"March or Die! - The Legion in Madagascar" Topic

"The Madagascar Expedition of 1895 was the most disastrous colonial campaign of the Third Republic. Orchestrated by a number of interests, which included a clutch of deputies from the island of La Réunion intent upon annexation and Catholics who had never pardoned the Hova monarchy its 1868 conversion to Protestantism, the expedition got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning. This need not have been the case, for two months before October 1894, when the French took advantage of a rebellion against Hova rule over the island to present the Malagasy prime minister with a proposal to establish a French protectorate, an interministerial commission had been hard at work planning a military expedition in anticipation of a Hova refusal. So, when in November 1894 it was made official that Madagascar would be forced to accept a French protectorate at the point of a bayonet, military preparations were already well advanced.

Alas, this did not guarantee their efficiency. The source of the problems, the critics believed, stemmed from the decision to confide the expedition to the army rather than to the marines, which won the Madagascar contract simply because they had underbid the navy for the honor of attacking the "Red Isle" by thirty million francs.1 Although army units had been present during the conquest of Tonkin, and the Legion continued to serve there, army officers had had little experience in colonial campaigning since Mexico. The French foreign minister at the time of the decision to invade Madagascar, Gabriel Honotaux, later excused the mistakes of the war ministry, whose "organization is not made for that, which does not have the necessary contacts with the colonial world so that from one day to the next it can recruit from all over the globe the means which it needs." Due to lack of experience, the army desperately underestimated the requirements of the Madagascar expedition, which helped to explain their low bid.

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to argue that the experience of other colonial campaigns was totally ignored by the committee that met in August 1894 to draw up a plan of campaign. Nor was their plan necessarily a bad one. In one month, representatives of the ministries of war, the navy, the colonies and the foreign office manufactured an invasion blueprint that, they believed, would require twelve thousand men to overcome a semi-organized Hova army of forty thousand. The objective of the operation was Antananarivo (Tananarive), the capital of the Hova people who dominated the northern half of the island, situated in Madagascar's mountainous interior. Majunga on Madagascar's west coast was chosen as the port of entry. Not only did it offer a large harbor, but also it stood at the mouth of the Betsiboka River, which, when combined with its tributary the Ikopa, provided a navigable route about 160 miles deep into the Hova heartland. Estimates put the number of porters and mule drivers required to support them for the remaining distance to Tananarive at eighteen thousand to twenty thousand. However, it was reckoned that this number could be reduced to five thousand by using the voiture Lefèbre—two-wheeled metal wagons invented in 1886, which came in kits and weighed about five hundred pounds when assembled. A final, and ultimately extremely controversial, decision taken by the committee was to depend essentially upon white troops, many of them from metropolitan units, to furnish two-thirds of the combatants, thereby reversing the proportions of white and native troops used in Dahomey. Worse, many of these white troops would come out of metropolitan units, which were neither experienced nor acclimatized to campaign conditions outside of Europe…"

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