1

The Colonial Moment

The Making of French Indochina,
Yes, no matter what happens, a Eu ro pe an nation will enter Annam in order
to take on a controlling infuence there. . . . It will not last, I am sure of that,
but it is necessary to go through it: Annam cannot escape this fate.
v.Ui niv1, resident general of France in Annam and Tonkin, letter to the
Catholic scholar Truong Vinh Ky [Petrus Ky], June i, 188o
Indochina, a marginal region that was nevertheless central to the French empire,
emerged in the midst of war, following a series of military expeditions that did not
fulfll their ultimate goals and whose outcome long remained undecided. There were
two major periods of confict, separated by ffteen years of peace. Between 18,8
and 18o,, the lower basin of the Mekong River, the southern provinces of Dai
Nampresent- day Vietnam and the kingdom of Cambodia came under the con-
trol of France. Between 18o, and 188i, the colonial undertakings in Indochina stag-
nated, with a failed attempt in 18, to occupy the northern part of Vietnam. From
188i to 18,, the expansion resumed with vigor: northern and central Dai Nam
and the Lao states became protectorates of France (map 1.1), while a sphere of French
infuence was established in the southern Chinese provinces, Yunnan, Guangxi,
and Guangdong. The unequal modern colonial relationship between the crises and
the dynamism of a dominating industrialized society and subjected cultures and
societies was thus regionally established. The same pro cess led the latter to be
forcibly inserted, as a dependent entity, into a world system whose construction at
the hands of the great Western capitalisms was nearly complete.
But nothing was played out in advance. If the establishment of Western dom-
ination over the Indochinese geographic area was foreseeable from the middle
of the nineteenth century, the colonial form this domination took was not in-
evitable, and the colonizers designed their projects very gradually. It took more
than a third of a century of complex transformations for this colonial order to
fully impose itself.
1,
m.v 1.1. Stages in the making of French Indochina. (Histoire militaire de lIndochine, vol.
[Hanoi, 11].)
1ui coioi.i momi1 1,
THE CONQUEST OF SOUTHERN I NDOCHI NA
( 1838-1867)
The frst advance of French Imperialism in Far East Asia was the annexation, in
the context of the Second Opium War (18,ooo), of the countries of the lower
Mekong.
1
This advance is inseparable from the generalized civil war that, begin-
ning with the revolt of the Taiping (18,oo), made it impossible for the Chinese
empire to protect its southern tributaries. Furthermore, it was also determined by
the nature of French and Southeast Asian societies. And, last, the competition be-
tween France and En gland was a permanent factor of French colonial expansion
in the nineteenth century.
The Christian Question in Vietnam
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no consensus in French so-
ciety in support of new projects for Asian expansion. Heterogeneous, yet united,
interest groups pressed for expansion into Indochina. The earliest urgings came
from the missionary Church,
2
especially the infuential Socit des missions
trangres (Society of Foreign Missions), created by Monsignors Pallu and
Delamotte- Lambert in 1o,8. Following their failures in China and in Siam, this so-
ciety, along with the Franciscans of the Philippines, concentrated its eforts on Viet-
nam. The missionaries, the teachers of religion (matres de religion), created vig-
orous Christian communities in the six apostolic vicariates of Dai Nam and
Cambodia, especially in the Spanish bishoprics of Bui Chu and of Western Tonkin
(table 1.1). In Tonkin, their followers represented perhaps to , of the popu-
lation. These communities were strengthened by the support ofered at the end of
the eigh teenth century by Bishop Pigneau de Bhaine and by a handful of French
advisors to Prince Nguyen Anh, who became the emperor Gia Long, in the midst
of the crisis that shook Vietnam following the great peasant revolt of the Tay Son
(1,,1,).
Their dynamism, however, was more the result of the clergys vigorous action
among the peasants, fshermen, boatmen, small merchants, and vagabonds, as well
as among certain families of mandarins and semi- scholars who taught ideograms
in the missionary schools, as has been shown by Alain Forest for the seventeenth
and eigh teenth centuries, and by Laurent Burel for the nineteenth century.
3
It was
also attributable to the clergys medical work; to the emcacity of the Association
de la Sainte Enfance (Society of the Holy Childhood), which oversaw the care and
baptism of sick or starving children and ran orphanages, a breeding ground for
the Christian communities; to their agricultural colonies, founded on the French
Catholic model of raising moral standards through work; and to the tenacious pros-
elytizing of baptizing nuns.
4
Roman Catholicisma religion whose virtues are
mightily prophylactic and protective, in Forests words both echoed local beliefs
18 1ui coioi.i momi1
and family rituals and simultaneously responded to a peasant societys desire not
only for salvation but for behavioral rectitude.
The Churchs activities were tolerated under the reign of Gia Long (18oiio).
But afterwards, little by little, the missionaries lost ground in relation to the au-
thorities. Indeed, the Confucian elite, for several valid reasons, considered Chris-
tianity a heterodox sect that could not be assimilated and that perturbed the global
system of cults and beliefs or ga nized around the imperial fgure. They equally
deemed it incompatible with other religious practices and with the omcial version
of Confucianism. Furthermore, certain missionaries sustained rebellions in the
hope of imposing a dynasty that would be favorable to them. Repression was in-
stituted under the emperor Minh Mang in 18i. The frst Catholic martyrs were a
Viet nam ese priest and a French priest, Father Gagelin, both executed in October
18. This was followed two years later by the torture and execution of Father Joseph
Marchand, who participated in the revolt of Le Van Khoi, adoptive son of the gen-
eral governor of the south, in whom certain missionaries saw a new Nguyen Anh.
In 18o, an edict condemned Eu ro pe an priests to death. Thousands of Christians,
including seven French and three Spanish priests, were martyred between 18 and
18o. An inextinguishable confict had opened up between the imperial power, the
dynasty, and the missions. This confict occurred in the context of a genuine mis-
sionary ofensive in Asia, supported by the fnancial power and energy of the
uvre de la Propagation de la Foi (Society for the Propagation of the Faith), created
in Lyon in 18ii by Pauline Jaricot. Fourteen new apostolic vicariates, of which seven
were assigned to the foreign missions, were created in China from 18 to 18oo.
From this arose an increase in tensions between the Roman Church and the Con-
fucian states, which saw this barbarian religion as a cause of moral and social dis-
1.nii 1.1 Members of Christian communities and French Catholic
missions in nineteenth- century Indochina
1873 1886
Catholics 324,000 333,000
Baptisms 83,331 66,826
Missionaries 114 174
Native priests 243
339
246
420
Catechists 301 384
Churches and chapels 931 767
Schools 304 643
soUvci: This assessment, taken from Vo Duc Hanh, La place du catholicisme dans
les relations entre la France et le Viet- Nam de (Bern: Peter Lang, 1),
pp. 1o,1o, is based on the archives of the seminary of the Missions trangres de Paris,
of the Annales de la Sainte Enfance, and of the Comptes rendus des travaux de la Socit
des missions trangres de Paris.

1ui coioi.i momi1 1
integration. The more Vietnam took refuge in a quasi- absolute isolationism, the
more the ardor of the missionaries intensifed.
The story of Monsignor Dominique Lefebvre is very representative of the
Churchs new Asian dynamism. Condemned to prison in 18,, then picked up by
a French ship, he disembarked in Singapore and returned secretly to Vietnam the
following year with Father Duclos. Both were captured. Duclos died in jail in June
18o; Lefebvre was condemned to death but not executed. In early 18,, he was
back aboard a British ship, but he refused to be repatriated to Eu rope and disem-
barked in May 18, in the Mekong Delta, where he evangelized clandestinely over
the next several years. For the missionaries, Vietnam was a perfect mission coun-
try; besides the Philippines, it was the Churchs only solid base in pagan Asia. They
urged the government in Paris to impose religious freedom on the court in Hue,
militarily, if necessary. The frst serious incident took place in 18, when, follow-
ing an ultimatum demanding religious freedom, two French warships destroyed the
coastal defenses and the Viet nam ese feet of Da Nang (Tourane). Emperor Thieu
Tri put a price on the head of the missionaries and ordered the executions of Eu ro-
pe ans, and his successor, Tu Duc, reiterated the edicts of persecution in 188 and
18,1. Even though these orders were not carried out, a threshold had been crossed.
Henceforth, the missionary demand for a religious opening of the country was part
of a new and irreversible historical logic, also clearly seen in Chinas dimcult expe-
riences during the same period. The establishment of diplomatic relations with out-
side powers on an equal legal footing resulted in the ruin of the tributary order of
the Asian world; freedom of trade was instituted; and the Confucian literate class
had to confront intolerable cultural competition, which was sustained in Vietnam
by the widespread use of the transcription of the language into Roman characters
(Quoc ngu), which the missionaries had invented in the seventeenth century. For
Confucian Vietnam, the missionary challenge was of crucial importance.
At the beginning of the French Second Empire, the missionary campaign in-
tensifed. As early as 18,i, eight bishops in the Far East sent a written demand to
Prince- President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte for armed action against Hue. Charles
de Montignys diplomatic mission to Siam (Franco- Siamese treaty of August 1,,
18,o), Cambodia, and Vietnam in 18,o,, failed in the last two countries. The
confusion of its goals and Montignys tactlessness and arrogance came up against
Siamese intrigues in Phnom Penh and a polite but nevertheless frm Viet nam ese
refusal in Da Nang. In spite of the naval bombardments of the forts of Da Nang,
on September io, 18,o, and ffteen days of negotiations in January 18,,, the French
envoy obtained nothing. The mandarins exclaimed with joy: The French bark like
dogs but fee like goats. This failure implied that the future contained no other
option than a military one. Some months later, on September io, Tu Duc, em-
peror from 188 to 188, ordered the decapitation of Monsignor Daz, a Spanish
bishop in Tonkin; this was used to justify an expedition to Cochinchina. The tireless
io 1ui coioi.i momi1
or ga niz er of the missionary campaign was Monsignor Pellerin, an apostolic priest
who had worked in northern Cochinchina and who, after his return to France in
April 18,,, with the help of Father Huc, intensifed intervention with the Catholic
hierarchy, Empress Eugnie, the Quai dOrsay (the French Foreign Ministry), and
the press. It was a note from Father Huc to the emperor that provoked the creation
of the Commission spciale pour la Cochinchine (Special Commission for
Cochinchina, April iiMay 18, 18,,) while the French- English expedition against
China aimed at obtaining a revision of the unequal treaties of 18i was being
prepared.
3
The two priests were heard by the commission and received several times
by Napoleon III.
Undoubtedly, it is necessary to avoid a mechanical identifcation of the Church
with colonial imperialism. The missionaries working in Dai Nam were in fact more
reserved than has generally been admitted regarding the French expansion after
18,o. But earlier this was hardly the case. The missionaries legitimated the myth
of a Tonkinese people ready to rise up against the Hue government, and of a sort
of liberating conquest. They also played an irreplaceable role as in for mants and
advisors. Thanks to their daily contact with the native populations, they were the
only Eu ro pe ans who could provide frst- hand information about these societies.
Familiar with indigenous social structures, and well aware of the decisive role played
by the literati, the missions sought, at least until 1io, either to weaken those struc-
tures or to Christianize them, beginning with the imperial state.
The Churchs actions were presented as part of a project that combined the
propagation of faith, colonization, and an increase in Frances national grandeur.
