Albert Bettannier

In a French classroom a teacher shows a boy in the uniform of a school battalion a wall map of France with a dark patch in the east. The patch is Alsace and part of Lorraine, the territory France had to give up to the new German Empire in 1871. Albert Bettannier painted the scene in 1887 and called it La Tache noire, The Black Stain, at a time when some French schools drilled boys in marching and shooting in these battalions.

For Bettannier the loss was personal. He was born in Metz in 1851, and when the city became German he chose to keep French nationality, in 1872, and moved to Paris to train under the painters Henri Lehmann and Isidore Pils. From 1881 he showed regularly at the Salon, the big annual exhibition in Paris, and the lost provinces stayed his subject for decades, as late as The Bird of France in 1912. He received the Legion of Honour in 1908 and died in Paris in 1932. The Black Stain itself now hangs in Berlin, in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the German history museum.