Sex & Empire: Colonial Brothels by Marie Robin

Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence.

Today’s special episode is by Marie Robin. Robin is a 6th year doctoral candidate in French colonial history at Columbia University. She holds a BA in History and Middle-Eastern Studies from the American University of Paris (2017) and an MA in History from Durham University (2018).

Robin’s dissertation investigates how the French military regulated soldiers’ sexuality during its colonial wars in Vietnam (1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62), revealing the legal, racial, and gendered logics underpinning this system. This regulation operated through the covert institutionalization of state-sponsored mobile military brothels (Bordels Militaires de Campagne, or BMC), which relied on the sexual labor of thousands of North African and Vietnamese women, many of whom were coerced, trafficked, or underage. In this episode she explores why the French military created these institutions, how they operated and their impact on French soldiers and colonial subjects.  

Marie: Picture this. It’s 1947, in the bustling French colonial city of Hanoi, Vietnam. A group of Moroccan soldiers of the French army, fighting against the Viet Minh in the First Indochina War, stand in line outside a small, nondescript building. They’re tired, restless, waiting their turn. Inside, the army has arranged everything: the beds, the rules, even the women. This isn’t an accident. It’s a military brothel. And it was part of the machinery of empire.

A year before beginning my dissertation, I had come across the acronym BMC—bordels militaires de campagne—a few times in my readings. Historians mentioned it occasionally, usually tucked away in a footnote, but no one seemed to pause and ask: what were these institutions, and what did they really mean during the recolonization wars? Who were these women that no one talked about? That absence stayed with me. I knew this was the story I wanted to tell—the story missing from the dominant narratives of France’s wars of empire, from nationalist histories, and from public memory alike. The archives, though, weren’t easy. Where do you even begin to trace a story that was meant to stay hidden? And yet, buried among reports about rations, wages, and military discipline, I started finding strange files—documents describing brothels, movements, medical inspections, and the lives of women who were almost invisible in the grand narratives of war and empire.

In this episode, I want to share that covert history: how French military brothels grew into a state-sponsored global sex enterprise during France’s two most important decolonization wars—first in Vietnam, from 1946 to 1954, and then, just months later, in Algeria, from 1954 to 1962. I’ll explore how they worked, why they mattered, and what they reveal about the messy end of empire.

It began during the First World War, when venereal disease spread rapidly among French, British, and American troops. Each army tried to manage the problem in its own way. The French solution was to create official military brothels—BMCs—designed to channel soldiers’ sexual energy into what the army called ‘safe outlets,’ where women were subjected to medical inspections. These BMCs continued into the Second World War, but everything seemed to change in 1946. That year, the Marthe Richard Law banned brothels and dismantled the old nineteenth-century system of regulation in France itself. On paper, the era of state-managed prostitution was over. And yet, in practice, it wasn’t. In the shadows, the Ministry of War quietly reopened BMCs in the metropole. Overseas, events were moving fast. In Vietnam, what began as skirmishes in the fall of 1946 was escalating into a massive colonial war. France was sending hundreds of thousands of troops—including a third of them colonial soldiers from Senegal, Algeria, and Morocco. And with them, the BMCs flourished exponentially.

The logic was simple—at least on paper. Soldiers, far from home, were seen as a danger to themselves and to the civilian population. Brothels, the army claimed, would keep men disciplined, prevent sexual assaults, keep homosexuality at bay and limit the rate of venereal disease. Morale was also advertised as an important reason for establishing military brothels. BMCs were sold not just as a health measure or a security precaution, but as a way to keep soldiers happy, satisfied, and ready to fight. To modern ears, it sounds strange: an institution built around sex, justified in the same way you’d justify a vaccination program. But to colonial armies, it was practical governance. The result was that brothels weren’t just tolerated. They were planned, funded, and supervised by the military itself. A soldier’s body was seen as a fighting machine—and the brothel was one of the army’s tools to keep that machine in working order.

Finally, there was also another fear: espionage. Sex with unregulated prostitutes or with local women could, in the eyes of the army, open the door to enemy intelligence. During the First Indochina war, this fear went even further. Ho Chi Minh had created a so-called ‘love brigade,’ women trained to seduce soldiers, gather information, and lure them into betrayal. Commanders grew anxious that their own colonial troops—Moroccan, Algerian, Senegalese—might be swayed by a woman’s attention, desert, and join the Viet Minh. This, indeed, happened on multiple occasions. The solution they devised was chilling. They shipped Moroccan and Algerian women to Vietnam to staff the brothels reserved for those soldiers. The logic was blunt: better to control desire within the walls of a BMC than risk a fleeting encounter with an unregulated Vietnamese prostitute who might be imagined as a spy.

From Hanoi to Saigon, from Algiers to the Sahara Desert, BMCs multiplied all over the Indochinese and Algerian territories. Unlike during the First World War, recruitment was no longer left to chance—the army oversaw it directly, sometimes recruiting the women themselves, sometimes delegating the task to intermediaries such as colonial officials or the Madams who managed the brothels. Thousands of young women from Vietnam and North Africa—including some who were minors—were funneled into these institutions. They came from poor families, with limited options for survival in a time of war. Some had already been working in the sex trade. Others had not, but were lured in by promises of steady income that rarely matched the reality. And some were simply forced into the system, with no real choice at all. For the women, the brothels could mean coercion, survival, or even a narrow form of opportunity against poverty—but always under the strict control of the military.

