The 'Black Horror on the Rhine' by Iris Wigger

Author:Iris Wigger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

3.3 France’s Attack on the Cultured Nations: The Continuation of War with Racist Means

A caricature of 1920 appealing to the conscience of the world represents France as an ape. It shows a colonial soldier decorated with orders and wearing a cap with the letters RF on it, identifying him as a representative of the Republique Française. Literally armed to the teeth with a knife in his mouth, he stands on a field full of crosses. The flag he is holding lists as triumphs “murder,” “homicide,” “abuse,” “assaults” and “morality crimes.” 484 The top of the flagpole is decorated with a cockerel head which makes clear reference to the French heraldic animal and to which nation’s flag was defiled here.

The threefold symbolism of this motive is easily deciphered. 485 On the one hand, it makes use of the line of development sketched by the Enlightenment leading from apes via Africans up to the Europeans, which a racially construed Darwinism had developed further and popularised. Then, it turned the African, displaced in the animal kingdom, into a beast by using the nature of his armament as a reference to common images of the “ignoble savage of colonialism” as an disinhibited, uncivilised warrior. Finally, it puts the insignia of the French nation in the hands of this primitive creature and thereby referred to the supposedly perverse reversal of imperial relations . And of course the apes turned into French were also in this type of illustration, often doing what the whole campaign tiredlessly accused them of, chasing white women.

This association of France with the “black atrocities” was reflected on all levels of the campaign. Popular media made out that France’s desire for revenge was the source of the atrocities on the Rhine 486 and representatives of different organisations mobilised against “the violation of the German woman by France.” 487 They argued together with government agencies that the French appointed “Negroes as rulers” in order to humiliate Germany. The critique of the use of colonial troops always targeted the French nation too. Large parts of the German press attributed the responsibility for the black crimes to France 488 and used the “Black Shame” to chain the French to the “stake of world history” (Schandpfahl der Weltgeschichte). Campaigners saw “the entire white world” standing against France. 489

The French people were accused of dreaming of a “Negro-Gallic empire,” 490 and a Europe under the dictate of a “Mulatto republic” 491 was prophesied. The French nation’s white core—“white people’s marrow” 492 was questioned and it was dismissed as “criminal rabble,” using the excuse to defend culture against the German barbars to satisfy its “rapacities” 493 in Germany. The central purpose of the fight against the “Black Horror” was for a representative of the German Foreign Office accordingly to be located in the “political area.” The Germans would not want to accept the humiliating presence of colonial soldiers and at the same time hope to cause France “problems,” 494 he revealed in a personal letter.

Such statements indicated that the French nation was held reponsible for the “Black Horror” with political calculation.

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