ChinaRhyming’s French Week #3: Christiane Fournier & Voila Magazine on Shanghai in 1932

Voila magazine, February 6th edition, 1932 (picked up on a junk stall in a Bordeaux flea market last year). Voila was fast into print concerning the January 28th Incident in Shanghai, with a lot of background. The article and several of the photographs were by the French journalist Christiane Fournier. Fournier, born in Dieppe in 1899, spent a lot of time in both Shanghai, China and French Indo-China. She was a novelist as well as a journalist – among her books were  the controversial Homme Jaune et femme blanche (Yellow Man and White Woman), the story of a mixed marriage, in 1933 Bébé Colonial in 1935. She had a tendency to romanticise rural life in China and South East Asia, but was also observant regarding the foreign communities of the region – she was quick to point out that by the 1930s any European wearing a pith helmet was already considered a cliche and hopelessly out of date in terms of fashion.

Fournier is always interesting to read. In 1936 she was a founder of Perspectives Occidentales sur l’Indochine, published out of Saigon. It lasted until 1938. Fournier had studied philosophy in Paris and then in Ohio. she married an army officer who was posted to Indochina and lived in Saigon, teaching and writing. She contributed to Voila, but also to Le Monde and other French publication. She returned to France with her husband in 1938. I believe Fournier died in 1980.

(BTW: several of the other photos in the article are by Heinz von Perckhammer, an Austro-Hungarian photographer who is himself an interesting character – imprisoned by the Japanese during WW1 and the Siege of Tsingtao, afterwards he remained in China making his name photographing nudes in Macao brothels, as well as some good street scenes of Peking. He went back to Germany and became a photographer for the Waffen-SS in WW2 and so is, for obvious reasons, rather persona non grata these days)