Two Sides of the Same Blow: Barbarie, Civilisation, René Georges Hermann-Paul, 1899
Part of our China History Archive
Barbarie, Civilisation, René Georges Hermann-Paul, 1899.
Barbarie – Civilization is an illustration by French illustrator René Georges Hermann-Paul (December 27, 1864 – June 23, 1940) first published in 1899 in the magazine Le Cri de Paris, an illustrated French political magazine founded by Alexandre Natanson in 1897, at the start of the Boxer uprising in China.
The Boxer Rebellion was an armed insurrection in China between 1899 and 1901 against the increasing foreign intervention. The Yiheyuan movement, The Righteous and Harmonious Fists, was a secret society founded in today’s Shandong (山东) province and consisted mainly of people who had lost everything due to natural causes or imperialism.
The Image
The illustration was published on July 10, 1899, and is built as two mirrored panels. On the left, a Chinese man is shown pinning a French soldier to the ground and raising a sword against him; this panel is labeled “Barbarie.” On the right, the same scene is reversed: a French soldier pins the Chinese man and raises the same sword against him, and this panel is labeled “Civilisation.” The accompanying caption made the point explicit, framing the labels as a matter of perspective: identical violence is called barbarity when committed by a Chinese man against a French soldier, and called a necessary act of civilization when the roles are reversed.
Hermann-Paul
Hermann-Paul was a French illustrator, caricaturist and lithographer whose work appeared in numerous newspapers and periodicals of the period, including Le Courrier Français, Le Figaro, Le Petit Bleu, Gil-Blas and Le Rire, alongside Le Cri de Paris. His fine art was exhibited in galleries together with painters such as Édouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Early in his career his illustrations were known for satirizing French society broadly, attacking the bourgeoisie, the clergy, politicians and monarchs alike, rather than favoring one side of the political spectrum. In the years between the two World Wars, he moved away from political illustration and his style shifted toward more literary influences.
Related: facts and history of the Boxer Rebellion
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