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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 4
complicated plans for getting a few coins out of them. Their ingenuity, their goodhumoured
dishonesty, are explained by their poverty and the absence of machines.
Crowds of Asia. We must be thankful to Cartier-Bresson for not having hit on the idea
of showing us the swarming crowds. Because they do not swarm about, or very little;
they organize themselves. Of course they invade everything, destroy everything: those
old women taking little steps forward, with little bows, little smiles, are old servants, the
mother goddesses of crowds. If one of them shyly enters the house of a rich man, to visit
a servant, her niece or cousin, suddenly they are all inexplicably there, swarming; the
house is too small to contain them, the walls collapse. These innumerable visitors are
particularly feared by the Americans.
But no one has the right to confuse this swarming with a plague of locusts. Chinese
crowds are organized: they fill up the pavements and spill onto the road, but they each
immediately make themselves a space while, at the same time, acknowledging that of
their neighbour. See those hairdressers: they all have their living space, and no one
dreams of contesting it. It is because this loose-knit crowd bleeds when it contracts. In
Shanghai, the government brings gold to the market, the buyers queue: there is a sudden
condensing of the crowd. The result is seven dead and several broken legs. In China each
person in the crowd must live at a respectful distance from the others, and the famous
Chinese politeness is above all a vital measure in order to avoid suffocation. Cartier-
Bresson everywhere makes us sense this ghostly swarming, fragmented in minute
constellations, this subtle but omnipresent threat of death. For me, who likes crowds as I
like the sea, these Chinese multitudes seem neither terrible nor even foreign. They kill,
but bury the dead within their midst and drink up the blood as blotting paper soaks up
ink: gone without a trace. Our crowds are more angry, more cruel. When they disperse,
they leave their dead behind them, and the abandoned pavements are smeared with red;
that is the only difference.
In the early years of this century, tourists were great lovers of poverty. Captain
Carpeaux, son of the sculptor Carpeaux, lamented in 1911 that a Chinese Haussman had
constructed boulevards through the imperial city: ‘Alas, what have they done to the main
street in Peking, so picturesque, so lively, so delightfully dirty and full of potholes?
Where are all the extraordinary hawkers next to their tiny displays of mysterious,
nameless things? Everything has been driven out, taken away, knocked down, levelled;
the great broken hundred-year-old flagstones have gone along with the filthy, curious
little traders.’
Filthy, delightfully dirty, extraordinary: that is after all what men in the grip of poverty
become. And people actually complain about that?
Blessed be cold and hunger for having dictated so many comical inventions and crazy
discoveries. And what is more, the poor are a conservative lot; they keep old furniture,
old clothes, old tools, unable to replace them. People used to go looking for the traditions
of ancient China in their hovels. What splendour in those royal rags, not forgetting the
ravishing arabesques traced in dirt on young necks. Have we changed so much? We no
longer go visiting the poor in their homes. It might even be said that we avoid them. It is
because they go too far; for quite a long time now, they have embarrassed the rich.
Imagine Barrès in Peking.Why not? It would be 1908; he would be walking back
slowly from a hospitable house and planning to write a ‘Chinese Bérénice’. Suddenly, he