Battles for Hearts and Minds: The Nogent Mosque during World War I

In April 1916, at the height of World War I, the French Government opened a small wooden mosque at the site of a former colonial exhibition and agronomy school known as the Jardin Colonial. Located in Nogent-sur-Marne just outside of Paris, the Jardin Colonial was transformed into a temporary wartime hospital from 1914 to 1919 serving largely colonial North African soldiers. The mosque remained on the site until 1922 when construction began on the Great Mosque of Paris. The Nogent mosque served as a French response in wartime propaganda battles with Germany, specifically in reaction to a German mosque constructed at a prisoner-of-war camp near Berlin.

The Nogent mosque functioned primarily as a spectacle of Orientalism for the French public and a sign of French paternalism towards its colonial soldiers. It was decorated with carpets on loan from the Louvre, a lantern from Morocco’s governor general, and a mihrab from the Sultan of Morocco. In a series of photographs later turned into postcards, a member of the once-revolutionary Mokhrani family of Algeria poses with wounded soldiers. Archival documentation indicates that the postcards figure within the French Army’s propaganda campaigns not only to soldiers but also to colonial administrators and subjects in French North Africa. The Nogent mosque thus figures within longer histories of Orientalist architecture, colonial exhibitions, and wartime propaganda. As a sign of Islam that circulated among multiple publics, the Nogent mosque is situated with the evolving dialectics of colonialism and republicanism: primitivist objectification, modernist utilitarianism, and contested citizenship.