ChinaRhyming’s French Week #2: The Boxers are Coming – Le Petit Parisien, October 1898

Picked up in a French junk shop for a few of those odd Euro thingies recently, the October 16th 1898 edition of Le Petit Parisien….Revoltes mis au pilori avoir attaque des Europeens (my schoolboy French translation being: ‘Revolutonaries are put on the pillory for attacking Europeans’).

The newspaper is referring of course to the 1898 Boxer Rebellion and the events in early October 1898 when a group of Boxers attacked the Christian community of Liyuantun village where a temple had been converted into a Catholic church and various other uprisings and slaughters. Paris got the news fast it seemed and rushed into print with this illustration on the cover. DEspite being put in the stocks, as illustrated, the Boxer Rebellion only gathered pace until Charlton Heston and David Niven sorted it out – or something like that!