Metropolitan Zouaves
A minor military mystery
For six decades, the French Army based all of its Zouave battalions in North Africa. As these units drew their recruits from the non-native populations of Algeria - men of European or Sephardic descent - this policy facilitated recruitment. It also ensured that, should the French government decide to dispatch an expeditionary force to a place too well supplied with sunshine, it would be able to send troops that were already accustomed to the heat.
In 1901, the War Ministry of the French Republic stationed four freshly formed Zouave battalions in major metropolitan areas in the European part of France. (Two of these occupied barracks in Paris and two made their home in Lyon.)
Rather than forming a new regiment, the four new battalions received designations that linked each of them to one of the four existing Zouave regiments. Thus, while located some 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from both the headquarters of their parent regiments and their sister battalions, these Europe-based battalions became known as the fifth battalions of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Zouave Regiments.
I have yet to locate any explanation for this curious practice. I therefore offer the question to the readers of The Tactical Notebook. Why do you think the French authorities placed the fifth battalions of four Zouave regiments in the two biggest cities in metropolitan France?
Please feel free to use the comments section to offer your thoughts. (Please note that any comments worthy of Groundskeeper Willie will result in a visit from Ian McCollum, who will make the culprit police up the brass on his firing range.)
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Pure guess, the presence of these colorful troops may have been a morale measure, and a way to solicit recruitment. Around the same time the Austria Hungarian government had a unit of Bosnians in Vienna. And these tall men in their exotic uniforms and distinctive band music were a favorite of the Viennese public. Another possibility is that the French government was concerned about civil unrest, and worried that troops from metropolitan France might be more sympathetic to whoever was causing the uproar than to their own officers and government than troops from a remote location might be. I met a guy once who got out of Tiananmen Square a few days before the government cracked down. He had friends who were there and survived. They said the troops that came in did not even speak Chinese, they were from some ethnic province or another. Same idea. Around the same time, the United States government had troops in Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval base, because if a Chicago Commune broke out, the federal government wanted to have land and lake forces capable of fighting against Midwestern (but actually eastern and central European and even Jewish) communards. We sometimes forget how concerned the governments of the day were about anarchists and radicals. Somewhere in the bowels of the French Army archives there is paperwork related to this, if those archives survived the travails of the 20th century. It’s an interesting little detail, and it would be fun to get to the bottom of it.
Mobilization and manpower if 🤖 is correct
https://chatgpt.com/share/690c26e9-b928-8002-86e9-d48099e10cc9
Short answer: it was about mobilization and manpower.
• Manpower reality: By the late 1890s, Algeria couldn’t supply enough “local” (i.e., Algerian-resident) reservists for the four Zouave regiments. To solve this, the law of 9 February 1899 created a 5th battalion in each Zouave regiment, to be stationed in metropolitan France—where most reservists actually lived. 
• Where they went (and why those cities): Beginning in 1901, these four 5th battalions were posted in the two key garrison hubs—Paris (Rosny, Choisy, Nogent) and Lyon (Sathonay, La Valbonne). This put the mobilization “nucleus” close to France’s main rail nets and depots so the battalions could rapidly expand into wartime régiments de marche on call-up. 
So, the War Ministry’s move wasn’t for show; it was a structural fix to ensure the Zouaves could be quickly brought up to strength for a European war by concentrating their active cadres and metropolitan reservists around Paris and Lyon. 
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zouaves
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zouave
• https://forum.pages14-18.com/viewtopic.php?t=74138
• https://collectifrance40.free.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88&Itemid=100
• https://www.les-tirailleurs.fr/documents/9a70d853-9307-4930-8cca-5c48e580da71/afficher
• https://www.les-tirailleurs.fr/documents/2013a1b6-8c44-4ff0-967f-b1ede3419642/afficher
• https://milguerres.unblog.fr/les-zouaves/