Why French officials placed a Muslim war memorial in the intellectual heart of Paris in the 20th century

The Paris Grand Mosque, marking its centenary, was built between 1922 and 1926 as a war memorial for the hundreds of thousands of Muslim colonial soldiers who fought and died for France in World War I — Muslims made up roughly 70% of the 100,000 colonial soldiers killed. To avoid violating France's 1905 law barring public funds for religious entities, officials routed 500,000 francs through the privately organized Society of Habous rather than funding the mosque directly.

Placed in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne rather than near the military shrine of Les Invalides, the site let French officials frame the mosque as both a tribute to Muslim sacrifice and evidence of France's civilizing influence on Islam, per contemporary writings. Officials repeatedly called it a war memorial, even as its message stayed far less visible than the thousands of secular monuments built for France's own war dead, or the colonial monuments in Algeria that listed European and indigenous soldiers separately.

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