Interesting article, Tango.
Some of this I actually knew from putting together a French colonial army. She didn't mention that white French colonial units, like the zouaves had the vote and got slightly better treatment during the colonial era than the Foreign Legion, who were also white, but did not get to vote until they were discharged and became French citizens (and, yes, I wonder why people who serve in our military don't get citizenship after they are discharged, like the Romans or the Foreign Legion).
A couple interesting comparisons from the American Civil War come to mind. At Petersburg, in 1864, Union troops dug a tunnel under Confederate lines and packed it with explosives. A black unit was going to lead the attack that would take off after the explosion and was pulled out of the line and given special training. Until somebody in the last day or two before the attack decided this would look too much like the blacks were being used as cannon fodder, so a white unit, with no special training, was substituted. There doesn't seem to be anything like that happening with the French. (And, yes, I realize that the switch of troops was ill advised and resulted in a total disaster, but at least somebody thought enough about the issue and cared.)
Second, the Confederates made it clear that black soldiers would be re-enslaved or even shot if captured. The North considered threatening to shoot a (white) Confederate prisoner for every black Union prisoner who was killed, but they knew that wouldn't fly politically. So, many black regiments were assigned to behind the front lines work, guarding supply lines, for example. This minimized the issue of black prisoners, but the black regiments were not getting combat experience, so if they were attacked, they typically did not do well, resulting in ACW rules that rate all black regiments at the lowest rung in quality (watch the movie Glory (54th Massachusetts, or read about the 1st Kansas Colored at Volunteers at Honey Springs, or the black regiments from Steedman's command at Nashville and you'll see this isn't fair and accurate). This doesn't seem to have happened in the case of the French African troops, though the Germans pretty clearly hated them.
One other thing I would like to have seen addressed is a comparison of the French and Italian casualties in southern France in 1940. OK, maybe that's just me and would have drawn her off on a tangent, but hey! a guy can still hope.
Grelber