6
This convergence was the foundation for the progressive rallying of Catholic opin-
ion to the colonial expansion project. For the Church, colonialism was vital, since
it provided a response to the grave dimculties that accompanied its work in the
societies of a newly industrialized Eu rope: the crisis of faith, threats against the
papal state, the deterioration of the alliance with the French imperial regime af-
ter the war in Italy during 18,, and the rise of Republican anticlericalism. The
development of ultramontanism dovetailed with the Churchs increased overseas
engagements, a path to a renewed universality, compensating for the slow de-
cline of Christian culture in France that had been going on since before the French
Revolution. Precious Cross, Bishop Pigneau de Bhaine had said in 1,, the
French have knocked you down and removed you from their temples. Since they
no longer respect you, come to Cochinchina.
7
Missionary action, the coloniza-
tion of souls, as a priest from Lyon would call it, also allowed the overseas co -
ali tion of the otherwise conficting interests of the modern state and the Church,
and was an efective restraint on their disputes back in France. It was henceforth
one of the keys to the survival and the adaptation of a Catholicism that was on
the defensive in France.
1ui coioi.i momi1 i1
Naval Imperialism
The question of power was central for the big Eu ro pe an states, and the role of the
French military, especially of the Navy, which sought to grow along with the na-
tion, was decisive in the frst phase of French expansion in Indochina. The Navy
was greatly inspired in this project by Justin Prosper Chasseloup- Laubat, who was
minister of the Navy and the Colonies without interruption from 18oo to 18o,, and
who was succeeded as minister in 18o, by Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly,
the conqueror of Saigon. It was Chasseloup- Laubat who persuaded Napoleon III
to annex southern Dai Nam and who, in 18o,, initiated the great mission to ex-
plore the Mekong led by Captain Ernest Doudart de Lagre. Two of the fve mem-
bers of the Cochinchina commission of AprilMay 18,, were from the Navy:
Admiral Lon Martin Fourichon and Captain Jaurs.
8
French Cochinchina was a
product of naval imperialism, and for twenty years, from 18, to 18,, the Navy
alone ran it; this was the so- called era of the admirals, of whom eight would even-
tually govern the colony after the treaty of 18oi. As Prime Minister Jules Ferry put
it in 188,: It is also for our Navy that the colonies are created. Just as the Army
had its omcers in the Bureaux arabes (Arab omces) in Algeria, the Navy had its
omcial administrators and indigenous afairs inspectors in Cochinchina after 18o1,
until the Gambettists put a civil government in place in May 18,. Even then, its
frst incumbent, Charles Le Myre de Vilers, was a former naval omcer.
There was nothing fortuitous about the role of the Navy, which was more im-
portant in Indochina than in any other colony. This was confrmed at each deci-
sive moment and proven by the centralization of power in the hands of Admiral
Amde Courbet in October 188, and the appointment of admirals to the Haut
Commissariat (High Commissioners Omce) of Indochina from 1o to 1,. The
Indochinese enterprise was, in fact, one of the important elements in creating a
powerful feet of warships with global range: the French Navy opted for steamships
in the great naval building programs of 18o,1 and 18,,, and by 18,o, it pos-
sessed warships, of which , were ironclads, as against ,,, of which i were
ironclads, for the British Royal Navy. It also greatly contributed to the develop-
ment of the French Merchant Navy, whose rise was nevertheless slower.
In 18o, the Division navale des mers de Chine (Naval Division of the Chinese
Seas) was created. This renewal of French maritime power necessitated the creation
of a global network of bases able to provide coal, wood, and supplies. Without such
a logistical infrastructure, it would be impossible for the French Navy to become
in de pen dent of the omnipresent network of British bases. Fueling coal- fred
ships engines, in par tic u lar, was crucial. The acquisition of the mines of Hon Gai,
already coveted in 18,8 by the powerful China Merchants Navigation Co., was a
driving motivation for the conquest of Tonkin. So, too, was the sensitive question of
ii 1ui coioi.i momi1
recruiting stokers and mechanics for the engine room. Only Asian, Chinese, Arab,
and Indian sailors, it was thought, could stand the terrifying heat of the engine room
in the tropics.
On September io, 188o, the warship Le Tonquin embarked on the Saigon-
Toulon crossing with the frst crew of forty Cochinchinese.
9
The occupation of
the Indochinese ports, remarkably well situated between the Indian Ocean and
the Pacifc, and the desire to create a French Hong Kong many dreamed of Saigon,
so close to the im mense Mekong Delta, whose middle and upper portions were
believed to be navigable counted heavily in the French decision. At stake in the
continuous pressure from the Navy was not simply the interest of a military lobby.
There was also the possibility that French imperialism would gain importance in
a global context. French colonization in the Far East was tied inevitably to the rise
in the importance of the Navy, without which the global expansion of French com-
merce and the French state and the acquisition of the status of a worldwide, rather
than just Eu ro pe an, power would have been unthinkable. This was, in essence, the
goal laid out by Foreign Minister Franois Guizot before the Chamber of Deputies
on March 1, 18i: To possess across the globe, at those points destined to be-
come great centers of trade and navigation, strong, safe maritime stations that will
serve as points of support for our trade. . . .
The Pressure of Business Circles
The reservations of business circles about colonial action and the per sis tent mis-
givings throughout the century of liberal economists in line with Jean- Baptiste Say
(1,o,18i) have been emphasized for good reason. French historiography has
often considered the search for new zones for the enhancement of capital and the
role of economic factors to be negligible parts of Frances Indochinese expansion.
This is by no means certain. In fact, it might be argued that the combined pres-
sures applied by the Navy and the Church in favor of colonial expansion, which
had not been efective under the July Monarchy, succeeded under the Second Em-
pire precisely because they then dovetailed with the expansionist dynamics of
French capitalism, which after the economic crisis of 18, entered an unpre ce -
dented phase of industrialization. Certainly, France had neither really invested in
nor carried out commercial expansion in Asia prior to gaining complete control
of the southern Indochinese peninsula: in 18o, only three French ships entered
Chinese harbors, as opposed to thirty- four British and thirty- fve American ships;
the following year, French trade with the Far East was estimated at o., million
francs, whereas British exports raised some 1o million francs in China alone; in
18,, of the 1o8 Western trading frms installed in Chinese treaty ports, only one
was French, against o8 British.
10
In Indochina, however, as in the majority of Frances colonial undertakings ex-
cept Tunisia and Morocco, conquest was a necessary preliminary to investment.
1ui coioi.i momi1 i
After the initial fruitless attempts taken in relation to Dai Nam from 181o to 18i,
the interest of French business circles in Asia deepened as a result of the First Opium
War (181), the work of Consuls A. Barrot in Manila and Michel Chaigneau
in Singapore, and, especially, the signature of the Franco- Chinese treaty of Wham-
poa in October 18. Already in December 18, an important mission from the
chambers of commerce of manufacturing towns, composed of delegates represent-
ing Lyon silks and the wool and cotton industries, led by the diplomat Thomas de
Lagren, visited not only Canton and Shanghai but also Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta),
Manila, and Tourane (Da Nang). The important survey it published on its return
valued the trade of the seas of Indochina at a billion francs, half of which con-
sisted of Chinese foreign trade.
11
From this arose the dream of a French Hong Kong,
for which the island of Basilan, in the archipelago of the Philippines, was consid-
ered in 18. In addition, between 18o and 18,, the Ministry of Agriculture and
Trade dedicated some twelve issues of its Documents sur le commerce extrieur (Doc-
uments on Foreign Trade) to China and the Far East.
Though dominant historiography has downplayed these facts, this is an indi-
cation of the role of the economic forces at work and of the imagined economic
stakes in Frances frst Indochinese expansion. Studies have shown that after 18o,
cities with a stake in colonial trading especially Bordeaux, which was deeply af-
fected by the crisis of the Ca rib be an sugar economy redirected their commercial
and maritime endeavors toward the Maghreb, Africa, and Asia.
12
As early as 18,8,
the shipowners Eymond and Hewey opened a regular line from Saigon to Singa-
pore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Manila. By November 18oi, the company Denis
Frres had settled in Saigon. Even Marseille capitalism, which, up until the middle
of the nineteenth century, had done very little in the Far East,
13
started trying to
expand its commercial horizons beyond the isthmus of Suez, especially after the
opening of a branch of the powerful British Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navi-
gation Company (or P&O) in Marseille in 18,1.
However, there has been little systematic study of the colonial attitudes of the
great industries of the time, metallurgy and textiles. Nevertheless, J.- F. Lafey, Pierre
Cayez, and especially J.- F. Klein have revealed the tenacious eforts of the Lyon
Fabrique (silk industry), which declined precipitously after 18,i because of the
silkworm disease pebrine, to widen its sources of supplies in the Far East.
14
Lyon
began to buy silk directly from China in 18,1 and reached i,ooo tons in 18oo, half
of total French consumption. In the 18oos, half of Shanghais raw silk exports and
a third of Cantons were bought by the French, greatly profting British shipown-
ers, the masters of the Asian silk trade. As the case of Lyon shows, a true munic-
ipal imperialism with strong regional roots began to take shape. In 18,, the frst
Lyon silk merchant settled in Shanghai, joined in 18o, by Ulysse Pila from Avi-
gnon, who founded his own trading frm. At the end of 18,, out of sixty- three for-
eign trading houses in Shanghai, fve were French. Between 188, and 18i, Lyon
i 1ui coioi.i momi1
on average imported from o,ooo to ,,ooo tons of Asian raw silk annually. Though
Lyon frms were limited by their dependence on the powerful British frm of Jar-
dine and Matheson and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, their
Far East Asian activity was starting. From then on, Lyon capitalism would strive
for the establishment of direct maritime links and French banks in the Far East.
The foundation of the Compagnie universelle du canal de Suez (Universal Suez
Canal Company) and the beginning of the digging of the canal in 18, strength-
ened the project of a new French expansion beyond India, structured around the
Suez Canal. In 18oo, a major bank, the Comptoir descompte, opened an agency in
Shanghai, where a French concession was established between 18 and 18,o. The
Messageries impriales, the future Messageries maritimes, the largest French ship-
ping company and the primary transporter of Asian silk after 18,o, inaugurated its
Marseille- Saigon line in 18oi. In its report of May 18,,, the Cochinchinese Com-
mission concluded that it was necessary to occupy the three principal Viet nam ese
ports in order to ensure the rapid development of French trade in China. To cap-
ture a part of the tramc from southern China and to re orient it toward a harbor un-
der French control, preferably Saigon, which was already the center of rice expor-
tation, was the underlying goal defned by the government of Napoleon III for the
expedition to China prepared in accord with Britain the following year.
More generally, the new French expansion in Asia should be contextualized in
the framework of the considerable development of Eu ro pe an economic activities
in the Far East from the middle of the nineteenth century on. Between 18oo and
18oo, Eu ro pe an exchanges with the Far East and India multiplied: in six years, from
18oo to 18oo, they rose from i,ooo million francs to billion (an increase of ,),
out of a world trade estimated at ,i billion francs in 18,o; French trade with the
region, in par tic u lar, rose from i8, million francs in 18oo to o8 million in 1888,
representing a growth of 8. in two de cades. In sum, if the real economic in-
terest of French capitalism in the Far East was still fairly slight, a demand for ex-
pansion into Asia by a segment of business circles was, in fact, emerging. We be-
lieve it is necessary to attract goods coming from the Far East to Marseille, the
Marseille shipowner Rostand declared in the context of the great Enqute de la ma-
rine marchande (Report on the Merchant Navy) of 18o.
13
Chasseloup- Laubat
echoed his words that same year, proclaiming: It is a real empire that we need to
create in the Far East.
The Fall of Saigon
In mid- July 18,,, despite strong objections by his ministers, Napoleon III decided
on a military intervention in Vietnam as a logical annex to the expedition to China.
