2026 Theses Doctoral

War and Sex: French Military Brothels, Sexual Violence and Decolonization in Vietnam and Algeria (c. 1945-1962)

Robin, Marie Elisabeth

This dissertation examines France’s wars of decolonization in Indochina (1945–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962) through sexuality as both a regulated practice and a site of violence. I argue that the governance of sexuality structured colonial warfare, while sexual violence shaped the political and diplomatic struggles through which decolonization unfolded. Drawing on French state, colonial, military, and judicial archives, as well as nationalist party dossiers and propaganda, private papers, abolitionist materials, visual and literary sources, and oral history interviews, the dissertation probes the ways in which sexual violence assumed multiple forms, became a political issue and was contested across both wars. Bringing these conflicts into a single analytical frame shifts our understanding from isolated episodes of imperial collapse to interconnected theaters linked by the circulation of personnel and governance practices, alongside parallel nationalist strategies of mobilization.

The dissertation proceeds through three complementary lines of inquiry. First, it analyzes the institutionalization of military prostitution. Between 1945 and 1962, as colonial and metropolitan troops poured into both theaters, regulating soldiers’ sexuality and sexual conduct became a political imperative, which the French state managed through a transcolonial and expansive network of state-sponsored military brothels known as Bordels Militaires de Campagne (BMCs). Relying on the sexual labor of North African and Vietnamese women, including minors, these institutions were far from ad hoc arrangements. I argue that the BMC system was a deliberate strategy of troop management developed at the highest levels of French governance, where the brothel was framed as an essential instrument of discipline, morale, and counterinsurgency. I further show that the system was sustained by a regime of legal exceptionalism and supported by colonial administrations and local collaborators, conditions that rendered many of the coercive practices within it administratively ordinary and largely insulated from legal sanction.

Second, I explore the paradoxical status of rape as simultaneously a highly visible political scandal and a site of judicial impunity. Despite the BMCs’ purported role in “curbing” battlefield rape, rape by French troops was pervasive across both wars. Far from being a hidden byproduct of war, rape by French troops became a highly charged site of political struggle; the principal nationalist movements—the Viet Minh in Vietnam and the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria—strategically weaponized reports of rape to bolster anticolonial claims and undermine French legitimacy. Precisely because such allegations carried political and diplomatic force, French military authorities, seeking to shield the army from scandal while operating under the exigencies of war, developed judicial responses that frequently neutralized and dismissed victims’ complaints.

Third, moving beyond institutional dynamics, the dissertation restores North African and Vietnamese women to the history of the end of the French Empire. From women’s tactical maneuvers, acts of open defiance, and everyday negotiations within the BMCs to the legal claims advanced by those victims of rape who sought justice, they emerge not as peripheral figures or silent victims, but as actors who navigated and defied the intersecting structures of military, colonial, and patriarchal power. Through them, the end of empire appears not only in cabinets and battlefields, but also in the intimate worlds where war was lived.

Keywords: French colonial history, Military brothels, Sexual violence, The Algerian War, The First Indochina War