The Cruel Imagination: Oriental Tortures from a Future Past in Albert Robida’s Illustrations for La Guerre infernale (1908)

It was for a planned future section of his war museum entitled “Storia dell’avvenirismo – Precursori della Futurologia” (“The History of Futurism – The Forerunners of Futurology) that in 1957 Diego de Henriquez, ex-soldier and passionate collector, bought fifteen of Albert Robida’s original sketches for Pierre Giffard’s La Guerre infernale (1908) from a bookstand in Rome. Of these original illustrations (today at the Civico Museo di guerra per la pace “Diego de Henriquez” of the City of Trieste), eight are reproduced in Law, Justice and Codification in Qing China. Accompanying and drawing on their publication, this essay critically assesses Giffard and Robida’s work, outlining precedents and coeval trends as regards the representation of Chinese tortures and the Yellow Peril in early science fiction and Western public discourse. La Guerre infernale is an early work of science fiction which offers, today, a graphic example of the collective imagery of coeval times related to future wars and technologies, Chinese punishments and atrocities, and fears of the Yellow Peril. By 1908, the theme of Chinese torture, and the topos of Oriental cruelty was not unprecedented in Robida’s work, nor was it an isolated case in popular French and Western publications. Be that as it may (and perhaps precisely because it taps into broader cultural currents), the clash, in La Guerre infernale, between ethnic stereotypes, which informed the representation of Oriental brutality and sadism, and visions of a future driven by technological progress, offers a unique vantage point from which to observe and critically assess Sino-Western cultural relationships at the dawn of the Twentieth century (or at the end of a “long” Nineteenth century).