PARIS: AN UNRECORDED REVOLUTION IN MANNERS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Mr. Angell is wrong in thinking that naked women on the Paris stage are a post-War novelty ; I cannot speak of fifteen years ago, but I can speak very definitely of twelve years ago, in 1914, when the two leading music-halls of Paris at least, regularly staged revues the feature of which was two grandes ensembles of women naked except for the minute cache-sexe. There seemed to be no novelty about these displays. At these two halls, however, the women generally moved about little, there was not much dancing, and in such as there was men did not take part. At other halls, there was dancing of naked women in pas seul and ballet, but I do not remember in those days ever seeing naked men on the stage.
After an absence of ten years, I visited Paris music-halls again in 1924, and was struck by a really remarkable change, to which Mr. Angell alludes without bringing out its full significance—the intimate association of white women and coloured men, not only on the stage, but generally in Paris. Even in 1914 there was a sort of general suggestion in the air that white women ought to find an exotic allurement in negroes and men of colour generally, but that suggestion had in 1924 assumed a repulsively concrete form.
It derives, of course, immense support from—if it does not originate in—the French national policy of using the subject coloured races of France to fill in the gaps in her own population —gaps due less to a falling birthrate, as so many imagine, than to the appalling infant mortality of France consequent on bad sanitation—in plain words to dirt. It is as a concomitant of this deliberate decision to support the declining French race with coloured—even with negroid—elements from Africa that one sees Frenchmen prepared to enjoy the spectacle of a huge Matabele negro, naked except for a loin-cloth, cracking his whip over a team of girls, themselves wearing practically nothing, as he drives them in their harness of ribbons round and round the stage.
More significant still is the sight one can see any night in a
Montmartre dancing hall, once internationally notorious, but now the resort of shop-girls and others with little money to spare. There, out of over a thousand dancers, one sees several hundred men of all shades of colour dancing with girls of the tnidinette and trottin type. This is a far more serious matter racially than the common sight of a wealthy negro parading the white woman he has temporarily bought around the expensive night haunts of the French capital, for in the Montmartre hall one sees how widely the French desire to see the -population recruited by coloured races (who will make as good cannon fodder as white men) has been accepted by the people themselves. Most significant sight of all is it to see the young men and young women (not to mention_ the children in the working-class districts) of all gradations of colour, the offspring of mixed unions, who are beginning to take their place in the boulevard life of Paris.
Nothing arouses the Boulevard Press to such indignation as any suggestion that the black is not in every way a fit associate of the white. While I was in Paris in 1924 there was a regular " campaign " inaugurated against Americans because a young American had objected to negroes being served at the same bar as himself. Doubtless he behaved tactlessly, and certainly he had no legal leg to stand on.
It was, however, the energy with which the French Press declared that any white American who had the impertinence to show repulsion towards black Frenchmen must be taught to feel that he was in France on sufferance and liable to deportation if he did not behave himself, while the black Frenchman in Paris was at home in his own capital, which was so instructive. It was a revelation to an Englishman, who had not realized how far France had gone towards becoming a bi-coloured Republic, and may perhaps have opened the eyes of those Paris correspondents of American papers who are so prone, to use their own language, to let the French "get away with it every time" when it is a matter of "friendship propaganda."
Outside Paris and the French provinces (where one notices chiefly the intermarriage and irregular association of French working-girls with coloured labourers), one can perhaps observe best in the Rhineland the progress which France is making towards becoming a semi-coloured European power. There, despite the repulsion inspired in all non-Latin Europeans, men of colour are still placed in authority over so highly developed a race as the Germans. In 1923 and 1924, these coloured men—the French will not have them called " black " because the pure negro regiments were withdrawn in 1921 as they could not stand the European climate—were largely used in the• French attempt to separate Rhineland from Germany through the subjection of the Rhine province to a terrorist Government of German and other criminals and nonentities. The joint terrorism of coloured troops and white criminals would, it was hoped, force the Rhinelanders to agree to set up a separate republic of their own on condition that France should put a stop to the reign of terror she had established. As the world knows, this hope fell short— but only just—of realization and the terror ceased. Coloured Men, however, are still armed and used by France in times of peace to occupy this beautiful country inhabited by a highly civilized (and disarmed) population, and all the inevitable degradation accompanying the long-continued use of armed coloured troops as the conquerors of a proud and progressive white race is forced upon the Rhineland—in the course of an occupation in which we take part.
It is permissible to hope that the lead of the Spectator in calling attention to this matter, which is but one of many indications of the French preparations to encourage colour in Europe, may lead to very close attention being paid in England to this disturbing phenomenon.—I am, Sir, &c., ARGUS.
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