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Race, Sex and Power on the Normandy “Frontier”: France, 1944
| In the summer of 1944, immediately following the liberation of occupied Normandy, American and French military and political authorities developed “correct and cordial” relations as they strove to restore the power of the French state. Yet there was one area of Franco-American relations that alarmed French civilian and police officials: the treatment of French women by black American soldiers. Evidence from US and local French archives shows that in the eyes of French and American authorities, sexual victimization of white French women by black US soldiers had become a serious crisis that could place into question the benevolent purposes of the liberation itself. American military justice was fast and severe in responding to the crisis: cases of sexual assault in France drew extreme punishment, and more capital cases were assessed for rape than for any other crime in France. Yet such punishments did not fall evenly on white and black soldiers: while white soldiers found it easy to get a reduced sentence, black soldiers received harsh penalties, and in fact more capital sentences (the death penalty) were imposed on black soldiers for the crime of rape than for any other crime. This paper argues that in a period of dramatic social and political change, in a “frontier” environment in which political structures and social order had to be recreated out of the turmoil of war, French and American authorities found common cause in addressing the threat of sexual violence from black soldiers.
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