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During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, certain physiological theories were used for political and ideological purpose, notably to define the enemy. But numerous counter-arguments persisted up to the First World War, vigorously challenging the dubious scientific statements that referenced an historical imaginary and rhetoric which essentially glorified war. We here propose that in the short stories Boule de Suif and Saint-Antoine, Maupassant discloses the perverse use of these discourses. Indeed, the author demonstrates, often with irony, that the social imaginary is mostly founded not on objective and empirical reason, but rather on the subjective persuasion of a moral and anthropological distinction amongst individuals which is established through anxiety, fear and the resolve of power by one being over another. In these works, the “mise en ennemi”, depends, beyond historical fact, on an embedding of natural (biological and physiological) and cultural (moral and customary) evidences that thus define the enemy as “l'Autre à tuer”. The irony is concealed within the use that Maupassant makes of the anthropological model. In enacting hybrid identities that contain the qualities and defects of both the dominant and the dominated, the author departs from the ethnic rationalization of an exclusively French or German experience and transcends the notion of nationality to instead address human nature as a whole and mankind's innate propensity to barbarity.
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