« War and Sex: French Military Brothels, Sexual Violence and Decolonization in Vietnam and Algeria, 1940s–1960s »

My first book project examines how the French army’s regulation of soldiers’ sexuality became a central instrument of colonial warfare. At the heart of this system was a state-orchestrated and legally liminal program of French military brothels known as Bordel Militaire de Campagne (BMC) staffed by Moroccan, Algerian, and Vietnamese women—many coerced or underage. I argue that these institutions were not marginal or improvised responses to the conditions of war, but an integral part of French military governance, designed to serve multi-layered political, social, and military imperatives. In practice, the BMCs were sites of exploitation and violence, while the pervasive reality of war rape by French troops became a highly charged site of political struggle, as nationalist movements, the Viet Minh in Vietnam and the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria instrumentalized accusations of French military sexual violence to challenge French authority and imperial legitimacy.

By placing military brothels, rape, and women’s responses at the center of this analysis, the book shows how sexuality and sexual violence shaped the intertwined processes of warfare, political struggle, and imperial dissolution. To analyze decolonization through this lens is not merely to add a new theme to an established history, but to rethink how the process itself has been understood.

Drawing on French, Arabic, and Vietnamese sources from archives in France, Morocco, and Vietnam, along with two dozen interviews, my book project offers the first comprehensive study of the BMC system and sexual violence during decolonization. It further breaks with conventional accounts that examine the Indochina and Algerian Wars in isolation and instead brings them into a single analytical frame, tracing the circulation of military personnel, institutions, and policies between North Africa and Southeast Asia while bringing to light the experiences of women largely absent from official and nationalist narratives of these wars today.