ABSTRACT
There was a certain irony in the fact that many of the colonial writers returned to Europe in time for the Great War. They had spent much time on the little-known battlefields of the empire, convinced that life's real frontiers could only be encountered in Africa and India, not in the comforts of European civilization. A typical example of the process of adaptation was the German writer Hans Grimm, who returned to Germany in 1910. The application of colonial experience to life in France had brought Pierre Mille immediately to the view that a racial 'democracy' would guarantee the stability of the social hierarchy. Pierre Mille was far from alone in proposing imperialist solutions to the problem of the 'intellectual proletariat' in France. Ernest Psichari also dreamed of national revival on the basis of a classless army. From the first the German colonial movement had been associated with campaigns for improving the lot of the working-classes.
