[
    {
        "id": 206982,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1974",
        "page_number": 53,
        "title": "RAS-1974",
        "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n47\n\nthe 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.\n\n51\n\nIn 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.\n\nIn 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.\n\nIn 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.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206983,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1974",
        "page_number": 54,
        "title": "RAS-1974",
        "content_text": "48\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nOn 9 June, after the party had left Mechiguig and was passing through a grove of tamarisks, Bechaoui, who had now joined the caravan, suddenly seized Morès' carbine and unhorsed him. He was cut in the head by a blow from a sword but managed to get on his feet and back up against a tree, from which position the lion-hearted adventurer opened fire with his revolver on his assassins. Surrounded by over forty Touaregs, he fought bravely, killing and wounding a number of his assailants. Then he was felled finally by two shots, and a knife plunged into his heart. And so the Emperor of the Badlands died amidst his servants in the desert.\n\nIt is not necessary to detail what happened after the Marquis' death—the long search for and trial of his assassins, 52 his apotheosis as a great national hero, the creation of a nationalist legend—except to add that his body was recovered by a French patrol, shipped to Marseilles; then conveyed to Paris and to a magnificent ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The funeral oration was declaimed by Maurice Barrès, the novelist and perfervid nationalist; the distinguished mourners were joined by contingents of butchers from La Villette, though accounts do not tell us whether they came wearing their Stetsons. The London Times reported of the funeral;\n\nSpeeches were delivered today in which the murder of Morès was attributed to the Jews and the English and the listeners cried, \"A bas l'Angleterre! A bas les Juifs!”\n\nEven on his catafalque the stone-cold Morès was a centre of agitation.\n\nIt is not a coincidence, I feel, that many people continued to doubt the official versions of the deaths of both these adventurers. Although Owen, who signed Mayréna's death certificate, declared that death was due to snakebite, the symptoms exhibited by the dying man were not those usually associated with death from a venomous snake—there was only one puncture of the skin and death came too rapidly. It is possible, then, that Mayréna either killed himself by taking poison and pricking his own leg to simulate a snakebite; or that the libidinous Mayréna was killed by a poison arrow shot by a jealous Malay. Morès' death, on the other hand, has been blamed by French nationalists on the dastardly British Secret Service and even, according to another version, on a conspiracy hatched by Constans, his political allies and Jewish friends. In both cases we are not likely to resolve the puzzle at this date.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077",
        "rank": 0
    }
]