Spain joined the expedition in December with the dispatch of a corps of its Philip-
pine army. Admiral Rigault de Genouillys instructions were very elastic.
16
He
was to conquer a token territory, the port of Tourane (Da Nang), in order to ne-
1ui coioi.i momi1 i,
gotiate a protectorate treaty or, by default, an unequal treaty similar to that which
En gland had imposed on China on June i,, 18,8 (and to the one it would impose
on Japan on October , 18,8). On August 1, 18,8, a small expeditionary force,
consisting of fourteen ships, two thousand French soldiers, and fve hundred Span-
ish troops, backed by a few hundred Tagals, seized Tourane. They lacked the means
to attack Hue, and the population did not rise up, as certain missionaries had pre-
dicted. Meanwhile, cholera decimated the units. The government of Hue refused
to negotiate, and its troops resisted emciently.
The French high command therefore decided to strike at Saigon, an essential
supplier of rice for central Vietnam, located in the area that at the time was called
Basse- Cochinchine (Lower Cochinchina), which unlike Hue was accessible from
the sea. Simply put, the strategy was to blockade rice shipments to central Viet-
nam. Saigon was taken on February 1,, 18,, but the ongoing war with China forced
the evacuation of Tourane on March o, 18oo, and only allowed the maintenance
in the south of a weak French- Spanish force of under a few thousand men. With
dimculty they resisted the attacks of twelve thousand Viet nam ese soldiers, rein-
forced by troops raised in the military colonies (don dien) of the delta. Saigon and
its Chinese counterpart, Cholon, were defended throughout that year by the pow-
erful fortifed lines of Chi Hoa, supported by a defensive perimeter about twelve
kilometers long blocking all the waterways, constructed under the orders of the skill-
ful Viet nam ese feld marshal Nguyen Tri Phuong. Meanwhile, the persecution of
Christians increased in the rest of the country.
It was the signature of peace with China (with the Beijing Treaty of October i,
18oo) and the end of the war in Italy that gave Admiral Lonard Charner the nec-
essary means to take Saigon. The lines at Chi Hoa were taken on February ii,,
18o1; My Tho, a strategic key to the delta and to Cambodia, was taken on April 1;
and French gunboats began penetrating the interior. In April, the provincial cap-
itals of Ba Ria, Bien Hoa, and Vinh Long fell. The Hue court was split between
realists supporters of a Siamese strategy of negotiation that would allow more
time and the modernization of the country and diehards. Moreover, it was ham-
pered by the interruption of the southern rice exports and by the serious revolt of
the Catholic Ta Van Phung (Le Duy Phung) in the name of the Le, supported by
the Spanish Dominicans, in the delta of the Red River. Obliged to choose between
its enemies, the Hue court fnally resigned itself to signing the treaty of June ,, 18oi
(the Saigon Treaty), negotiated by Admiral Bonard, the frst French governor of
Cochinchina, and the representatives of the court, Phan Than Gian and Lam Huy
Diep. Hue thereby ceded the three southeastern provinces of Dinh Tuong (or My
Tho), Gia Dinh, and Bien Hoa, to France, along with the archipelago of Poulo Con-
dore (Con Dao); granted freedom of navigation for French ships on all branches
of the Mekong and opened Ba Cat, Quang Yen in Tonkin, and Tourane to trade;
paid an onerous indemnity of four million dollars (piastres), or twenty million gold
io 1ui coioi.i momi1
francs; and proclaimed religious freedom in the empire of Dai Nam, which also
abandoned its suzerainty over Cambodia. Spain obtained only monetary com-
pensation. The whole was a catastrophic treaty for Hue.
The annexation of the western provinces of Cochinchina, Vinh Long, An Gi-
ang (or Chau Doc), and Ha Tien was the logical continuation of this frst stage of
conquest. But in 18o, nothing was certain. As early as 18,, an active guerrilla war
was already being or ga nized among the peasants and the scholars in the occupied
provinces, with the secret support of Hue. Go Cong was attacked on June i1ii,
18oi. The insurgency, based in the swamps of the west, the coastal mangrove
swamps, and along the border of the Plain of Reeds, and led by Truong Cong Dinh,
a young don dien chief, was at its peak in 18oio. However, although weakened
by their leaders death in August 18o, the guerrillas resumed fghting at the start
of 18oo in the western provinces and in the Plain of Reeds.
17
Moreover, Emperor
Tu Duc considered the Treaty of Saigon no more than a tactical withdrawal.
In 18o, a Viet nam ese diplomatic mission, directed by the remarkable mandarin
Phan Thanh Gian, the chief proponent at court of a temporary compromise with
France, attempted to negotiate the repurchase of the fallen provinces with Paris by
exploiting the distrust of colonial wars of the French liberal middle class, who
were dismayed at the cost of the conquest (1o million francs). The Viet nam ese
propositions a fairly loose protectorate covering the entire south and the surren-
der of Saigon, My Tho, and Cap- Saint- Jacques, which amounted essentially to an
Indochinese version of the granting of the treaty ports of Canton and Shanghai
seemed to a number of po liti cal fgures to be more favorable to commercial pen-
etration of Dai Nam than its annexation. Napoleon III, the libre-changistes (parti-
sans of free trade), and the Quai dOrsay shared this point of view. The naval omcer
Gabriel Aubaret, an outstanding scholar and a great admirer of Chinese civilization,
began negotiations in Hue and signed a treaty on July 1,, 18o, that aimed at a re-
stricted occupation. It was never, however, ratifed because of the campaign unleashed
in Paris by a coalescing colonial party backed by the Republican opposition, by
Adolphe Thiers and Victor Duruy, and, in Saigon, by a Comit de dveloppement
industriel et agricole (Industrial and Agricultural Development Committee), jointly
representing business interests and the Navy. For these, no longer just the commer-
cial conquest of China but also control of a vast territory that was within cannon
range the paddy lands of the lower Mekong, an im mense deltaic frontier, a new
Algeria in the Far East was at stake in the polemic.
18
The decision reached in Paris to annex western Cochinchina had been antici-
pated a year before by the signature of a protectorate treaty with the Khmer king
Norodom on August 11, 18o, at the initiative of Admiral Pierre de La Grandire,
the French governor. Norodom, who was also challenged by the revolt of his step-
brother Si Votha in June 18o1, hoped in this way to ofset the reinforcement of the
Thai threat following the lessening of the danger represented to his country by
1ui coioi.i momi1 i,
Vietnam. Trapped in a situation in which it was threatened from the interior and
exterior, the Khmer court had only one choice. The preceding sovereign, Ang
Duong, had already sought French aid at the time of the Montigny mission to Kam-
pot in 18,o.
19
A sanctuary for the Viet nam ese guerrillas of the south, and the key
to the Mekong basin, Cambodia was crucial to control of the lower part of the river.
Whoever intended to dominate southern Vietnam must also control Cambodia.
This had been understood since the eigh teenth century by the Viet nam ese em-
perors, who had forced the weak Khmer state into a tributary dependence with the
goal of consolidating their control of the delta. It was in essence this same tribu-
tary strategy that the French authorities took up. Through it, Cambodia was to
become the base for an eventual expansion into Siam and toward the Mekong basin.
With the failure of Phan Thanh Gians mission, the nonratifcation of the
Aubaret treaty, and the advent of the protectorate over Cambodia, the fate of the
last Viet nam ese provinces in the south (Vinh Long, Chau Doc, and Ha Tien) was
sealed. Between June 1, and i, 18oo, with the backing of Napoleon III, notwith-
standing the hesitation of the Foreign Ministry, Admiral de La Grandire annexed
the western provinces of the delta without warning. As Hues imperial commis-
sioner (kinh luoc) in the south, Phan Thanh Gian, who had sought a realistic tem-
porary compromise in order to renegotiate the 18oi treaty and modernize the coun-
try, reluctantly gave in and then committed suicide. One year later, on July 1,, 18o,,
a Franco- Siamese treaty confrmed the French protectorate over Cambodia in re-
turn for the transfer to the Bangkok government of the three Khmer provinces of
Battambang, Sisophon, and Siem Reap.
Protests and awkward proposals for compensation by Hue were rebufed by
the French, who henceforth controlled southern Vietnam. Colonization had pre-
vailed, in spite of the literatis refusal to collaborate, the administrative void cre-
ated by the departure of the mandarins of western Cochinchina, and the re sis -
tance of peasant guerrillasrenewed in 18o, by the sons of Phanh Thanh Gian
and continuing until December, through the uprisings of the Achar Sva (Sua)
(18ooo) and the Buddhist thaumaturge Pou Kombo (June 18ooDecember
18o,) at the frontier of Cochinchina and Cambodiaas well as the last serious
revolt of 18,i in the region of Soc Trang, Tra Vinh, and Ben Tre.
I NTERLUDE ( 1867-1878)
After 18o,, French expansion in Indochina entered a period of remission, which
persisted until the so- called Opportunist Republicans came to power in France in
18,,. Napoleon IIIs disastrous Mexican adventure (18oioo); the Prus sian defeat
of the Austrian empire at Sadowa (18oo); the battle of Sedan, when the French
emperor and his army surrendered to the Prus sians (18,o); the Paris Commune
(18,1); and the sharp confict between Republicans and monarchists in the years
i8 1ui coioi.i momi1
that followed all contributed to paralyzing the French colonial thrust. For France,
Eu ro pe an issues once again were the priority.
The Tonkin Crisis of
This crisis exploded in the continuation of the great Mekong exploration that had
begun in 18ooo8. Led by two naval omcers, Ernest Doudart de Lagre and Fran-
cis Garnier, the expedition explored the course of the Mekong for i,ooo kilome-
ters (as well as the course of the Yangtze River for ,oo kilometers) and proved its
impracticability as a navigable route into China. It discovered the existence of silk,
tea, and textile exports from Yunnan via the Red River.
20
The commercial myth of
Yunnan was thus born and would remain powerful until the end of the century,
despite the fact that Consul Alexandre Kergaradec had proven the limits of the Red
Rivers navigability after his two trips upriver in 18,o and 18,,. From then on, ac-
quiring privileged access to Tonkin became a necessity for French imperialism, par-
ticularly since Britain was exploring ground routes between Burma and Yunnan.
It was the start of the race to Yunnan between the French and the British. An ac-
tive lobby of French businessmen in China rallied to this project notably, Jean
Dupuis, who had been established in China since the Second Opium War (18,8oo)
and furnished arms to the Chinese imperial forces that put down the Yunnan Mus-
lim uprising of 18,,,, and Ernest Millot, former president of the board of di-
rectors of the French Concession in Shanghai as did the Catholic Missions, the
Navy, and the colonial administration of Cochinchina.
In March 18,, Dupuis had successfully led an arms convoy to the Chinese Mar-
shal Ma via the Red River into Kunming. A pretext for military intervention pre-
sented itself when Viet nam ese mandarins detained Dupuis in Hanoi with his return
shipment of salt from May to October. Dupuiss objective was to establish, with his
Chinese partners, a two- way fow on the Red River of Eu ro pe an products and min-
erals from Yunnan, in order to open the region to Eu ro pe an trade under French
control. Determined to intervene, Admiral Marie- Jules Dupr, the governor of
Cochinchina, who had ordered the reconnaissance of the Red River in 18,i, seized
the opportunity. On October 11, he sent Francis Garnier to Hanoi with iii men
and four small ships to omcially settle the Dupuis afair. Just then, a Hue delegation
arrived in Saigon to obtain the restitution of the three Cochinchinese provinces an-
nexed by France in 18o,. In fact, Garniers main mission was to obtain from Hue,
by negotiations started in Saigon or by force, a new treaty that would grant the open-
ing of the river to French trade, the annexation of western Cochinchina, and, pos-
sibly, a protectorate in Tonkin.
