ON APRIL 14, 1900, the Exposition Universelle in Paris threw open its doors to adoring crowds. Sparkling hopes for the new century were heightened by this celebration, which showcased an electrical palace, films from the Lumière brothers, a Ferris wheel, a diesel engine, and other wonders. A staggering fifty million people streamed forth to take in these miracles of the modern world. Among many marvels, visitors toured ethnological villages and human zoos stocked with members of far-off tribes like the Malagasy from Madagascar and the Dahomean from West Africa. A poster for the event depicted Arabs and Asians at the foot of a heavenly, white goddess. Thanks to Western technology and industrial wealth, the entire world was coming together.
Alongside these festive reports, French newspapers also featured a more disturbing story, one of things falling apart. On July 17, 1900, in Le Constitutionnel, a venerable paper famed for serializing the fictions of Honoré de Balzac, a short, unsigned dispatch appeared. This report from Shanghai told of a new “xénophobe” movement in northern China. Three days later, Georges Clemenceau’s left-wing paper, La Justice, picked up the story and that term. Next, it showed up in L’Univers. Then, on August 31, one of the most literary papers, Le Journal, published a piece by a Chinese “mandarin” who denounced his country’s outlaws and their xenophobia. As fall arrived, La Presse featured a headline warning of China’s xenophobia, and by October, Le Figaro and Le Matin assumed readers knew exactly what was meant when they denounced Chinese “xénophobes.” In less than a year, xénophobe and xénophobie had become part of the French vocabulary.
Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900
Parisians learned that the trouble with “les xénophobes” had commenced in a corner of northern China during the winter of 1899. These xénophobes were not engaged in specific national rivalries, but rather were focused on broader divisions, ones that greatly mattered due to the unprecedented expansion of Western powers abroad. Having watched their crumbling empire be infiltrated by not only one nation but by Germans, British, French, Russians, and the Japanese, a group of impoverished youth staged an uprising. Thanks to their reliance on martial arts, they came to be known in the West as the “Boxers.” While some of their goals remained inchoate, their motto made one explicit. “Support the Qing,” it declared, “destroy the foreigners.”
The Boxers’ revolt against all colonial powers followed decades of furious globalization. Like the sixteenth-century rush to grab land in the New World, during the nineteenth century, a second major wave of Western expansion had been sparked by new technologies. Hordes of European settlers moved into once forbidding places, as travel was increasingly facilitated by machines that powered not just people, but also ideas and products across seas, mountains, and deserts. In a crackle and whir, isolated tribes now communicated, traded, and intermingled. Bands of humans—long segregated and curiously distinguished by their pet notions of God and nature, the sacred and profane, ethics, politics, and individuality—found themselves in astonishing proximity. Much like the meeting of the Spanish and Nahuas people, these long-lost cousins had little knowledge of each other and could not help but consider many of their newfound kin quite strange in their looks, habits, and customs.
Demographics helped push globalization forward. After 1850, prosperity led to increased population densities within industrialized Western countries, and an unprecedented exodus of hundreds of thousands searching for opportunity in other lands. British, French, Germans, and Russians left home, aided by the telegraph, the emergence of a functional worldwide postal service, and the transformative power of steamships and locomotives. While once only the most desperate or foolish would traverse oceans or trek mountain ranges, increasingly such risks might be taken just for fun. Armed with Cook, Baedeker, or Michelin travel guides, fin de siècle pleasure-seekers came to be known as “globe-trotters.”
This grand reunion of humanity encouraged some to welcome the dawn of a universal age. As the inhabitants of the technologically advanced nations spread out, dignitaries spoke of the need for universal laws or even a world government. Conventions in Geneva, Paris, Berne, London, and the Hague brought together lawyers, pacifists, and diplomats who pressed for international bodies that would govern warfare, trade, patents, and copyrights. Optimists proposed a “World Federation” or a “United States of the World.” Globalists like the German Walther Schücking contemplated a future in which nations and their distinct illness, nationalism, were recognized as failed experiments. Schücking and his allies were citizens of the world, who echoed the words of Terence, that North African slave turned Roman dramatist, who wrote: “I am a man: I consider nothing pertaining to man foreign to myself.”
Beneath the grandeur of such proclamations, however, quite another reality lurked. These reunions between long-segregated tribes were not always so brotherly. International interdependence commenced at the end of a long gun. Between 1870 and 1914, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium—thanks to industrial strength and sea power, repeating rifles and explosives—conquered weaker lands in a veritable stampede for new markets, cheap resources, and forced labor. This unprecedented conquest spread out over nearly all of Africa, as well as many parts of Asia and South America. At the same time, the Chinese and Ottoman empires were collapsing, offering more opportunity for land grabs.
