ABSTRACT
From Henner’s academic portrait, through Bruno’s school book Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), to the colourful illustrations which accompanied Hansi’s no less colourful texts 30 years later, images of lost youngsters, in pictures and words, emerged as the principal leitmotif of the ‘Alsace-Lorraine question’. The Treaty of Frankfurt not
only ended the war, said one Alsatian observer, but ‘kidnapped from France its most loyal children’.3 Eastern deputies attending the National Assembly debates at Bordeaux in 1871 helped set that scene and, in the language of their protest, helped invent those images. They insisted that their children would ‘eternally demand’ their ‘inviolable rights’ as members of the great French nation; and as they stormed out of the Assembly they announced that ‘Your brothers from Alsace and Lorraine, separated at this moment from the common family, will keep for France, now absent from their homes, a filial affection until that moment when she returns to take her place’.4 And a dozen years later, when that gymnastic patriot Paul Déroulède chastised Jules Ferry for focusing more on exotic foreign lands than on France’s annexed lands, he used the same motifs: nationalists who aimed to rescue their two lost ‘sisters’ could not care less about Ferry’s ‘twenty black servants’.5