21
Duprs strategy was aimed at fnding an eco-
nom ical way to force Hue to capitulate, as had been done in 18,8. In view of the
Viet nam ese refusal to negotiate anything other than the evacuation of Dupuis, Gar-
nier, actively seconded by Monsignor Paul Puginier, the bishop of western Tonkin,
decided to use force. He proclaimed freedom of navigation on the Red River under
1ui coioi.i momi1 i
French protection on November 1,, 18,, and on November io, he seized the citadel
of Hanoi, followed by other strategic points in the delta. He also installed pro- French
authorities in the provinces of Nam Dinh, Ninh Binh, Hai Duong, and Hung Yen.
It all failed, however. Garnier was killed on December i1 at the Paper Bridge by
Black Flags, former Taiping insurgents who had taken refuge in North Vietnam
and were hired by the Viet nam ese administration to fght the French. In Tonkin,
unrest was spreading throughout the country. The emergence, dating back to 18o,
of a powerful anti- Christian movement among the literati (evidenced by demon-
strations of candidates during examinations and calls for the massacre of Chris-
tians, those French of the interior, and Prince Hong Taps plot in 18o) culmi-
nated in 18, with the Van Than movement.
22
Following the example of Monsignor
Puginier, the Catholic communities had often helped Garnier. Hundreds of Chris-
tian villages were burned in Tonkin and in Nghe An. In Paris, reticence took hold:
occupying Tonkin was out of the question. Instructions of January 8, 18,, enjoined
Dupr to retreat.
Dispatched to Hanoi, Lieutenant Paul Philastre, who was very hostile to Gar-
niers initiative, signed a new, ambiguous treaty with the imperial government on
March 1,, 18,, under which France would evacuate Tonkin and promised mili-
tary aid to Hue. In turn, the imperial city acknowledged the abandonment of the
western provinces of Cochinchina, accepted the creation of joint customs houses
and of concessions, temporarily entrusted the direction of its customs to the French,
and legalized Christianity once more. It also agreed to the presence of a French res-
ident in Hue and accepted French consulates, all protected by restricted garrisons,
in Hanoi, in Ninh Hai, near the future Haiphong, and in Thi Nai (Binh Dinh). The
commercial treaty of August 1, 18,, proclaimed free trade on and around the
Red River. Through the treaty of March 1,, Vietnam saw its entire in de pen dence
from China recognized (art. i) and was promised French military and naval assis-
tance, in return for the ac cep tance of French protection although the Viet nam -
ese negotiators refused to allow the word protectorat to be used and a vague agree-
ment to conform its foreign policy to that of France.
In spite of the Hue concessions, the afair of 18, was a serious setback for the
defenders of the extension of colonization to all of Dai Nam. The monarchist gov-
ernment of the duc de Broglie had liquidated the Garnier expedition as cheaply as
possible. The conservative majority in the National Assembly, which was commit-
ted to giving priority to continental patriotism and was strongly hostile to the pol-
itics of conquest, especially since it might lead to confict with China, searched for
a compromise in Asia. In 18,,, reverting to Aubarets approach, Minister of For-
eign Afairs Louis Decazes declared that France had entirely renounced its protec-
torate over Annam. This fnal respite temporarily strengthened Dai Nams Confu-
cian monarchy. However, given the limitations of its own thinking, the Hue regime
was only able to take advantage of this last chance in a traditionalist manner.
23
o 1ui coioi.i momi1
The treaty of 18,, however, included several possibilities that never saw the
light. The frst of these was the establishment between France and Dai Nam of a
relationship of noncolonial dependence, similar to the unequal relationship of
in de pen dence that Britain was in the pro cess of forming with Siam and China.
The second was that of a fnal respite for the government in Hue, one that Tu Duc
and his entourage, henceforth more open to reformist ideas, probably hoped to use
in order to proceed, with French technical aid, toward a limited modernization of
the empire along the lines of the Chinese Yangwu yundong (Western activities
movement). They were undermined in this, however, by the echo among the literati
of the anti- Christian subversion of the Van Than, and of their radical refusal of any
reconciliation with the foreigners. Furthermore, the court never conceived of its
relations with France as other than a vague tributary allegiance. The treaty of 18,
therefore inevitably led to a number of incidents. Hue, where the proponents of a
traditionalist re sis tance quickly dominated once again, accumulated the barriers
to the development of foreign trade in Haiphong and reinforced its tributary links
with China. In 18,o and 188o, the court sent emissaries bearing tribute not to the
border village of Nan Ning, as was customary, but directly to Beijing. In 18,8, it so-
licited Chinese military aid against brigands and insurgents in Tonkin. The strength
of the dominant po liti cal categories in Viet nam ese society, the mobilization of Viet-
nam ese literati against the treaty, as well as against Christians, pressure from the
colonial lobby in Paris, and the chain of events probably at that point destroyed
the possibility of imperial Dai Nam avoiding colonization. The brief encounter
of the bureaucratic elite of Vietnam with Eu ro pe an modernity came too late.
The Rise of the Colonial Idea
During the lull of the early 18,os, a decisive debate took place in France that led to
the politics of colonial expansion abruptly accelerating after 18,8. Without this,
the annexation of the whole Indochinese peninsula would not have been conceiv-
able. Nationalist ideology was reor ga nized around the colonial project, and the
French imperialist doctrine took hold. Indeed, after 18,1, colonization gradually
became a central part of the collective vision of the national future. Colonialism
it would seem that the term was introduced into the French po liti cal vocabulary in
18, by a ferce adversary of overseas expansion, the liberal economist Gustave de
Molinari made its appearance in the form of a vast movement of thought that
saw the general functioning of French society, the future of the nation, and colo-
nial development as intimately connected.
The essential texts were the economist Paul Leroy- Beaulieus De la colonisation
chez les peuples modernes (published in 18, and reprinted fve times by 1o8) and
Gabriel Charmess Politique extrieure et coloniale (188,). Leroy- Beaulieu laid the
theoretical foundation for the rallying of liberal economic thought, until then very
reticent, to the colonial idea. During the 188os, the majority of liberal economists,
1ui coioi.i momi1 1
like Charles Gide, Frdric Passy, and Lon Say, ultimately accepted colonization,
all the while looking to promote free trade in the colonies instead of protection-
ism. For them, colonizing was no longer a marginal activity, but rather a response
to the irreparable weakening of France in Eu rope, to the Eu ro pe an crisis of French
nationalism, and to the profound upset of the national consensus caused by the
events of 18,1. It was, furthermore, a legitimate response: Republican culture in-
deed took it upon itself, throughout the nineteenth century, to develop a messianic
vision of liberating colonization that would propagate the Republics founding
trinity, science, progress, and democracy, to the ends of the earth. The duty of civ-
ilization to native peoples, Jules Ferry asserted in 188i, was to proclaim the law
of work everywhere, to teach purer morals, to spread and to transmit our civiliza-
tion. It was to deliver the blessing of the Eu ro pe an civilization, as Admiral Charner
had already put it in 18o1.
24
Between 18,1 and 188o, the Republican idea, the ideal of the nations self-
representation, in the midst of reconstruction, was enduringly projected into col-
onization. Finally, the colonial dream corresponded, more prosaically, to the Re-
publican preoccupation with the necessity of establishing a form of social regulation
at the heart of industrial nations. For the advanced French Republicans, start-
ing with Lon Gambetta (president of the Chamber of Deputies, 18,81; prime
minister, 18818i), who truly inspired the resumption of overseas expansion, colo-
nial imperialism would be the crutch of equality. It was the indispensable stabilizer
of a nation torn apart by fve revolutions in the short period from 18o to 18,o,
the shock absorber of the fall in the fortunes of the traditional elite and the petite
bourgeoisie, as well as the proletarianization of the peasantry. A nation that does
not colonize is bound irrevocably to socialism, to the war between rich and poor,
Ernest Renan prophesized in 18,1.
23
Social peace, in the industrial age of humanity,
is a question of outlets, Jules Ferry said.
26
Colonial administrators and theorists
such as Paul Bert, J.- L. de Lanessan, Joseph- Simon Gallini, Auguste Pavie, and
Paul Doumer sprang not only from the new Republican bourgeoisie made up of
the notables of commerce and industry, but also from the milieu of small manu-
facturing and small rural landowners, from the new social strata whose arrival
Gambetta had predicted in a famous 18,o speech.
The colonial project, a historical new deal counterbalancing the disasters of re-
cent French history, showed an unpre ce dented capacity to mobilize supporters,
notwithstanding that it deeply divided opinion. It did so largely through the sci-
entifc movement: numerous scientifc institutions, such as the Musum dhistoire
naturelle (Natural History Museum) and the infuential Socit nationale daccli-
matation (National Zoological Society), todays Socit nationale de protection
de la nature, founded in 18, by Isidore Geofroy Saint- Hilaire as the Socit im-
priale zoologique dacclimatation; learned societies dealing with po liti cal econ-
omy, such as that of Lyon; and most especially by the geo graph i cal movement. In
i 1ui coioi.i momi1
the de cade following 18,1, ten geo graph i cal societies were created on the model
of the Socit de gographie de Paris, which rallied to the colonial expansion in
the 18oos under the impulsion of its powerful general secretary, Charles Maunoir,
and had i,, members in 188,. One of the most active was the Socit gographique
de Lyon, created in 18,. The representatives of the business milieu joined them,
and their involvement created parallel societies devoted to commercial geogra-
phy, which sought to stimulate prospecting for new outlets for French industry.
A case in point is the Socit de gographie commerciale de Paris (Paris Com-
mercial Geography Society), which chose Dr. Jules Harmand, former companion
of Francis Garnier in Tonkin, as its vice president in 18,8. Already coming to-
gether before 18,o, expansionist and intellectual lobbies and circles constituted
themselves into an intricate network connected with the po liti cal and business mi-
lieus of France.
Indochina occupied a central position in the great colonial debates between 18,
and 188o.
27
More than virtually any other area of expansion, Indochina efectively
condensed the entire colonial problematic, and one cannot overemphasize the deci-
sive importance that it had for the future of French colonial imperialism in the 188os,
just as it did sixty- fve years later, in the twilight of empire. Although rendering
dependent what remained of Vietnam incited violent opposition in France, notably
during the great Indochinese crisis of French politics in 188,, the defeat of this
opposition, already foreshadowed in the previous de cade, ultimately gave the French
colonial project its true opportunity. Missionaries, omcers, voyagers, and explorers,
such as Jules Harmand during the course of his fve journeys to the Mekong basin
in 18,,,,, preceded colonial possession with scientifc possession, creating a new
geopo liti cal imaginary. They reinvented Indochina, a new term whose former
hyphen (Indo- China) was subsequently elided, the imagined territory where a colo-
nial domain could be created out of a geo graph i cally unknown area.
Francis Garnier was especially active in this regard. In 18,, he published his
Voyage dexploration en Indochine, a remarkable account of his exploration of the
Mekong from 18oo to 18o8, which had a great deal of success. Between 18,1 and
18,, he also published six articles and booklets on the necessity of commercial
penetration of central China. The notes that he brought back at the beginning of
18,, detailing his journey to Sichuan were published in 188i as De Paris au Tibet.
