⁶² This would have been easy to do, since any woman suspected of prostitution could be arrested by the police des moeurs, even on flimsy pretexts. After two arrests, she could be assigned to a quartier réservé or a BMC.

Many women in Moroccan brothels were also underage. It was a common practice to recruit underage girls, who were often mistreated. Cousin of Winston Churchill, Anita Leslie’s war memoir recounts her time as an ambulance driver in France during the Second World War. She remembered meeting a young Moroccan girl near Besançon, dressed in traditional Amazigh clothing with a decorated headdress and ‘with black, bewildered eyes, like those of frightened cattle on fair day…who had probably been sold, at the age of 12, to the military bordel of her tribe’ and whom she saw kicked and screamed at by French military health authorities.⁶³ Underage girls were undoubtedly recruited to BMCs in North Africa in this period. One sixteen-year-old girl was found working at a BMC in Turenne (Sabra), Algeria in 1957 and, three years later, a fifteen-year-old girl’s genitals were injured in the same BMC by a Senegalese soldier.⁶⁴ The girl resumed work after a few days in the infirmary.⁶⁵ In this same BMC and in the same year, five of the eight girls were under twenty, making them minors.⁶⁶ There were reportedly many Moroccan girls under eighteen in BMCs across Northern Algeria.⁶⁷ The Moroccan girls sent to France ten years earlier were recruited from the same system, rife with underage work.

The lack of consent among Moroccan women was compounded by economic exploitation which the French army used to force compliance with their regulations. Upon recruitment, each woman signed a contract with the female concessionaire, essentially the brothel manager, agreeing to a year of military sex work for the French army, with the understanding that this year could be renewed at their discretion.⁶⁸ The manager was firmly in charge of her brothel; BMCs could be distinguished by the woman who ran it, such as ‘Anita’s BMC’ or ‘Aïcha’s BMC’.⁶⁹ Travel costs from North Africa to France and then within the metropole were funded by the French Army, as well as the return journey if the woman met the requirements of her contract. However, if the woman wished to terminate this contract before the year was up, they would ‘have to repay the price of their outward journey and pay the price of their return voyage to North Africa themselves’.⁷⁰ This would have been extortionately expensive and served to hold Moroccan women to economic ransom: as indentured sexual labourers, they were forced to keep working.

Money was a tool to control the behaviour of women and to enforce a hierarchy. The memos clarifying the BMCs’ organization also stipulated punishments for the staff. These ‘penalties’ were decided by the commandant de la région or territoire, at the suggestion of the chef du corps they included ‘fines, being sent back to North Africa at the cost of the guilty party (either in part of in full), temporary closure of the brothel, being sent back to North Africa at the cost of the concessionaire’.⁷¹ If women missed the mandatory health inspections, had contact with the civilian population, tried to use a local shop themselves or acted in a way that the chef de corps disagreed with, they could be punished. Moroccan women in BMCs were under constant threat of losing potential earnings or having to pay for their journey home if they failed to meet the draconian arrangements to which they had agreed. A new financial regulation introduced by the French military further compounded this economic coercion. The original regulations were established on 19 May 1947 and slightly amended on 18 August 1948. From then, brothel managers had to pay an 8,000-franc deposit (around 100 passes) for each woman in the BMC.⁷² This was to cover potential hospital bills or pay for the women to return to North Africa if necessary. This amendment illustrates three elements of the BMC system. First, women were being sent back to Morocco as a punitive measure or were requiring medical assistance to such an extent that the French military needed to take measures to ensure that they would not have to pay these expenses. Secondly, Table 1 indicates that a BMC employed between eight and sixteen women, which means that the patronne would have had to pay a deposit of between 48,000 and 128,000 francs. This substantial sum of money would have been inaccessible to most women. Therefore, the patronne would probably have acquired it either by previously working as a brothel manager, by borrowing it from illegal sources (due to the secrecy of the project), or by requiring that the women working in the BMC pay a share, further trapping them in debt. Thirdly, putting the brothel manager under great financial pressure to ensure that the women working in her BMC met French regulations would clearly have intensified the existing hierarchy within the brothel. The patronne would have to pay if women were sent back to Morocco for disobeying the strict regulations or needed to go to hospital. The potential for mistreatment, coercion and denial of access to medical care is evident.

