« On n’est pas un bon légionnaire quand on n’a pas le cafard » : enjeux médicaux, culturels et politiques d’un sentiment géographique (1880-1930)

Abstract

At the intersection of medical, political and cultural geography, this paper investigates colonial blues (cafard colonial), a kind of homesickness, which appeared among the French Foreign Legion and African colonial army during the 1880s. At first, the cafard colonial was considered specific to these troops and claimed as one of their identifying characteristics. Then, in the 1910s, physicians defined this form of nostalgia as a colonial pathology. During Word War I, the cafard affected as well French soldiers in the trenches and in the 1920s eventually became nothing but a kind of blues that may be experienced by anyone in French Society. In French colonies, cafard crises often resulted in explosive violence, easy to excuse because of its medicalization. The cafard is indeed consubstantial with colonization and its contradictions, which make finding a rightful place impossible for the colonizers. This paper calls for a critical analysis of geographical affects.

Keywords

• affect
• colonization
• exoticism
• medicalization
• nostalgia