Reading the body in combat

Is race a pertinent category for understanding the way in which French officers read the body in combat prior to 1914? In order to answer this question, this article sets out to discuss this attribute as a means of reading bodies in combat, which led officers to produce these archives during the Moroccan campaign of 1912 to 1913. The study, which is both quantitative and qualitative, focuses on two distinct groups of documents and allows us to perceive a more complex form of classification of fighting bodies in the writings of officers. In these documents, the attributes of class and race in the uniformed services are mentioned but they do not feature to the same degree, or for the same reasons, depending on the narrative context and the view points of the archives.