Jean Dupuiss literary activity was also signifcant: he published fourteen articles
and six books between 18, and 188o; in 18,,, in a speech to the Paris Geo graph -
i cal Society, he denounced the inertia of French politics in Annam. The Socit
acadmique indochinoise (Indochinese Academic Society) was established to pro-
mote the studies of Trans- Gange India,
28
and more or less romanticized narra-
tives about the peninsula multiplied.
Not only did Indochina become part of the texture of the new national idea, it
also became one of the priorities of the newborn Third Republics foreign policy,
1ui coioi.i momi1
as is shown by the imperialistic leanings of Gambettas newspaper La Rpublique
franaise at the time of the Garnier expedition. The campaign of the so- called Tonk-
inois merged with what Raoul Girardet has called the nationalisme dexpression
mondiale (global nationalism) of the Opportunist Republicans. This interest in In-
dochinese afairs, as elaborated on in the writings of Jules Harmand, Paul Berts
son- in- law Joseph Chailley- Bert, Jules Ferry, J.- L. de Lanessan, Paul Doumer, and
Albert Sarraut,
29
among others, would long remain central to the development of
French colonial thought.
FRENCH CAPI TALI SM AND COLONI AL EXPANSI ON
I N THE FAR EAST AFTER 1879
Certainly, the new colonial discourse was a vehicle for fantasies that intoxicated
its authors as well as French opinion, myths that multiplied a hundredfold the
promise of the fabulous Chinese market, or of a new Louisiana in Tonkin, which
would be the source of many disappointments over the next twenty years. How-
ever, the project of opening a commercial route to Yunnan and Sichuan via Tonkin
strongly oriented the resumption of French expansion in the Far East.
Classic Colonial Interests
The resumption of colonial expansion in Indochina was part of a fundamental
movement that one cannot simply limit, as the solidly installed clich would have
it, to the actions of a small lobby of opportunists and speculators aided by a hand-
ful of omcers and priests. It is not that their actions were negligible. The classic
colonial interests were actually more active than ever. The new Gambettist ad-
ministration; the merchants and the colonists of Cochinchina a true colonie
colonisatrice (colonizing colony); the colonys frst civil governors, Charles Le Myre
de Vilers (18,8) and Charles Thomson (1888,), Gambettas former secre-
tary; and the deputy Jules Blancsub, republican mayor of Saigon and a friend of
Gambettas, all amrmed their position in favor of expansion into central and north-
ern Indochina. Their dictum was, as the historian Alfred Rambaud, who was close
to Jules Ferry, wrote: Extending is the only means of preserving.
30
The pressure from the business milieu and from the speculators should not be
underestimated either, especially that of Dupuis and Millot, who were closely
linked to the Gambettists and to Charles de Freycinet. In 188i, Dupuis founded
the Socit dtudes et dexploitation du Tonkin (Society for the Study and Ex-
ploitation of Tonkin) with the view to investing, with the participation of Hong
Kong capitalists, in the coalfelds of northern Vietnam plans also claimed by an-
other group or ga nized by a nephew of Ferrys, Bavier- Chaufour.
31
These milieus
produced the myth of the Tonkin mines, as well as several maps distributed dur-
ing the parliamentary debates of May 188, which bore fanciful captions such as
1ui coioi.i momi1
Mung- t- tchen- po: grosses ppites dor [big gold nuggets], Muong- lou: riches
mines dor [rich gold mines], and so on.
The interests of the French Army and Navy also should not be disregarded. Tonkin
and Annam, in par tic u lar, ofered points of logistical support, since they could
supply the coal that would be required by a feet with global range along the lines en-
visioned by the Jeune cole (Young School) of Admiral Hyacinthe Aube and Com-
mander Franois Fournier, which argued for a more mobile force based on cruisers,
torpedo boats, and ships lightly armed with torpedoes.
32
The doctrine prevailed for
a time with the nomination of a Republican naval omcer, Admiral Jean Jaurguiberry,
to the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies in 18,8o, and again in 188i8. In
18,, he proposed the frst plan for occupying Tonkin, which called for a corps of
o,ooo soldiers. More than ever, it seemed that possession of Indochina would deter-
mine the future of French naval power in the Indian Ocean and the Pacifc.
Finally, after 188o, with the Church and the Republic increasingly at odds, ter-
ritories that could be colonized also became indispensable grounds for compro-
mise. Even though the Catholic missions were more reserved toward the conquest
between 18,o and 18,, certain members of the hierarchy, notably Albert de Mun
and Monsignor Charles Freppel, a monarchist deputy for Brest from 188o to 181,
threw all their weight behind occupation of the whole of Indochina.
The New Economic Problematic
These infuences, however, were only successful because they seemed to answer a
more fundamental economic exigency. Certainly, the best historians often reject
this type of explanation, with seemingly solid arguments to back up their point of
view. We know, for instance, that Jules Ferry invoked the commercial imperative
only after having taken the po liti cal decision to conquer Tonkin. It is also certain
that we should not view the creation of the protectorate over Dai Nam and Laos as
the work of fnancial capital (in the Hobsonian or Leninist sense of the term), born
of the fusion between large industries and banks, and of large monopolist groups
looking to divide the peninsula between themselves. These groups, which would be
very active in Rus sia and in Turkey after 1oo, hardly existed in France at the time,
and they could in no way have been behind the Indochinese enterprise of the 188os.
There are however, two reservations to this evaluation. First, colonization of the
peninsula was the springboard of the expansion into China for coalescing French
fnancial capital. Second, Indochina was long the site of the accumulation and for-
mation of important segments of this fnancial capital, in par tic u lar, of the power-
ful Banque de lIndochine, today the Banque Indosuez. For these two reasons, the
colonial Indochinese enterprise can in hindsight be said to have truly participated
by anticipation, if you will in the imperialistic quest for new realms of proft.
Other data, in contrast, show the extent to which economic decisions were
essential in the French colonial ofensive in Indochina. French capitalism, along
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,
with all the industrialized economies, sufered a long depression in 18,,, which
reached its low point in 1888,. The metropolitan economy faced both indus-
trial stagnation industrial growth rates were negative in 18,, 18,,, 18,, and
from 188 to 188, and a crisis in terms of profts and the exportation of mer-
chandise. France had never known such a long period of economic uncertainty
in the industrial era: between 18,, and 1o,, its GNP at current prices augmented
by only 1o, compared to 11 for Germany and oo for the United Kingdom.
All of the sector indicators confrm the depth and per sis tence of these dimculties.
The mechanisms of proft accumulation and creation were undermined. The de-
terioration of profts followed the fall of returns on investments in the home mar-
ket, which was itself caused, as Jean Bouvier has shown, by the hyperaccumulation
of capital that had taken place around 18,o. For example, the Crdit lyonnais,
founded in 18oo with 1o million francs in deposits, had roughly 1,8i million
in 1881. From then on, the export of capital became more critical than ever as a way
of raising and regulating the rate of proft. Considerable before 18,o (,oo million
francs invested abroad on average each year) but hesitant from 18,o to 188, (with
a yearly average of 1, million), this export of capital underwent a recovery from
188, to 18, (with a yearly average of o million), before reaching a record level
from 18o to 11 (with a yearly average of 1,ioo to 1,oo million).
33
During the eco-
nomic depression, colonies that could take their place among the principal outlets
for these capital fuxes were viewed as solutions to the problem of fnding sites for
the proftable investment of excess capital. It was indeed precisely at the beginning
of this cycle of recession, on January i1, 18,,, through the initiative of the Comp-
toir descompte and the Socit gnrale, that the Banque de lIndochine whose
infuence on Frances Indochinese politics still needs to be elucidated was founded.
34
Compounding the crisis in proftability was the weakening of French foreign
trade, whose key role in the sale of metropolitan products must be kept in mind.
Over the nineteenth century, exports steadily increased as a proportion of Frances
physical product, but they slowed to around .i, billion francs a year between
188o and 1o (fg. 1.1). During the period from 18,, to 11, French trade was
at its lowest point in 18,,, and in 18,8, the commercial balance began to show a
stubborn defcit (fgs. 1.i and 1.).
French economic and po liti cal leaders thus saw the creation of captive consumer
markets as an emcient riposte to a situation that was all the more serious because all
of Frances principal commercial partners, with the exception of En gland, adopted
protectionist legislation in the 188os. As J.- L. de Lanessan, the future governor- general
of Indochina, noted in 188o:
Industry at frst only worked for the home market, through exchanges between
cities and the countryside; but soon this market became too narrow, and industry
was compelled to manufacture for export, that is, for foreign nations. However, the
o 1ui coioi.i momi1
same things have occurred in these nations, the same evolution has taken place in all
civilized nations. . . . With the number of unindustrialized civilized countries de-
creasing every day, it is increasingly outside of them that manufacturers are obliged
to search for consumers.
33
Gambettas decree of November 1881 transferring responsibility for the colonies
from the Ministry of the Navy to the Ministry of Commerce, and his decision to
place at the head of these two departments spokesmen for commerce from Mar-
seille and Bordeaux, Maurice Rouvier and Flix Faure, were signifcant in this re-
gard. No less revealing was the debate that ensued in the Chamber in 188 under
pressure from the textile industry of northern France, which wished to abolish the
free trade that a Senate decree (snatus- consulte) had established for the colonies
in 18oo. This debate led to a vote for the assimilation of the customs regulations
of the colonies to those of the metropolitan France in November 188,, and then
to the protectionist Mline customs tarif on January 11, 18i.
Jules Ferry would amrm forcefully that the most dependable escape from the
crisis, a necessary corollary to the resumption of growth, was through colonial
policy that was the daughter of industrial politics. This was not simply a com-
mercial fantasy, as is frequently said today, even if the mirage of the markets of
Tonkin and Yunnan had some misleading efects. In fact, the entire fabric of French
industry and agriculture gradually formed strong ties with colonial markets, and
many businessmen pushed for their conquest, or at least accepted it which was
already a great deal. Nevertheless, there was no automatic direct causal link between
economic determination and the conquest of Indochina. It was this larger move-
ment that gave unity to the conglomerate of businesses and the very heterogeneous
iicUvi 1.1. Relationship between French exports and production (percent), 1,81
11. (Based on data from J.- C. Toutain, Les structures du commerce extrieur de la
France, 1,81,o, in La position internationale de la France: aspects conomiques et
fnanciers, XIX
e
XX
e
sicles, ed. M. Lvy- Leboyer [Paris: Editions de lEcole des hautes
tudes en sciences sociales, 1,,].)
iicUvi 1.. French foreign trade after 1oo. (Based on Jeanneney and Barbier- Jeanneney,
Les conomies occidentales, 1:io.)
iicUvi 1.i. French foreign trade until 1oo. (Based on J.- M. Jeanneney and E. Barbier-
Jeanneney, Les conomies occidentales du XIX
e
sicle nos jours, vol. 1 [Paris: Presses de la
Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 18,], p. io.)
8 1ui coioi.i momi1
interests that would come together to form colonial capitalism. The main indus-
tries of the time pressured for Indochinese expansion. The cotton industry of the
north, in Rouen and the Vosges, which in 18,, was still the third largest in the world;
Le Creusot and Paris metallurgy; and the Lyon silk industry all demonstrated their
interest in the endeavor.
36
Their goal remained China. It was a goal outlined by
Francis Garnier, who wrote in an article posthumously published in 188i: There
is no possible future for our manufacturers if we do not claim our share of the Chi-
nese market, or if we continue to pay British or American middlemen a high com-
mission on Chinese raw materials.
37
Thanks to Jean- Franois Kleins research, the Lyon case is now well known.
