Morel was very anti-French because of his opposition to the Treaty of Versailles but also the nature of France's "mission civilisatrice" ("civilizing mission") in Africa, with any African willing to embrace the French language and culture becoming French and theoretically the equal of whites, threatened to upend Morel's beliefs in the essential biological inferiority of blacks. Morel believed that the Africans were committing outrageous crimes against Germans in the Rhineland because the French had empowered them, at least theoretically, by making them into black Frenchmen, who were just as much French citizens as anyone else.