Partition pour piano "Little negroe (Négrillons) Two Step"

First edition of this piano score, with the front cover colour-illustrated by an unidentified artist with two stylised, caricatural children’s heads. An attractive copy despite the front cover being partly detached.

Little Negroe (Négrillons) is a two-step march composed by Georges Razigade (1876–1947), a composer of light music specialising in waltzes and salon intermezzos, and published by the Parisian music publisher Cairanne.

The title and illustration belong to what historians identify as the earliest phase of French négrophilie, born of the cakewalk craze that swept through Paris between 1900 and 1903 in the wake of performances at the Nouveau Cirque by American companies such as the Elks, two of whose young African American performers were then known on Parisian posters by the stage name « Négrillons ». More than twenty years before the same mechanism resurfaced with jazz and Josephine Baker, the paradox characteristic of the interwar years is already visible here in its purest form: the Parisian public’s immediate and widespread enthusiasm for an African American dance and its performers went hand in hand with a caricatural and demeaning representation of their image.

This score thus bears witness to one of the earliest moments of French fascination with African American dance and music. It adopts the vocabulary of the stage while redirecting it through a device well documented by colonial historiography: infantilisation, which reduces the Black subject to the figure of the child and thereby establishes a paternalistic relationship that denies them the status of an equal.