38
The Lyon silk industry was the only French industry whose production was domi-
nant on the world market; it was endangered, however, by the rise of silk manufac-
turing in Milan and the Rhine port of Krefeld in Germany. Moreover, after the pe-
brine disaster, it became dependent on imports of Chinese raw silk. In 18,,, i
of the silk manufactured in Lyon was made with these imports; in 1oo, o.,, and
in 11o, .8.
39
Inasmuch as Indochina was potentially a substitute source of raw
silk, the Lyon trade was deeply concerned with its development. Its major frms in-
vested in the activities of the Banque de lIndochine and of the British Hong Kong
and Shanghai Bank. In 18o, its silk merchants opened a silk- trading house in China
directed by the young Ulysse Pila (18,1o). In Lyon, the factory own ers, the
bankers, the silk merchants, and, with them, the ironmasters of the industrial basin
of the Loire, their newspapers, the chamber of commerce, the Socit gographique,
and the Socit dconomie politique constituted a powerful pressure group, di-
rected by Pila and the banker E. Aynard, a liberal deputy of the Center- Left. Around
1888, this group, already in existence, converted to the Tonkin project of the
Gambettists and Ferryists. At this point, they planned to penetrate and develop
southern China commercially via Tonkin, which was strategically placed for the pur-
pose and would only need to be equipped with economic infrastructure. Henceforth,
they subscribed to the idea of a French protectorate at the southern frontier of the
Qing empire, entailing colonization of Indochina based on free trade. To this end,
the Lyon chamber of commerce and Socit gographique, with the support of a
dozen other chambers of commerce, or ga nized Paul Brunats mission for the com-
mercial exploration of Tonkin in 1888,. They leaned heavily toward military con-
quest. Allied to business circles in Marseille and Paris, and to the cotton industry of
eastern France, they were jointly active in the Banque de lIndochine, starting to in-
vest before 1oo (perhaps around 1, million francs) in harbor and river infrastruc-
ture in Tonkin, as well as in the trading of Annam salt for Yunnan opium. Pila helped
found some of the frst businesses in the protectorate: Messageries annamites a
vapeur in 188,; Docks et magasins gnraux de Haiphong in 188o; and the Com-
pagnie lyonnaise indochinoise in 188. An active Republican, he became the coun-
selor to his friend Paul Bert, with whom he maintained close ties after the latter
1ui coioi.i momi1
became resident general in 188o. Pila also or ga nized an important colonial exposi-
tion in Lyon in 18. He was to be one of the true found ers of French Indochina.
Ten years later, when the breakup of China was being planned, French business
pressure for more aggressive economic penetration of southern Chinathe great-
est still unexplored market in the world, according to the British explorer Archibald
Colquhoun
40
intensifed. The French focused on Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and
Guangxi. As in the past, pressure was often applied by competitive business and
the chambers of commerce that spoke for it. In 18, at the initiative of the inde-
fatigable Pila, those of Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille, Roubaix, and Roanne es-
tablished the Mission lyonnaise dexploration commerciale en Chine, directed by
Henri Brenier (18,,). This time, however, powerful industrial and banking in-
terests with links to the Quai dOrsay and the Army also intervened. They took ac-
tion not through the classic channels of the chambers of commerce but by going
straight to the top of the government. Indochina was the base for their activity
in China, where they, especially the Banque de lIndochine, were readily tempted
by the possibilities of cooperating with foreign capital in the creation of interna-
tional consortiums which were ultra- imperialist, in a sense aimed at equipping
the country, notably with railroads.
In June 18o, the Compagnie de Fives- Lille obtained authorization from the Chi-
nese to build a railroad from Longzhou to Dong Dang, extending the HanoiLang
Son line; but in the end, it was not built. The line from Yunnan (Haiphong- Kunming)
was the object of a series of technical and economic missions to China. In 18,, the
Comit des Forges (Ironworks Committee) created the Socit dtudes industrielles
en Chine, which the following year sent out the engineer Dujardin- Beaumetz, an im-
portant member of the committee. This mission was completed by the Guillemoto
and Belard missions in 18,8, and those, much more prudent in their conclusions,
of the consuls Auguste Franois (18) and Haas (1oo1o) to the upper basin of
the Yangtze. For its promoter Paul Doumer, who was closely tied to big business
particularly to the Union des industries mtallurgiques et minires and the Com-
pagnie gnrale dlectricit, over which he would preside in 111 the construction
of this railroad was a necessary prelude to the annexation of Yunnan. The decrease
in orders for the construction of railroads in Eu rope helped to valorize the project
for heavy industry and the large French banks. Because the Quai dOrsay deeply dis-
agreed with Doumers methods, it was with dimculty that a consortium was created,
in 188, based on Guillemotos hasty report, for the construction of the line, which
gave birth to the Compagnie franaise des chemins de fer du Yunnan in June
1o1. The consortium grouped together the main French banks (Comptoir national
descompte, Socit gnrale, Crdit industriel et commercial, Paribas, Banque de
lIndochine) and the major frms of the railway industry (Count Vitalis Rgie
gnrale des chemins de fer and the Socit des Batignolles). A number of mining
unions came into being in 1881oo.
o 1ui coioi.i momi1
THE CRI SI S OF TONKI N AND THE PROTECTORATE
OVER ANNAM TONKI N ( 1880-1883)
The mechanisms to advance French colonization in Indochina were therefore
established, particularly once the question of the po liti cal regime was settled in
France after the crisis of May 1o, 18,,. Yet this advance would be singularly hesi-
tant. Colonization was held up both by the complex decision- making pro cess that
accompanied it, composed of initiatives on the ground, as well as governmental
decisions the empire was being built both at its center and its periphery and by
the vigorous re sis tance it incited in France. Opponents included liberal economists
like Gustave de Molinari; nationalists for whom the annexation of Tonkin signi-
fed the abandonment of Alsace- Lorraine; and monarchists, like the duc de Broglie,
who disagreed that colonial policies were in any way a compensation for the mis-
fortunes experienced in Eu rope. De Broglie long remained attached to the idea of
the primacy of continental issues, denouncing the entrapment of France in the
wasps nest of Tonkin. Furthermore, the question of Indochina, the symbol of
the colonial project, profoundly divided the Republicans. Like the Socialists, the
Radicals, whose program of 1881 and electoral manifesto of July 188, rejected all
politics of conquest, denounced its risks and implications. They believed it was im-
possible to reconcile overseas expansion with the recovery of external dynamism
within Eu rope, and, most important, that it signifed the exclusion of all social re-
form policies and any hope of raising the standard of living of the pop u lar classes
of France. Colonialism was, in other words, the abandonment of radicalisms orig-
inal great historical project in favor of external growth. You want to found an em-
pire in Indochina. We want to found the Republic, said Clemenceau, who lucidly
celebrated the best of the outlets, the interior outlet, much more powerful, much
more desirable, more proftable in the true sense of the word, than the external out-
lets, so problematic and so costly.
41
What ultimately came decisively into play in the dramatic engagement of the Re-
public in Indochina was French capitalisms commitment to growth. French opin-
ion would never be unanimous on the subject of Indochina. More than any other
colonial conquest, that of Indochina took place with very small parliamentary ma-
jorities: hardly four votes at the time of the great parliamentary debate on Tonkin
on December i1i, 188,. It unfolded against a backdrop of violent opposition, in
par tic u lar, in 188,, after the fall of Prime Minister Jules Ferrys government on March
o, when it became the central theme of the October legislative elections.
With rare exceptions, however, such as Yves Guyot, a radical representative of
the Seine and future minister of public works, this opposition was largely moti-
vated more by power struggles, by what was at stake in metropolitan politics, than
by any fundamental critique of colonialism, or even of the actual situation in In-
dochina. Only isolated individuals such as the Bonapartist Jules Delafosse, an elected
1ui coioi.i momi1 1
representative from Calvados, carried out this kind of fundamental critique. As for
the anti- colonialism of the Radicals, they did not challenge the principle of colo-
nization, but rather its methods and the priority over social goals accorded to it by
the Opportunist Republicans. Nor did they challenge the idea of a hierarchy of
races, the ideological pillar of colonization. In fact, denouncing the Indochinese
policies of Ferry in their name, Camille Pelletan identifed himself explicitly with
this idea on December i, 188,, when he asked: Dont populations of the inferior
races have as many rights as you: You abuse them, you do not civilize them! It
was a remarkable confusion: the opponents of colonization accepted its justifca-
tion. Indeed, Clemenceau would write the preface for Auguste Pavies book la
conqute des curs. Business opportunism, the abuses of colonial management, the
collusion of Frances policy of overseas expansion with the Eu ro pe an strategy of
Bismarck all these were denounced. Indochina, however, was a luxury that would
be accepted, if it were free of charge.
Much more important than this European- centered anti- colonialism was the
conversion of the Opportunist Republicans, in power since 18,,, to the Indo chinese
enterprise, and its insertion into the center of the dominant Republican project.
Their conversion was above all the work of Gambetta and his po liti cal allies, Charles
Freycinet, Jules Ferry, Maurice Rouvier, the young Thophile Delcass, Jules M-
line, Flix Faure, and Eugne Etienne. Between 18,8 and 188o, Gambetta and Ferry
seem to have rallied to the idea of a dynamic imperialism outside Eu rope. For them,
it represented the only possible defense of Frances status as a world power; as Ferry
said, it would not resign itself joyfully to playing the role of a big Belgium in the
world. It was also the principal means of escape from the economic crisis, which
worsened toward 188o, as well as the foundation for a consensus around the Re-
public. For them, Republican democracy, a return to prosperity, and the search for
power and imperialism went together.
Henceforth, France could no longer abstain from taking part in the competi-
tion triggered in Southeast Asia with the thrust of the British from Burma toward
the upper Mekong in 18,,, a British expedition to open a trade route between
Bhamo in upper Burma and Shanghai, under Col o nel Horace Browne, led to the
murder of a British consular omcer, R. A. Margary, evidently with the involvement
of the Qing authorities and from Singapore into the Malay Peninsula. If, at any
given moment, we do not snatch our portion of colonies, En gland and Germany
will seize them, Gambetta declared in 18,8. Numerous votes in the Chamber
notably on May io, 188, when the credits requested by Ferry for the expedition
to Tonkin were approved unanimously by the representatives present
showed that as long as the policies in Indochina did not have serious fnancial and
military implications, they were largely approved. In any case, the tenacious re sis -
tance of Hue to the expansion of Eu ro pe an trade in Tonkin hardly allowed Paris
a choice other than the use of force.
i 1ui coioi.i momi1
At the Congrs international de gographie in 18,8, the French delegation
claimed Annam, Tonkin, and Siam for France. The following day, the campaign
in favor of the revision of the Franco- Vietnamese treaty of 18, became more pro-
nounced. In the following years, national geo graph i cal conferences and the cham-
bers of commerce of Frances great industrial towns multiplied their resolutions
in favor of annexation of Tonkin. One must search there for new outlets to re-
place those that were lost through our disasters of 18,o, the Douai Congrs
national de gographie declared in 188i. Already in July 1881, during Ferrys frst
cabinet, the Chamber had managed to release an initial credit, but the Opportunist
Republicans hesitated until the spring of 188. The project for the complete occu-
pation of Tonkin prepared by Gambettas grand ministre in November 1881 was
struck down in April 188i in favor of a plan for more limited intervention in the
delta, drawn up by Prime Minister Ferry and the governor of Cochinchina, Le Myre
de Vilers, in September of the preceding year. Its prudent approach was in part the
outcome of the crisis in Egypt and the resulting Anglo- French confict. The plan
aimed at deploying only limited forces to take control of the Red River in order to
impose on Hue an interpretation of the 18, treaty in favor of a protectorat cat-
gorique (frm protectorate), in the words of Admiral Jaurguiberry.
