ABSTRACT
By 1949 Pierre Gourou had spent more than 25 years writing about the Far East. Too young to fight in the World War I, he had lived for nine years in Indochina, which was riven with colonial violence (a mixture of racism and repression); and back in Europe (Belgium and France) from 1936 he had witnessed the rise of fascism, survived German occupation, and served in the French Resistance. His exposure to the ugliness and sorrow of war perhaps helps to explain why he was drawn to Inguimberty’s art and saw it as an emblem of peace. Gourou maybe wanted readers of France Illustration to see something other than malevolence and destruction, and one wonders how the magazine’s readers viewed his contribution: as a meditation on the virtues of order and harmony, and by implication French order, perhaps; or as a useful distraction from the military difficulties that France was facing at the time. Either way, the art of war – by painting, photograph or map – is conspicuous by its absence from this 1949 publication, and, for his part, Gourou spurned violence, from wherever it came, and sought to look past conflict and find peace and order in the world; and so did his friend Paul Mus, with whom he shared an office at the Collège de France. 1 This did not necessarily mean that either Gourou or Mus operated in a serene space of inquiry that was devoid of power. Among other things, we have already shown how, in Indochina, power came in different forms, and with the French claiming they were a civilising force for good, and the Viet Minh waging what it believed was a ‘sacred resistance’ against the French. Gourou was uncomfortable with both of these visions of power. Nonetheless, our suggestion in this chapter is that a certain type of metropolitan power and influence accrued from the way he and other French scholars lodged their ostensibly humane objection to both colonial violence and the idea (later enshrined in the thought of Frantz Fanon) that decolonisation would only truly occur if the West’s glorification of itself and denigration of the colonised (what Fanon called “the cultural problem”) was also extirpated with violence. 2
