French Tales of the Yellow Peril

The myth of the yellow peril is one of the most despicable follies of the imaginative fiction of the 20^th century.

Despite this, the guilty realization that the global struggle between the European imperial powers, anxious to retain their monopoly on the rewards of colonization, and their once-Asian subjects, gave rise to a new subgenre, that of future world war stories.

In this volume we present two such ground-breaking novels: Jules Lermina’s The Battle of Strasbourg (1892) and Camille Mauclair’s The Virgin Orient (1897), in which the authorshave enough conscience to point out that Asian resentment against Europeans is largely a reaction to blatant white xenophobia and imperialism, and foresee such global wars as the inevitable and natural repercussion of such evils.

This ＂yellow peril＂, the threat of Asian plans for world domination, subsequently evolved in a series of more down-to-Earth thrillers such as the Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer, launched in 1912. Two somewhat similar yet different French exemplars are provided here, featuring the dastardly exploits of evil masterminds such as Fuh-Suh the Terrible (1934) and the Mysterious Fen-Chu. (1944).