Toward War
It was in this context that the Freycinet cabinet, formed in January 188i, sent Com-
mandant Henri Rivire with three companies to Hanoi on March io. Under pres-
sure from French traders in Tonkin and Monsignor Puginier, Rivire attacked the
citadel on April i, on the pretext of neutralizing it. He handed back only a por-
tion of the captured installations fve days later. French policies, hesitant until early
188, were clearly ready to exploit the general weakening of Dai Nams empire.
Paralysis was spreading throughout a power anchored in a conservatism divided
between defenders of peace (chu hoa) and of war (chu chien). A profound misun-
derstanding of the West equally blinded it: His ignorance in all sciences is extreme,
wrote Pierre Rheinart, the former French charg dafaires at Hue, of the infuen-
tial minister of fnance Nguyen Van Tuong in 188,. His conversations with the
French have taught him little, even about our country. He fnds our institutions
strange and does not even understand them. Industrial progress surprises him, but
in and of itself, he fnds little to envy.
42
Most important, however, Tonkin entered
into a pro cess of destabilization, linked to internal causes that are still poorly un-
derstood and to the indirect efects of the great revolts that had shaken southern
China since 18,o. This situation would allow interventionist lobbies to put an end
to governmental hesitation.
The Chinese crisis, in efect, caused the migration of highland populations to
the mountainous areas of Tonkin and Laos. Among them were Hmong groups
who settled on the heights of Tran Ninh and Hua Phan toward 18,,o, as well
1ui coioi.i momi1
as masses of the poor feeing misery and the civil war. Other groups followed after
18o: bands of Yunnan rebels, known under the generic name of Ho, and the re-
maining Taiping troops, who lived of the land, among whom were Liu Yong Fus
(Luu Vinh Phucs) famous Black Flags.
43
They settled around Cao Bang and then
Lao Cai on the upper Red River and were used by the Viet nam ese authorities start-
ing in 18,i, against the rival Yellow (whose leader was Luong Tam Ky) and White
Flags. Implicated in local conficts between the Hmong and the Yao, they were
joined in 18,8 by around 1o,ooo supporters of a rebel military mandarin of
Guangxi, Li Yang Kai (Ly Duong Tai). Northern Vietnam, ravaged by foods,
famine, and bandits, was therefore on its way to being incorporated into the trou-
bled space of southern China, and after April 18,, at the request of the Viet nam -
ese, some regular Chinese troops arrived to fght the Chinese rebel forces, which
were disbanded the following month.
On September o, 188i, the Hue court decided to mount a military re sis tance to
the French challenge. However, stuck between this challenge and the hostility of
the literati, who blamed the court for the successive concessions to the foreigners,
it was internally riven by grave dissensions regarding what attitude to take toward
France. These disagreements heightened following the death of Emperor Tu Duc,
who died childless on July 1, 188. Ministers and regents disagreed about which
policy should be followed: Nguyen Trong Hiep, the minister of foreign relations,
favored a compromise and collaboration with France, while two regents, Minister
of War Ton That Thuyet and Nguyen Van Tuong, were determined, as were the
majority of the literati, to mount an uncompromising re sis tance. The two men were,
however, enemies. Their division degenerated into pitiless struggles for infuence
that led to a serious dynastic crisis and a nearly total absence of imperial power.
Four sovereigns succeeded one another over the course of two years. The frst was
the presumptive heir, Duc Duc (July ioi, 188), nephew and adoptive son of the
defunct emperor; accused of incompetence and of involvement with the French,
he was consigned by the regents to close confnement three days after his acces-
sion. The second was Hiep Hoa (July oNovember o, 188), his uncle, who was
forced to poison himself for the second reason. Then came Kien Phuc (November
o, 188July 1, 188), another nephew of Tu Ducs, enthroned by the re sis tance
party that had been in power at Hue since July 188, who died after a reign of eight
months. Finally, Ham Nghi (August i, 188July ,, 188,), Kien Phucs thirteen-
year- old younger brother, acceded to the throne.
The risk of an armed confict with China, however, hampered French plans for
exploiting the situation in Hue. On December i,, 188o, Beijing warned that oc-
cupation of Tonkin would entail war, and, in August 1881, the Chinese sent thirty
thousand men there. For his part, on the eve of his death, in January 188, Tu Duc
appealed to China for help. The Qing regime was briefy tempted by the idea of a
division of Tonkin as a way of assuring the survival of the tributary system that
1ui coioi.i momi1
associated the Chinese empire with the peripheral states in a relation of superior-
ity. When Rivire attempted, in March 188, to occupy the principal towns of the
delta, a threshold was crossed, and he came up against the Black Flags and the re-
sis tance of Viet nam ese troops, which encouraged a Chinese military presence. It
is clear that what was playing out in Vietnam, as would be the case half a century
later, was a radical shift in the or ga ni za tion of the Far East: in this case, the estab-
lishment there of Western imperialist rule.
The Franco- Chinese confrontation thus had a determining infuence on the out-
come of the four successive phases of the crisis in Tonkin, whose Viet nam ese, Chi-
nese, French, and international dimensions were closely intertwined. After the
negotiation in Beijing of a compromise based on the division of Tonkin into two
zones of infuence, Chinese to the north, French to the south (Boures convention
proposal of December 188i), the second Ferry ministry, constituted on February
i1, 188, disavowed the Boure convention on March , and opted, on March 1o,
for conquest. On March 1i, Rivire occupied Hon Gai, where the engineer Fuchs
had just discovered coal in 188o8i. Liu Yong Fus Black Flags challenged, then
killed Rivire on the Paper Bridge on May 1. His death dramatized the situation
such that on May io, the Ferry government obtained the necessary votes from the
Chamber for the fnancing and consignment of an expedition to or ga nize the pro-
tectorate, commanded by General Alexandre Bout and Admiral Amde Courbet.
On August i, after the seizure of the forts of Thuan An, outside Hue, while Bout
overran the Red River Delta, Jules Harmand, named general civil commissioner
on June 8, delivered an ultimatum to the Hue government. If it rejected his pro-
posal: The empire of Annam, its dynasty, its princes, and its court will have pro-
nounced their own death sentence. The name Vietnam will no longer exist in his-
tory. On August i,, 188, the regents were compelled to sign a drastic protectorate
treaty with Harmand that was a prelude to pure and simple annexation. The Tonkin
provinces, Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, and Ha Tinh, were to be placed under adminis-
tration of French residents, along with the management of customs and external
relations. Binh Thuan was conceded to Cochinchina, and a French resident was to
be installed in Hue, with the right to audiences with the king.
The court, however, still considered all this merely a matter of gaining time. The
war continued in the north, where the main Viet nam ese fortress, Son Tay, fell on
December 1o. The regent Ton That Thuyet, the soul of the re sis tance, fortifed Hue
and secretly constructed a powerful camp entrenched in the mountains at Tan So,
close to Cam Lo in Muong country, as well as building a mountain road toward
upper Tonkin. Intending to revive the old strategy of national re sis tance to foreign
invasion from highland bases, Thuyet had artillery, supplies, and a third of the im-
perial trea sury transported to Tan So.
A second stage in the confict, that of the semi- declared Franco- Chinese con-
fict, began after the summer of 188. Convinced of the weakness of the Chinese
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,
army, Jules Ferry demanded on August that it evacuate Tonkin. He was in fact
seeking to confront both Beijing and the anti- colonial opposition in the French
Chamber of Deputies with a fait accompli. This was why reinforcements, voted on
December 1,, were sent. These policies seemed to succeed: the fall of Son Tay and
that of Bac Ninh, held by the Chinese, on March 1i, 188, led Li Hongzhang, the
principal Chinese statesman, on May 11, 188 (with the Fournier agreement), to
accept the recognition of Franco- Vietnamese treaties, the opening of southern
China to French trade, and the evacuation of Tonkin. Nevertheless, the confict with
China obliged Ferrys government to content itself with the formula of a protec-
torate over Vietnam and not to ratify the treaty negotiated by Harmand. Instead,
a new protectorate treaty, the Patenotre treaty this one defnitive was signed
in Hue on June o, 188. A fundamental charter for the protectorate until 1,, it
too restored Binh Thuan and the administration of northern Annam to the impe-
rial government, as well as confrming an administrative dissociation of Annam
and Tonkin. In Tonkin, the treaty placed the provincial administrations under the
control of French residents (through articles o, ,, and 8). It envisioned Frances di-
rection of the foreign policy of Dai Nam and the installation of a French resident
general in Hue, who was to have the right to personal audience with the emperor,
a stipulation that represented a genuine profanation of the imperial function. For
Vietnam, it was the end of the tributary relationship with Beijing. In Hue, the great
seal of investiture granted to the Nguyen dynasty by the emperors of China was
solemnly melted down on June o in the presence of the court assembly and replaced
by a seal sent from France, carved from a meteorite. The protectorate of Annam-
Tonkin had been established.
In parallel, following forceful action by the governor of the colony of Cochinchina,
Charles Thomson, a much more coercive protectorate was imposed on King
Norodom of Cambodia, with a view to the quasi- annexation of the country by the
colony, under the treaty of June 1,, 188. The treaty envisaged the installation of
French residents in the provinces, who were to control the Khmer governors, and,
in contrast to the protectorate over Vietnam, it stipulated that the resident gen-
eral would take charge of public order, economic ser vices, and taxation, and pro-
claimed the institution of private property and an end to personal enslavement
for debt. Your protection is the cremation of the monarchy, Norodom appar-
ently said.
In a third phase of confict, the war with China revived, following an incident
at Bac Le on June ii, 188, when, in the absence of an order to withdraw, Chinese
units resisted the advance of French troops. Beijing actually felt that a defnitive
retreat should only take place after a defnitive resolution of the confict. In Paris,
intransigence prevailed in the euphoria born of the successes of the spring. The ul-
timatum of July 1i not only required the Chinese government to evacuate Tonkin
immediately, but also demanded the payment of an indemnity of i,o million francs
o 1ui coioi.i momi1
(making China fnance the conquest of Tonkin). Since China refused to pay the
indemnity, There is nothing left to do but deliver a violent blow to that senile old
lady, to take something as a forfeit, that is, to occupy Formosa [Taiwan] and then
wait, Jules Ferry wrote on August i1.
44
Thirty- fve ships of Courbets squadron
once again set up the strategy of territorial collateral. The bombardment of the great
arsenal of Fuzhou took place on August ii, followed by the January 188, oc-
cupation of Ke Long and Tam Sui, Formosas two coal- mining harbors, which the
Navy had long dreamed of acquiring. This was followed by a blockade of the
island, then the February 188, embargo on supply of rice to northern China, and
fnally a landing in the Pescadores in March.
Jules Ferrys maximalist strategy, however, failed because of a violent campaign
of protest on the part of the Radicals and Conservatives, which reduced the gov-
ernments ability to maneuver in the Chamber, and the discontent of the British,
whose trade partially controlled the tramc in Chinese rice. Furthermore, Viet nam ese
and Chinese troops attempted a counterofensive in the Tonkin Delta. Ferry ini-
tially had to come to some sort of compromise and accept unomcial British medi-
ation and a plan for a peace resolution, secretly fnalized by Duncan Campbell on
March 1,, 188,.