What was life like inside the BMC? They were not places of comfort or safety. First, the place itself. Most were little more than dilapidated wooden barracks or tents hastily pitched near military camps. Some operated under a canvas shelter, with thatched huts separated only by strips of fabric. Officers themselves described the installations as ‘extremely rudimentary.’ The quarters were squalid. Women stepped across cracked, broken pavement just to reach rooms that were stifling, airless, with dirt clung to the walls. Their beds—if they could be called that—were nothing more than straw pallets, soaked with sweat and stains. Sanitation was appalling. Inspectors reported slicks of sewage and sometimes water was scarce. At the largest BMC, which housed nearly 500 Vietnamese women, there were no toilets—only rusted tin cans to relieve themselves.

And always, there was surveillance. Women were not permitted to linger outside the brothel building, let alone leave it. Guards kept the buildings under watch day and night, to block unauthorized visitors and to prevent escape. But surveillance went beyond walls and fences. It was also inscribed on women’s bodies. Since the nineteenth century, prostitutes had been cast as the source of venereal disease and the BMC carried forward that legacy. To “protect soldiers”, women were subjected to mandatory, gynecological medical inspections by military physicians. ‘In the barracks we were monitored by doctors so as not to catch and sexually transmit diseases,’ recalls one woman about her time in a BMC in Algeria. The frequency was relentless—sometimes twice a week, sometimes every day. Soldiers were also subjected to some form of hygienic control. Before and after each sexual encounter, they were required to pass through what was called the prophylactic cabin. There, soldiers were required to wash their genitals with antiseptic solutions under the supervision of military medical staff.

BMCs were sites of sexual exploitation, of exhaustion, and of violence. In the archives, we find frequent reports of assaults and abuses. Above all, the sexual cadence was infernal: ten, twenty, thirty, sometimes even fifty soldiers a day. Women had no control over pace, or over who stood in line outside their door. The sexual encounter—or ‘trick’—was strictly timed, with a capped price set by the military. Everything was regulated: the length of the visit, the amount paid, even the day a soldier was allowed in—determined by his rank or the unit he belonged to.

What did it mean to sell sex in a mobile brothel amid a war? Simon Murray, a British national who served in the French Foreign Legion during the Algerian War, recalled how the Legion’s exclusive brothel would accompany the regiment ‘on operations into the interior.’ Indeed, many mobile field brothels—just as their name suggests—were itinerant. They moved with the troops, following the rhythm of military campaigns. A BMC could be dismantled, packed up, and reassembled wherever the army advanced: in forests, across mountains, even in active combat zones. For the women, this meant constant uprooting. One day stationed near a garrison town, the next in a makeshift hut beside a bivouac, or under canvas in the middle of contested territory. This came with danger and sometimes death. At Dien Bien Phu, France’s final battle in Vietnam, Myriam, an Algerian woman in one of the bMC, remembered it as a descent into chaos: ‘It felt as though we were losing our minds, she says. A constant influx of men, day and night—paratroopers, legionnaires, Moroccans, Vietnamese, Algerians. They always wanted sex. And then the shelling began. It was like thunder.’ Four of the girls in Myriam’s unit died in the bombing.

Their presence reveals how empire transformed women’s bodies into resources—no different from food, fuel, or weapons. Like tents, weapons, or supply depots, the brothels themselves became part of the army’s logistics—portable institutions of sexual labor, shifted across landscapes of war. Echoing capitalism’s exploitation of racialized labor, the military sustained itself by rendering these women anonymous and replaceable. Upon arrival in a BMC, each woman was given an identification number—a system that facilitated bureaucratic control, especially over health inspections. It is telling of the army’s commodifying logic that in some official communication women were referred to as cheptel—French for the word livestock.

And yet, just because the system was exploitative does not mean the women remained passive or silent. Some found ways to subvert it—quietly or more directly. Sometimes they fled from brothels. They refused to be relocated to combat zones. They demanded maternity leave. They fought back against soldiers who tried to abuse them. Agency took many forms. Sometimes it was defiance, sometimes negotiation, sometimes small acts of self-preservation. But each of these moments reminds us that even within an institution built to control them, women were never only victims. They endured, they resisted, and they made choices that shaped their own survival.

In the end, military brothels were never just about sex. They were about control. Control over soldiers’ bodies. Control over women’s bodies. They show us how colonial power operated not only in parliaments or on battlefields, but in the most intimate corners of daily life. And they also force us to ask difficult questions about memory. Why were these institutions forgotten, or buried in footnotes? Why did official histories and nationalist narratives alike turn away from them? What became of the women when the brothels closed? What legacy did they carry—of stigma, of silence, of survival? In that silence, we hear the discomfort of empire’s afterlives: the things too shameful, too intimate, too unsettling to remember. And France was not alone. Other armies built their own systems—Japan’s so-called ‘comfort women,’ the U.S. military’s prostitution regimes in Asia, and others. Across the world, militaries turned women’s bodies into instruments of war.

To tell the story of the BMC is to confront the darkest undercurrents of decolonization—the parts that cannot be folded neatly into national pride or patriotic memory. It is to acknowledge the violence written into the intimate spaces of war. And to remember these women is to refuse the silence that empire tried to leave behind. Thank you for listening.