While Japan, Russia, and the United States were eager to participate in these orgies, this was mostly Europe’s party. The European imperial powers rushed to divvy up immense vistas, in what one disgusted observer called “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness.” For the colonists, this feeding frenzy raised two distinct risks: the lesser one involved trouble from the poorly armed, indigenous peoples. Comforted by a stark asymmetry in power and the belief in their own beneficence, this concern could be assuaged. The graver peril was that competing invaders, in their intoxicated rush, might stumble into war with one another. Pan-European coordination was deemed critical.
In 1885, the Berlin Congo Conference brought together thirteen European powers, as well as the United States. To avoid inadvertent conflict, they sliced up the African continent, giving each imperial power their share. Yet, despite such treaties, what ensued was not a United States of the World, but scattered skirmishes and tangled alliances that foreshadowed another possible outcome of globalization: world war.
The world was shrinking. Armed with breech-loading rifles, stocked up on quinine to prevent malaria, and powered by steam to go upriver, Europeans strode into once impenetrable domains. These uninvited guests insisted on staying; they created trading companies, which then morphed into plantations. As for the natives, they were not enslaved; the Berlin Congress, like Queen Isabella of Spain before them, outlawed that indignity. Rather, they were “employed” as indentured laborers. Foreign commercial outposts gradually transformed into national protectorates and then colonies, possessions of the home country. In a relatively short period, a smattering of intrepid traders became colonial masters, whose rule was backed by European gunboats and troops.
A thick web of narratives justified these actions. At the Congo conference, the expansion of European culture eastward was celebrated, thanks to what the French called its “civilizing mission.” Like the Spanish in the New World, the British Anglo-Saxon, the German Teutonic, the French Catholic, and the Russian pan-Slavic expansionists were encouraged to imagine themselves as philanthropists. These liberators brought a mix of Christianity, science, and justice. They came, it was said, not just for wealth, land, and power, but as peacekeepers, liberators, and educators. In exchange for their property, their culture, and, in essence, their freedom, these savages would be saved from superstition, cannibalism, cruelty, and poverty.
Missionaries, schoolteachers, and functionaries carried the flags of freedom forward. They rubbed up against fortune hunters, ex-criminals, libertines, slave traders, and pirates. So confident were they in their righteousness, the good of their God, the supremacy of their lineage, and the superiority of their culture that the reaction of their hosts begat some confusion. Western travelers noted that in foreign lands, they would be met by accommodation and servile assistance, then suddenly rage and violence. Within the stories the colonists told themselves, it made little sense. And so, when a whirling group of rebels in China announced their mission to attack and destroy foreigners, a rarely used term for irrational fear, plucked from Greek, seemed appropriate.
THE DRAMA UNFOLDING in China was especially captivating for the French. After their humiliating defeat in 1871, they had followed Ernest Renan’s prescription for avoiding civil unrest at home by vigorously embracing overseas expansion. Renan had little patience for those with ethical qualms about such enterprises. “The conquest of a country of racial inferiors by a superior race, established there to govern them,” he declared, “has nothing shocking about it.” In 1879, the author of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo, also lustily urged on his compatriots. “God,” he proclaimed at a public ceremony, “has offered Africa to Europe. Take it!” The crowd broke into hearty applause.
The Third Republic embraced this strategy, and its imperium grew at breakneck speed. By 1895, colonial inhabitants living under French rule had multiplied from five million to fifty million. By 1913, France controlled thirteen million kilometers of foreign land. Soon France was second only to Great Britain in overseas holdings. In 1889, an École coloniale was established to train functionaries in anthropology, colonial sociology, and mass psychology. To serve their sudden empire, French newspapers fed readers a steady diet of events from China, the Ottoman Empire, regions of Africa, South America, the Baltic states, Japan, Russia, and India. Seemingly minor events—the arrival of a diplomat, a colonel being sent home on unnamed charges, or tension in the Upper Nile—were newsworthy. When an uprising took place in an obscure, northern region of China, dozens of French newspapers grabbed on to the story.
Discord in China was itself no shock. In 1873, an anonymous Catholic French missionary had delivered a prophetic warning. He applauded Pope Pius IX’s aggressive effort to expand missionary work in China, but mentioned the possible reaction, a “xénophobie” in the Far East. Japan and China, the unnamed priest advised, remained deeply unwelcoming to foreigners. A French proconsul similarly wrote of the risk of such anti-stranger reactions in “Oriental” countries that had been “hermetically sealed” for centuries.
These descriptions could not be waved away as simple Western bias. In fact, the Japanese had a long history of hostility toward “Yabanjin” or barbarians. These foreigners included the northern people of Hokkaido as well as all Westerners. When the Portuguese landed on Japan’s shores in 1542, they were described by the amused inhabitants as “long-nosed goblins.” In the following years, Western missionaries settled on Japanese soil, winning over some local lords and building a community of approximately 300,000 Christians. Ultimately, this led to a fierce reaction and an edict of expulsion against the Christians in 1587. From then on, the Japanese shoguns kept a lock on entry into their country, restricting foreign trade to one port, Nagasaki, and one nation of traders, the Dutch. Japan remained quite closed until American gunboats, captained by Commodore Matthew Perry, forcibly demanded entry in 1853. Even after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a program of modernization that made the Japanese more open to the West, their political elite remained deeply suspicious of foreigners, especially as they noted what was happening across the sea in China.
