ABSTRACT
The era of the First World War seems to represent to the Antilles and French Guiana—the ‘old colonies’ tied to France since the beginning of the seventeenth century—a real watershed in sanitary policy. In order to better comprehend the chain of events that resulted locally in the enactment of public health policy, this chapter attempts to explore the sanitary repercussions of the first experiences of conscription in 1913, before examining what followed during the first global conflict. The chapter is based principally on unpublished military archives, keeping in mind that colonial medicine remained, until the first half the twentieth century, largely a military responsibility, only yielding slowly and progressively over time to civilian control. It demonstrates how medical examination of Creole conscripts provided scientific justifications for social exclusion, whereby morbidity was ascribed not to the social conditions of the Antilles, but to the innate inferiority of coloured troops bound for the European conflict.
