Shades of Whiteness: Petits-Blancs and the Politics of Military Allocations Distribution in World War I Colonial Cochinchina

Christina Firpo, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo

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Copyright © 2011 Society for French Historical Studies. The definitive version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00161071-1157349.

Abstract

During World War I male French citizens in Cochinchina whom the colonial government had drafted to fight in Europe left their families behind in the colony. Through a complicated subsidies process, the government offered financial assistance to families impoverished by the draftee’s departure and the concomitant loss of income. Far from being a monolithic category, the colony’s poor white applicants, also known as petits-blancs, received varying government subsidies, depending on their family configurations. This article argues that the military allocations council’s judgments correlate with the petits-blancs applicants’ relationships to indigenous people and their adherence to traditional gender roles. To guard white prestige, the colonial government effectively penalized petits-blancs applicants who deviated from behavior associated with whiteness.