For while the French proconsul and missionary had a point about Japan, the notion of a “hermetically sealed” China was absurd. True, China with its Great Wall embodied such insularity; once, it too allowed sea traffic through only one port, Canton. However, after the Second Opium War ended in a crushing defeat, the great Qing dynasty had been falling apart. As victors, the British, French, and Russians made their way into the country, where freedom of religion and opium use now had been conceded. Peace came only when Tianjin was opened as a port, British ships were given the right to haul indentured Chinese to the Americas, land was surrendered to Russia, and more. Over the next decades, this weakened empire under the rule of the Dowager Empress Cixi had been increasingly infiltrated by Western missionaries and traders. Chinese loyalists bitterly noted that their desire for autonomy had been grossly violated, as this once regal empire lost control of its own borders.
Then, in 1897, a match was lit. In the southern Shandong Province, two German Catholic missionaries, Richard Henle and Franz Nies, were murdered. The killing was carried out by the Big Swords, a secret society. The crime provided Kaiser Wilhelm with a long-awaited pretext for invasion. German troops took control of land inhabited by 60,000 Chinese. Observing how easily the Kaiser had waltzed in, other foreign armies deployed their forces into the tottering nation. By 1900, Russia had taken Manchuria, only to have it snatched away by Japan. Great Britain spread out their holdings in Hong Kong and grabbed for Tibet. France fattened its Indochinese empire. Portugal grabbed Macao.
Meanwhile, in northwest Shandong, a drought had made many destitute and raised fears of starvation. A group of young men merged the traditions of mass possession from the Spirit Boxers with the invulnerability rituals and beliefs of the Big Sword Society. Using spells, swallowed charms, deep breathing, and martial arts, they came to believe themselves invulnerable to swords and bullets. These “Yihequan,” or “Boxers United in Righteousness,” adopted the slogan “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.”
Imperial powers divvying up the “cake” of China, 1898
The Boxers began as a loose cluster of thugs who indulged in looting and thievery. At first, they tormented those conversos, the Chinese Christians, and the rare Western missionary. As the attacks continued, the government found itself in a bind, torn between European powers who demanded that the safety of their nationals be ensured and a restless, angry populace. Advisers to the Dowager Empress were split. Meanwhile, a catastrophic flood of the Yellow River created a mass of new refugees and more destitute converts who joined the Boxers. Insurgents now suddenly massed throughout north China; their desire to attack foreigners, however, remained mostly unfulfilled, since few lived among them. Nonetheless, these peasants rose up against these symbols of all they had lost to Westerners.
As the Boxers became popular heroes, their call filtered into cities like Tianjin and Beijing, where many foreign nationals did reside. On December 31, 1899, a British missionary was murdered, followed by a group of four French and Belgian engineers. As the identities of the victims made clear, the Boxers were not Anglophobic, Francophobic, or Germanophobic. Their country was occupied by many powers and they had declared war on all of them. Seemingly overnight, thousands of Boxers swarmed the streets, eager to burn down Western churches and chase down immigrants. In the rioting, nearly two hundred non-Chinese were murdered.
In France, the Boxer Uprising continued to share the front page with the glories of the Paris Exposition. All across the country, newspaper readers learned of dazzling inventions like the Palace of Electricity in one column, and a savage, primitive reaction in another. Xenophobia, they were told, targeted no individual, no maligned group, not settlers or colonists or invaders, but any foreigner. A group of possessed, half-mad Chinese rebels would attack anyone who was not Chinese.
After two of their missionaries were killed, German political commentators warned of the emergence of what they called a “Fremdenfeindschaft,” “stranger-as-enemy relationship,” in China. That term never translated into other tongues. Instead, the French xénophobie shot forth into English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and more. Almost immediately, Western readers drank in stories about xenophobic “propaganda,” “Mandarin” xenophobia, “secret xenophobic societies,” and the power of “xenophobes” to stir up bloodlust in the masses. Xenophobia no longer applied to some rare medical illness or a broad rivalry between Western nations; it now served as an explanation of the fearsome trouble Western globalists might encounter in the East, where an irrational, violent hatred of all outsiders might take hold as exemplified by the spirit-worshipping, rampaging Boxers.
