ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG
47
the Chicago meat trade. Morès soon joined forces with Drumont,49 the brilliant anti-semitic editor of La Libre Parole, served as the paper's official duellist, and created a body of street fighters called 'Morès and His Friends'. These street fighters, the first 'storm-troopers', were recruited from among the butcher boys of the district of La Villette in northeastern Paris. Morès outfitted his 'friends' in cowboy hats, purple shirts and other Wild West accoutrements.
51
In June 1890 Morès was sentenced to three months imprisonment50 for the publication of inflammatory writings; but this experience did not dampen his ardour as a fervent nationalist, socialist and anti-semite. He fought four duels, in one of which he killed Captain Armand Mayer, a Jewish officer in the French Army; but in 1893 his political position was compromised when Clemenceau revealed that the anti-semitic Morès had borrowed money from Cornelius Herz, a Jew associated with the notorious Panama scandal. In 1894 the impetuous Morès landed in Algeria and immediately embarked on a violent campaign to arouse the Moslems in North Africa.
In 1895, after a short visit to France, Morès returned to Algeria. His purpose was to create an alliance between Catholic France and Moslem Africa so as to block British expansion in the African continent. His scheme was visionary and it is not clear how he expected to unify Frenchmen and Arabs in a crusade against British imperialism; but we do know he planned an expedition from Tunis through Ghadames and Ghat across the Sahara Desert to Bahr el Ghazal, where the French would be in a strong position on the Upper Nile to throttle British power in Egypt and prevent complete British control of the route from Cape to Cairo.
In Tunis on 29 April 1896, Morès signed an agreement with a certain El Hadj Ali to guide a caravan from Gabes, Tunisia, to Ghat, a distance of some thousand miles. He left Gabes on the morning of 14 May with a small escort. On the journey south a party of Touaregs attached themselves to the caravan, claiming they would guide the party through the desert. In fact, they were the henchmen of the Touareg Bechaoui, who was waiting to plunder the caravan and kill Morès at a place on the Libyan frontier called Mechiguig.
ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG
47
the Chicago meat trade. Morès soon joined forces with Drumont,49 the brilliant anti-semitic editor of La Libre Parole, served as the paper's official duellist, and created a body of street fighters called 'Morès and His Friends'. These street fighters, the first 'storm- troopers', were recruited from among the butcher boys of the dis- trict of La Villette in northeastern Paris. Morès outfitted his 'friends' in cowboy hats, purple shirts and other Wild West accout-
rements.
51
In June 1890 Morès was sentenced to three months imprison- ment50 for the publication of inflammatory writings; but this ex- perience did not dampen his ardour as a fervent nationalist, socialist and anti-semite. He fought four duels, in one of which he killed Captain Armand Mayer, a Jewish officer in the French Army; but in 1893 his political position was compromised when Clemen- ceau revealed that the anti-semitic Morès had borrowed money from Cornelius Herz, a Jew associated with the notorious Panama scandal. In 1894 the impetuous Morès landed in Algeria and im- mediately embarked on a violent campaign to arouse the Moslems in North Africa.
In 1895, after a short visit to France, Morès returned to Algeria. His purpose was to create an alliance between Catholic France and Moslem Africa so as to block British expansion in the African continent.. His scheme was visionary and it is not clear how he expected to unify Frenchmen and Arabs in a crusade against British imperialism; but we do know he planned an expedition from Tunis through Ghadames and Ghat across the Sahara Desert to Bahr el Ghazal, where the French would be in a strong position on the Upper Nile to throttle British power in Egypt and prevent complete British control of the route from Cape to Cairo.
In Tunis on 29 April 1896, Mores signed an agreement with a certain El Hadj Ali to guide a caravan from Gabes, Tunisia, to Ghat, a distance of some thousand miles. He left Gabes on the morning of 14 May with a small escort. On the journey south a party of Touaregs attached themselves to the caravan, claiming they would guide the party through the desert. In fact, they were the henchmen of the Touareg Bechaoui, who was waiting to plunder the caravan and kill Morès at a place on the Libyan frontier called Mechiguig.
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