ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates discourses on public hygiene in the French and German colonial armies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. It argues that the colonies acted as a testing ground for policies in public health. The military strength of the European troops was no longer defined exclusively by the size of the army corps sent out, but also by their ability to adjust to the varied geographic, climatic and sanitary environments of their deployment. Since the time of Napoleon's mass armies, a close correlation between the military and the demographic discourses had emerged. In the political constellation of the French state, the colonies took on a quite different role than they had, for example, in the German Reich. From the perspective of military men and politicians, the systematic incorporation of the colonial population into the army was meant to guarantee troop strength on a permanent basis.