The Boxers, China, circa 1901
AFTER THE PRIOR, failed usages, here was the moment when xenophobia took hold. “Xénos” now referred to Western foreigners, immigrants, strangers, and travelers. “Phobos” seemed at first glance to be a misnomer; were the Boxers motivated by fear or rage? Xenocide, the desire to kill strangers, might have made more sense, given the circumstances. Instead, some scribbler during a long, hot July in Paris, latched onto this neo-Grecian compound and made it famous. Newspaper dispatches, like the first one published on July 17, 1900, in Le Constitutionnel, were routinely unsigned. Someone must have sent basic information from Shanghai, I imagined, that was relayed to the French newspapers, probably through one of the news services. Whoever received that report, and in the process revived “xenophobia” in this new context, would surely be lost to history, I assumed. Discovering the author’s identity would be like finding a proverbial needle in the haystack.
A note to needles: your time in the haystack may be up. Thanks to online search engines, I discovered a letter buried in a newspaper archive. Written to the editor of the Globe, one of London’s leading newspapers, it was published on June 4, 1915, years after the events in China. The author, an obscure fellow, quickly established himself as a pedant, the kind of fellow who took pleasure in correcting another’s grammar or offering explanations no one requested. His letter chastised the editors for their misguided usages of “Boche.” This derogatory French term for Germans had emerged after the war of 1870, and the letter writer carefully explained that it stemmed from “Teutobochus,” Latin for “Kaiser of the Teutsch.” This same etymological matter so deeply distressed this gentleman that he whipped off a second letter of protest, this time to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. However, in his note to the Globe, he ended with this aside:
The process by which some words come into general use is rather obscure. During the days of the Boxers’ Rebellion, I launched the word “Xénophobe.” It caught on in the French Press, and is now to be found in some dictionaries!
The letter was signed, “Yours faithfully, Jean de Saintours, The College of Preceptors, W.C.”
I was flabbergasted. Without this bit of boasting, who would have known? But who was this? Not surprisingly, Jean de Saintours turned out to be a man who loved to play around with language, including his own name. After piecing together his noms de plume—Jean P. A. Martin de Saintours, Jean P. A. Martin, and J. Martin-de Saint-Ours—I discovered that he descended from a dwindling noble line with its roots in the Périgord region. In 1883, this young scion was listed as French deputy consul to the United States. Under that title in the city of Lyon, Saintours hosted a conference on the need to teach French in the colonies. When the proceedings were published, the editors noted that his proposals happily coincided with the formation of the French Alliance for the Propagation of Our Language in the Colonies and Among Foreigners. And so, this patriot played a small role in boosting what became one of the most successful institutions of cultural expansionism. This alliance now promotes French culture in 850 centers in 137 countries.
Afterward, Saintours left the consulate and began to teach at an educational society in the Rhône. By 1906, this language buff held a post at the London College of Preceptors, which trained and granted diplomas to secondary school teachers. During the intervening years, he developed a formal expertise in stenography, at the time a lively semiotic science, quite useful when deployed in tandem with that new marvel, the telephone. Foreign dispatches would be called in telephonically; the words would be swiftly coded by stenographers, who acted as go-betweens between the far-flung dispatchers and local editors. Our man took out ads in French newspapers offering his services to journalists who wished to employ transatlantic telegraphic or telephonic means to send or access news from London. By 1893, operating under the name Jean Martin, he was appointed senior telephone stenographer for Reuters in London. In this capacity, he gathered information, wrote reports, and disseminated them to news outlets.
Jean Martin de Saintours
Jean Martin de Saintours claimed he coined the French term “xénophobe” and then disseminated it. But could one be sure? Just as news of the Boxer revolt broke, I found an ad for his services that placed him at 32 rue du Rocher near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The right place at the right time. The notion that he would have taken the liberty to coin a new term also was not difficult to believe. In scattered writings, Martin was a bit of a troublemaker who reveled in puns and neologisms like British “red-tapeism.” He jumped into kooky debates, like the ones stimulated by the Simplified Speling Sosieti, a British group that argued English would become the world’s lingua franca if phonetic spelling was adopted. A partisan of French, Martin mocked the idea that English would dominate only if “utility, post, and pint” were spelled “yutiliti, poest and pient.”
Unless he chose to lie about a matter that no one cared about, Jean Martin de Saintours received a report from Shanghai, wrote it up, and in the process labeled the Boxers as “xenophobes.” Then he sent this label out over the expansive network of Reuters’ outlets. Of course, Saintours was incorrect about being the first to use the term, but that could have been an honest mistake, since those other usages were obscure. And then there was another detail. Fifteen years after the fact, when Jean Martin de Saintours took credit for this invention, the term “xenophobia” had become so widely dispersed that its moment of inception had been erased from history. No subsequent author, to my knowledge, ever memorialized the fact that, during the Boxer Uprising, this term took root then and there. That fact seemed to be lost, forgotten by all except Jean Martin de Saintours, xenophobia’s self-proclaimed inventor, and now me.