Diverse Attitudes of French Pacifists and Socialists Towards the ‘Yellow Peril’ in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This essay examines the various ways in which pacificists and socialists in France responded to the ‘yellow peril’ from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) to the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). I identify and examine four different attitudes they developed towards the ‘yellow peril’. On the one hand, some pacificists and socialists perceived it as a reality and used it as a means of exposing the problems of expansionism but differed on their views of what Asia would become for the West: whereas pacifists like Paul d’Estournelles de Constant invoked Asia as a potential existential threat, certain socialists welcomed ‘yellow’ workers as future comrades. On the other hand, there were people who viewed the ‘yellow peril’ as a myth or some sort of ideological smokescreen. Roughly speaking, they fell into two groups: socialists who treated it as a set of false ideas created to justify Tsarist imperialism, which practically led them to embrace Japanese imperialism, and revolutionary syndicalists who, opposing capitalist exploitation and expansionism in general, dismissed it as part of bourgeois ideology. Thus, I ultimately argue that the ‘yellow peril’ was less of an imperialist ideology consisting of negative racial stereotypes about East Asians than a versatile concept that was used against as well as for racial stereotyping and expansionism.