An Empire Peaceful and Disturbed

Abstract

A French naval recruitment poster from the interwar period, now preserved in the Musée de Publicité in Paris, shows two bright-eyed young sailors standing on an island protected by a French man-of-war riding serenely at anchor and surrounded by tropical copiousness: one sailor is holding a large bunch of bananas, the other is admiring a parrot, while at their feet is crouched a contented island woman to the left of whom is a monkey touching a pineapple. The depicted scene was of a particular colonial reality, yet far removed from the eventful one that had greeted Jean Merlin, French Governor-General of Indochina, as he was being driven from a banquet in Canton, China. Merlin was the intended victim of a bomb attack by a Vietnamese nationalist. Although he escaped injury, several Frenchmen in his entourage died. This violence took place in 1924, some three years before the recruitment poster was printed, and some 3000 miles away from the idyllic island scene the poster presented.