“To recall a part of history with a different memory doesn’t mean we are denying the history we know or have been told completes the story.Īt the Cannes film festival last year, Vadepied said the film aimed to rectify “France’s failure to recognise the tirailleurs and tell their story”. “We have the same history but not the same memory” the actor told Allocine. Sy has insisted the film does not challenge French history but focuses on an often overlooked aspect. The last Senegalese tirailleur from the first world war, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, died in 1998 aged 104. When French military chiefs realised the war would last longer than they had initially thought, a major recruitment drive was launched in west Africa 42 of the 93 Senegalese battalions subsequently formed fought in France. In the early years, it included former slaves and prisoners of war.īy 1914, there were 21 battalions of Tirailleurs Sénégalais (BTS), all serving in west Africa and Morocco, five of which were sent to the western front serving with distinction at Ypres during the Battle of Flanders. The first Senegalese corps was established in 1857 under the orders of Napoleon III. The first tirailleurs – a military term coined under Napoleon Bonaparte to describe light infantry skirmishers – incorporated into France’s armed forces were from its north African colonies – Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The historian Anthony Guyon agreed, telling journalists the row was stoked by “people who known nothing about the tirailleurs”. People want to create a smokescreen around the promotion of this film … it isn’t what I said that’s being attacked, it’s me.” I was talking about a film that is about France, it’s about war and what I said was quite clear. The problem isn’t what I said it’s what I am. Sy dismissed the polemic, telling French television: “I said what I said … take whatever meaning from it you want. Some people took exception to his comments, pointing out that 108,000 French soldiers had served in several operations in Africa since former president François Hollande set up Operation Serval in 2013 at the request of the Mali authorities to combat the threat of terrorism in the region. When it’s far away, you say to yourself, well over there, they’re savages, we don’t do things like that,” he said. We have the impression that it was only when Ukraine happened that we realised this … but guys, I’ve seen this since I was a kid. It reminds us that man is capable of invading, of attacking civilians, children. “A war is the sinking of humanity even when it is at the other end of the world. His interview with Le Parisien to promote it, however, sparked a national row after he seemed to suggest that people were more concerned about conflicts in Europe than those in Africa. He has been working with the director Mathieu Vadepied to make the film for the best part of the last decade. Sy, whose father is from Senegal and his mother Mauritania, grew up in the low-income banlieue town of Trappes. Sy, who stars in and coproduced Tirailleurs, plays a character in his 40s who joins the French army to find and protect his 17-year-old son, who has been conscripted and sent to the trenches of Verdun.
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