The women’s living conditions further increased their debt and thus decreased their freedom. French authorities charged Moroccan women in BMCs for living expenses. Provided with food rations, housing, heating and lighting, the women needed to repay the cost of food, fuel and electricity themselves. Healthcare and medical checks were provided free of charge by army physicians in an attempt to control the spread of venereal disease, but more than half of the cost for each passe also went to managing the brothel. The price for each passe in the BMC in Fréjus was 70 francs, with 30 for the brothel manager, 30 for the woman and 10 for the sous-maitresse.⁷³ These prices were controlled by the general commandant du territoire who set a minimum price for each passe to ensure Moroccan women generated enough money to cover their living expenses without the help of the French military.⁷⁴ Women were also confined to the brothel and isolated from the troops, including having to cook their own meals in their own kitchen, probably to minimize ‘unnecessary’ contact and discourage relationships developing beyond the strictly transactional. Their barracks were guarded, night and day, to prevent escape or unauthorized visitors.⁷⁵ Military memos repeatedly stipulated that the brothel be ‘inaccessible to the civilian population’ and that, if the BMC needed to travel, the team must be under the control of a high-ranking officer ‘who should forbid all contact between the women and civilians’. Evidently this was enough of a priority not to be entrusted to a lowly soldat de deuxième classe. Fear of interracial sexual contact with the local French population was so marked that these women were even forbidden from direct contact with local businesses and ‘generally all relations with civilian providers’.⁷⁶ This extended to strict regulations to only use army postal services and only make purchases in local shops through a high-ranking officer. In French-run BMCs, Moroccan indentured sexual labourers thus had little freedom and were economically exploited. They were also forced to take on a merciless quantity of work.

Moroccan women working in French military brothels were expected to see a very high number of clients. Generally speaking, one Moroccan woman was recruited for every 1000 Moroccan soldiers. The only anomaly was the Camp de Larzac near Montpellier, where five women were sent for 400 men, probably because the camp was about to rapidly expand. Just one indentured sexual labourer for 1000 men would have meant an inhumanely high workload. Even if each client only wanted to visit once a month, this would still mean an average of thirty-three clients a day. If clients wanted to visit once every two weeks, still likely an underestimate, this meant seventy-one clients a day. In Camp Gallieni, men could also come from other camps. After a long shift during the day, during the evening hours women could apparently see about twenty clients, although I suspect this number is an underestimate.⁷⁷ This workload was higher than in many Moroccan brothels. A 1949/1950 ethnography of the Bousbir quartier réservé in Casablanca, a small, walled city home to hundreds of indentured sexual labourers and located a few miles from the city, found that Moroccan clients took about ten minutes and paid for each ejaculation instead of a set period of time.⁷⁸ Of the women in Bousbir, 60 per cent saw only three to six visits a day, with eight to ten on a Sunday. The upper limit was holidays, which could mean up to forty clients in a day.⁷⁹ The higher workload in BMCs in France was also reflected in the regularity of medical examinations for venereal disease. French health authorities mandated that women formally registered as filles soumises in Morocco undergo regular gynaecological examinations to protect clients from venereal disease. This varied slightly throughout Morocco, depending on how accessible medical care was, but tended to be every week. Busier brothels would have visites sanitaires twice a week, and more rural brothels every two weeks. Yet the women in BMCs in France underwent medical examinations every two days, indicating that they were markedly busier.

We do not have any first-hand accounts from Moroccan or North African women who worked in BMCs in France. However, accounts of North African women selling sex in the same period can help give a sense of how women in a BMC in France experienced this quantity of work. Germaine Aziz described working in Algeria in one of the very worst types of brothel, a maison d’abattage, where it was common to have to do ‘a minimum of 50 passes a day’.⁸⁰ Aziz herself described having to see eighty to one hundred men a day for at least three years and the resulting fatigue and sense of hopelessness. This was certainly, to use Christelle Taraud’s phrase borrowed from Alain Corbain, ‘sexual Taylorism’.⁸¹ Aziz goes on to recount how:

on market days, the queue was never-ending. It stretched out outside the house: the sous-maîtresse let the men enter three by three, then closed the door again. Outside they waited patiently. As soon as they entered the threshold, they were in such a hurry that they didn’t even choose, they took the first available. They didn’t even look at our faces and followed us, penis in hand.⁸²

Sometimes, when she could not face it anymore and needed a moment’s respite, Aziz would barricade herself in her room. She’d push the bed and the cabinet against the wall and ‘crouch in a corner, like a hunted animal, trapped in that room without light or air, where the dull smell of sperm was so strong that it made me nauseous’.⁸³ The excessively high workload and lack of freedom was likely slightly worse than the experience of Moroccan women working in a BMC in France, but comparable. French authorities chose for BMCs to work like that, considering this preferable to sex between Moroccan men and white women.

III

BMCs were established in France to control the sexuality of Moroccan men, but how did Moroccan soldiers feel about this control, particularly since it came from trafficking Moroccan woman? In 2006, film-maker Dalila Ennadre interviewed Fadma, an elderly Amazigh woman living near Azilal who had travelled to Indochina to work in a French BMC for the First Tabor of the tirailleurs marocains in Indochina from 1953 to 1955.⁸⁴ Within Ennadre’s documentary, Fadma recounted her experience being recruited to work in a BMC after they were banned in France but not the French empire, her time working in one, and her return to Morocco. Her unnamed friend, whom she met whilst he was in the tirailleurs marocains, provided his own opinions on the BMCs France established for Moroccan soldiers overseas. He saw this within the framework of humiliating colonial domination by France:

they hired so-called women to motivate us, to help us forget our country so that we would fight for them. But we couldn’t bear them taking our women…They brought these women to humiliate us…We dedicated ourselves to raising their flag and liberating them from the Germans. As soon as that was done, they took us back to our country and continued to dominate us. The women came voluntarily, but they didn’t understand any of that!⁸⁵

There are four elements to draw out of his account. First, humiliation. This ex-soldier felt it was humiliating for French military authorities to expect Moroccan men to buy sex, which he said gave the Moroccan soldiers a collective feeling of shame (hachouma) at their women being recruited for sex work, and that the men all hated it. Secondly, he expressed a similar humiliation at the hands of the French nation, a country he fought for that refused Moroccan independence for so long. Anger at his poor military pension contributed to this. Thirdly, he expressed a degree of anger towards the ‘so-called women’, whom he felt did not understand the political dimensions of what they had agreed to do. He seems to have held them accountable for this collective male humiliation for agreeing to sell sex. Moroccan soldiers stationed in the metropole and buying sex from Moroccan women may have felt the same way. They would likely have felt even more anger towards France, as after liberating the colonial power, they waited for two years in poor living conditions to return to their families. Many may have feared a similar fate for their wives or sisters whilst they had gone to fight France’s wars and were not able to protect them. Part of this shared shame likely came from the fact that many Moroccan soldiers knew women who had had to turn to sex work, and yet many would continue to buy sex.

A similar feeling of shame and anger from Moroccan soldiers towards Moroccan women selling sex can be seen in other accounts. A poem from Mririda N’Ait Attik, who sold sex near Azilal and whose oral poetry in Tashlaheet was translated into French in 1927, suggested that goumiers held little respect for Moroccan sexual labourers. In The Bad Lover, Mririda addressed a goumier who paid her for sex but called her a bitch and tried to shame her for her job. She complained he was ‘arrogant, rude and as coarse as [his] djellaba’ and wondered, ‘don’t you feel my disgust and my hate?’ Angered, plotting her revenge and laughing, she looked forward to charging him three times the usual price as ‘the fine for your pride and your insults’. Mririda concluded that she’d treat him with disdain as she knew she was worth more than him: ‘And I’ll not even notice your touch/ Rivers don’t notice a drop of rain!’⁸⁶ Both these accounts pre-date the French BMCs in this case study but offer a glimpse into how Moroccan soldiers might have treated Moroccan women selling sex.

There is also evidence that Moroccan soldiers mistreated Moroccan women in BMCs. In 1946, Moroccan women in BMCs in Tindouf and Fort-Trinquet in Western Algeria complained of poor treatment by Moroccan soldiers. One woman died after accusing a Moroccan man of cursing her, prompting many other women to volunteer complaints of mistreatment by Moroccan soldiers, complaints that they had apparently been too scared to share previously because of fears of retribution. Because it was so rural, the girls were based in Tindouf but travelled to work in Fort-Trinquet, although none were willing to do so after this incident. The curse aside, complaints of mistreatment were so rife that the captain responsible for the 1st Goums in Tindouf ordered an inquiry into the BMC in Fort-Trinquet and threatened to close it if the women’s complaints were grounded or the mistreatment continued.⁸⁷ But his wording is revealing. He clarified that apparently ‘the filles soumises in Tindouf do not technically belong to a BMC and as a result have the right to decide not to be assaulted by soldiers or to refuse to go to a camp where they are mistreated’. He implied that if the filles were to be working in a real BMC, instead of what was likely an informal one, they would not be able to complain about this mistreatment or avoid visiting the camp. The only case of a BMC being closed is therefore where it was not technically a BMC, hence why it was able to close. The fifteen-year-old girl in Algeria in 1957 with genital injuries mentioned earlier corroborates this: a young girl feeling pressure to return to working in the BMC so soon after hospitalization and who had suffered a sexual encounter violent enough to damage internal organs.

Yet love could blossom between Moroccan men and women, although the patronnes were supposed to prevent it. The most common word employed by Fadma to describe her experience working in a BMC in Indochina is amour. Laughing, she explains how she would never expect a man she loved to pay for sex in the BMC and, instead, how the girls gave money earned from their passes to the man they loved:

as soon as I met someone good, he was in my heart. As for the others…well, I only went with them for money. But the one I had fallen for, I never asked him for money. The opposite, it was me who gave it to him! [laughs] In fact, you could say that I was taking from Ahmed to give to Mohammed! I wasn’t the only one who acted like that. It was pretty common. I saw the girls get their money out and give it to their boyfriend.⁸⁸

Fadma’s account reveals an emotional economy that may have run through some of these encounters between Moroccan men and women far from home. Many Moroccan men may have felt humiliated by French authorities and have resented being treated as though they were led by nothing more than their sexual urges. Others would have felt anger towards the women working in the BMC. Others may have formed an emotional attachment with them. Like Fadma and her friend, some may have continued these relationships after returning to North Africa.

In their correspondence, those organizing BMCs gave little thought to what would happen to women after their return to North Africa at the end of their contracts; only stipulating what would happen if they prematurely broke these arrangements. Some sources indicate it could be surprisingly easy to reintegrate into the community after leaving sex work. Fadma was able to return to the Middle Atlas, where she continued sex work. The Bousbir ethnography cites examples of women who returned to their rural communities and who were sought out by men fascinated by women ‘considered as educated, clean and subdued by their experience with men’.⁸⁹ Their welcome may have been shaped by the fact that they were supposed to return from sex work with ‘money, jewellery, land and cattle’, an outcome difficult to believe given the economic exploitation within colonial brothels. These scenarios assume that these women were even able to leave sex work after they had been mise en carte. The dozens of requests held in the colonial archives written by women kept in sex work in Bousbir and their families, petitioning for their release from the brothel system, suggest otherwise. Mririda’s poetry unfortunately tells the same story. She indicates that leaving the community to engage in sex work often engendered shame, isolation and regret. Addressed to a young shepherdess, Mririda warns her not to go to the town:

If you only knew what awaits you,

You’ll have to give yourself to men,

If you want to eat and sleep,

You’ll pass from one to the other,

There’ll be nothing else for you…

If you return to your land without shame

You’ll be hunted and cursed

If you only knew what awaits!

The regrets will kill you.⁹⁰

As Mririda tells the shepherdess, it is hard to know how many women knew what they were agreeing to when they began selling sex. Many of the women brought to France to work in military brothels were not there by choice. It is impossible to know whether they decided to go abroad because they were motivated by a desire to travel and make money, whether they were forced into it by their husband or brothel manager, or whether their choice was made by divorce, widowhood or crippling poverty. Certainly, any women who had planned to see the world would have been bitterly disappointed to find leaving the brothel was forbidden and any who had planned to make their fortune would be equally disappointed to give the patronne over half their earnings. We equally cannot know who agreed knowing what awaited them: having to see dozens of clients of day, living in small cold shacks, having little to eat, following all orders from the brothel manager and not being able to leave before a year had passed.

And yet, just because this system was exploitative does not mean that the women working within it always felt exploited. This is the ‘grey zone between coercion and choice’.⁹¹ It is not a binary of freedom or victimhood, a simplistic approach to the range of human experiences. Many would have found the system in which they laboured unjust and oppressive, but all navigated it as best they could. Looking back on her life and slowly shaking her head, Fadma recollects: ‘I’ve been independent my whole life. I’ve always been free…I’ve never let anyone “colonize” me.’⁹² We do not know the individual circumstances behind each woman’s motivation. Here it is impossible to calculate the amount of agency that each woman was able to wield, but much more important to recognize that the system French colonial authorities put in place s’en foutait.

IV

This case study of military brothels demonstrates France’s desire to control intimate practices and by extension colonized people. The hope of dominating the ‘intimate frontiers of empire’ was a way to dominate thoughts, identities and desires.⁹³ When the 1946 Marthe Richard laws removed the regulations that confined French sex workers to brothels, French sex workers were liberated from the excessive restrictions of the regulationist system because they lived in the metropole and were assumed to be white. These changes were not applied to the French empire; many indentured sexual labourers in the empire remained within this system because they were assumed to be non-white and selling sex to other colonized people. The sexuality of colonized people was thought to need more regulation, more control than that of white French citizens because of the racial hierarchies inherent in French imperialism.

Highlighting both the scale of this trafficking and the specific details necessary to understand what happened to these women, this case study has tried to recreate their experiences to understand the extent of French colonial exploitation in the name of protecting whiteness. It has used the specific to look at the systemic, drawing out the personal, intimate experiences behind neatly typed memos on crumbling carbon paper to chart their impact on the courses of hundreds of lives. Women in Morocco could be arrested on suspicion of sex work and sent to a brothel. Once registered as a prostitute, they lost any right to individual freedom. From here, they could easily be forced to travel overseas to work in military brothels on French soil. French military brothels were established not to prevent trafficking, but to encourage systematic exploitation by using colonized women to regulate racial boundaries. Cruelty was built into the minutiae of how they operated, from who was recruited to where they lived to what they ate. These documents reveal that French authorities decided this casual exploitation of colonized women should be their post-war policy, with the intent of preventing interracial sexuality and ‘protecting’ French women. The system was not broken, it was rotten. The case study shows the depth of this rot.

Footnotes