Then, suddenly, the unforeseen occurred in Lang Son. After having taken the
city with a powerful column of eight thousand men and advanced beyond the bor-
der with the aim of neutralizing the Guangxi army, General Franois de Ngrier,
returning to Lang Son, was wounded on March i8 at the city walls. The Chinese
were about to withdraw, but de Ngriers substitute, Lieutenant- Colonel Paul Her-
binger, panicked and ordered an accelerated retreat, destroyed his baggage, and
abandoned a battery. Militarily, this had no decisive importance, and diplomati-
cally speaking the accord was almost signed in Beijing, but Jules Ferry, who had
secretly asked Bismarck to intervene on his behalf with China, could not make pub-
lic this fact. In Paris, on March o, panic broke out following an anguished tele -
gram from the new commander in chief, General Ernest Brire de lIsle, who, fear-
ing a Chinese ofensive in the delta, asked for reinforcements. What weighed
suddenly on Tonkin was the shadow of the events of Mexico during the Second
Empire and the idea of a long war with China and of what Le Temps called a colo-
nial Sedan. In the Chamber, Georges Clemenceau and the Bonapartist Jules De-
lafosse led the assault against Jules Ferry, asking for his indictment before the High
Court. Ferry was overthrown the same day, by oo votes to 1, with absten-
tions, for a disaster that did not take place.
43
The victory of the opponents of conquest was, however, short- lived, as is evi-
denced by the last phase of the Tonkin crisis, that of compromise. Charles Four-
niau has demonstrated that it was not the colonization of Vietnam per se that was
at stake during the crisis of Lang Son but rather three questions that greatly sur-
passed it: relations with China, the question of what limits to fx on the fnancial
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,
and military engagement of France in colonial expansion, and the future of the
po liti cal project of the Opportunist Republicans, who aimed to provide a greater
margin to the executive power in relation to the Parliament Ferrys vision of a
strong government and whose failure was marked by the overthrow of Ferry
in a climate of extraordinary violence.
46
The Tonkin crisis squarely established parliamentary dominanceThe Tonkin
question is only accessory: the true struggle is over Frances domestic policy, wrote
Le Tlgraphe on December i,, 188,.
47
It ended with a compromise over Indochina.
Many important chambers of commerce, town councils, and newspapers sought
this solution. They had prematurely denounced a hypothetical evacuation that no
one in the Chamber, not even Clemenceau, had called for. In contrast, o Radicals
out of 1 voted for the ioo million francs and the dispatching of a reinforcement
of 8,ooo men requested by the new government headed by Prime Minister Henri
Brisson and Minister of Foreign Afairs Charles de Freycinet, in so doing granting
it the necessary majority. The Patenotre protectorate treaty of June o, 188, was
ratifed on June , 188,, and ratifcation of the Franco- Chinese treaty followed on
June , sealing the historic compromise between France and China on Indochina.
France gave up all demands for an indemnity and its insular conquests, while China
recognized the French protectorate over Annam- Tonkin, in efect abandoning its
responsibilities as central power of the tributary system, and accepted the opening
of Yunnan, Guangxi, and western Guangdong to commerce and the railroad. In
August 188,, the Chinese troops, accompanied by Liu Yong Fus Black Flags, evac-
uated Tonkin.
Certainly, anti- colonialist opposition remained powerful in France. The leg-
islative elections of October 188, were a defeat for the Tonkinese. On Decem-
ber 18, the commission des ordered to examine the new request for credits
for Tonkin by the Brisson government pronounced on the report of Camille Pel-
letan in favor of evacuation, and the credits were approved by a majority of only
four during the dimcult debate of December i1i, 188,. However, the goal of
this opposition stayed the same: to limit Frances Indochinese action to Annam-
Tonkin; to restrict the level of its military engagement, which the Freycinet gov-
ernment, constituted in January 188o, did; to establish limits on colonial policy; to
assure direct management by the government of the initiatives on the ground; to
establish parliamentary control of foreign policy and the colonial empire that was
being formed. This was the thrust of Paul Berts intervention in the debate. Colo-
nization must be cheap and imply only a limited mobilization of Frances military
and fnancial means.
After the 188, crisis, most po liti cal fgures in the Third Republic, aside from the
Socialists and a few Radicals like Pelletan and Clemenceau, rallied to what hence-
forth was the reality of Indochina, and more broadly, the reality of colonialism. In
the legislative elections of 18, only twenty- eight of those elected condemned
8 1ui coioi.i momi1
colonial expansion in their policy statements. From then on, a consensus on the
legitimacy of colonization was maintained through the formation of what would
be called the Colonial Party. This party was in fact an infuential network of
heterogeneous, often rival, colonial lobbies set up by Jules Ferry, Joseph Chailley-
Bert, and Eugne Etienne. Its main organizations were the Comit de lAfrique
franaise, founded in October 181, and the Union coloniale, founded in 18; the
latters newspaper, La Quinzaine coloniale, and its Indochina section, the Comit
de lIndochine, were, together with the Comit de lAsie franaise, founded in 1o1,
the essential elements. In 1oo, two hundred deputies were members of the Cham-
bers colonial group, and in 1oi, the Radicals held the Ministry of the Colonies
for the frst time in the person of Gaston Doumerge a sign of their rallying to the
colonial cause.
Henceforth deprived of any sympathetic response from metropolitan France, and
cut of from China, imperial Vietnams struggle against colonization was doomed.
Nevertheless, it continued for another ten years, because in the feld, the fnal and
most dimcult phase of conquest was just beginning.
RE SI S TANCE TO CONQUEST: THE CAN VUONG
AND I TS DEFEAT ( 1883-1897)
Hues Military Coup (July , )
The long war of pacifcation in fact started following the arrival in Hue on July i,
188,, of General Count Roussel de Courcyan idiot who can be a good warrior,
according to Bernard Lavergne, the confdant of the Republics president, Jules
Grvy
48
who had been appointed commander in chief and resident general in
April. Brutal and ignorant of the real situation, and against the will of Freycinets
government and the Quai dOrsay, which was in charge of the supervision of the
protectorate, he was determined to forcibly annex Annam and Tonkin, as urged
by the Ministry of Colonies, the Army, and Cochinchinese administration. The frst
step in this direction was clearly the elimination of the regents and the partisans
of re sis tance within the court.
As early as November 188, the strategy of a military coup against the Hue gov-
ernment had been prepared by Pierre Silvestre, the infuential director of Afaires
civiles (Civil Afairs) in Tonkin. He was well informed of the divisions within the
court as well as of the regents Ton That Thuyet and Nguyen Van Tuongs secret
plan to reach the fortifed camp of Tan So, together with the young emperor, Ham
Nghi, in order to call for a general uprising there against the French. General Brire
de lIsle, the commander in chief, had given his approval to the Silvestre plan, which
prefgured the French strategy of December 1o in Hanoi. It consisted of feign-
ing ignorance of the Viet nam ese preparations and taking advantage of the re-
1ui coioi.i momi1
gents and Ham Nghis fight from the capital to proclaim the latters deposition
and replace him with a new emperor, one more docile and accommodating, se-
lected from the imperial lineage.
In Hue, de Courcy made repeated provocations, forcing Thuyet into con-
frontation sooner than expected. On July i he ordered the regents to come to his
own residence the following day, which Thuyet refused to do, and insisted he en-
ter the palace for the imperial audience with his entire retinue through the Mid-
dle Door, which was reserved for the sovereign. With no recourse, Thuyet took
the initiative to start battle. On the night of July to ,, 188,, imperial soldiers
launched a preemptive attack on the French billets and the legation. By dawn, they
had been defeated. The regents, with the fourteen- year- old Emperor Ham Nghi
and the court, set out for the mountain bases of Tan So. Like Tran Hung Dao dur-
ing the Mongol invasion in 1i8, they sought to raise the nation against the invader,
and on July , and July 1, they issued a call for general resistance to help the king
(chieu can Vuong), according to the title of the proclamation of July 1 as well as
for the extermination of Christians.
The French victory in Hue, followed by the sacking of the Forbidden City and
taking of the imperial trea sure (perhaps i.o tons of gold and o tons of silver, a
small part of which was subsequently restituted to the court), had resolved only
the problem of the monarchys submissiona matter that was fnalized already on
July ,, with the return to Hue of Regent Nguyen Van Tuong (who would be ar-
rested on September o and deported), and then of the queen mother, Tu Du (Tu
Ducs mother), and of the majority of the court. Certainly, the partisans of re sis -
tance quickly lost their supporters in the high mandarinate and in the royal fam-
ily, who were determined to assure the continuity of the imperial regime and the
social status of the ruling class at any cost, even dependence. With the help of some
of the high mandarins, notably Nguyen Huu Do, the governor of Hanoi, who was
promoted to grand chancellor and then to kinh luoc (imperial commissioner), de
Courcy was able to impose the additional agreement of July o, 188,, which ex-
tended the protectorate regime instituted in Tonkin to Annam and gave the resi-
dent general the right to preside over the Secret Council (Co Mat Vien). On Sep-
tember 1, he enthroned a new emperor, Dong Khanh (188,8), a nephew of Tu
Duc and future son- in- law of Nguyen Huu Do. This was a crushing humiliation
for the dynasty, which was discredited in one blow.
49
French control, however, was precarious. Outside Cochinchina, the expeditionary
corps occupied only the principal towns of the Red River Delta, Lang Son, Hue, and
three ports in Annam. Elsewhere, Thuyet and Ham Nghis appeal, heard throughout
the provinces, motivated a formidable re sis tance movement known as the Can Vuong
(Help the King), which spread to Cochinchina, where several conspiracies would be
discovered in 188, in the region of Saigon. Thereafter, Annam was put to fre and
sword, as the new resident general, Paul Bert, telegraphed after his arrival in 188o.
m.v 1.i. Viet nam ese re sis tance to the French conquest, 18,818,. (J. M. Pluvier,
Historical Atlas of South- East Asia [Leiden, 1,], p. ,.)
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,1
Viet nam ese re sis tance, moreover, developed simultaneously with major events
in Cambodia, where a general insurrection broke out in January 188, under the
impetus of Norodoms longtime adversary, his stepbrother Si Votha.
30
Practically
the whole of Khmer society entered into dissidence by protesting against the treaty
of June 1,, 188, imposed on the king. The latter refused all cooperation with the
French authorities, whose military helplessness was total, insofar as they could not
fght on two fronts, Vietnam and Cambodia. The Can Vuong would force them to
choose and to divide the military tasks. In August 188o, Saigon and Norodom
signed a new agreement, the third, putting aside the treaty of 188. After a series
of tours through the provinces, the king obtained the submission of the insurgents.
Cambodia had escaped annexation pure and simple.
National Re sis tance
The Can Vuong movement, remarkably analyzed by Charles Fourniau, was a gen-
uine national insurrection. The French authorities denied its importance and ap-
plied to it, as they had to the Chinese rural banditry of the high region of Tonkin,
the Viet nam ese notion of piracy ( giac), which in the mandarin tradition was
a way of defaming any rebellion. This allowed for the double legitimization of
repression, in terms both of the Confucian order and of the Republican vision of
a pacifying and civilizing colonization. What enables us to say, Jules Ferry would
write, that piracy is in a way only an accident, and that it will only have a relatively
short duration, is that it is not inspired by a feeling of patriotism and in de pen dence.
The Annamese has almost no national spirit.
31
Negating the existence of a Viet-
nam ese nation was a way of justifying the colonial theories of an antagonism be-
tween the Tonkinese and the Annamese or between the peasantry and the man-
darins, as well as projects to convert them from a protectorate to a regime of direct
rule like that in existence in Cochinchina. Until 188,, in fact, Cochinchina, on which
the protectorate of Cambodia already depended, tried to annex the two southern
provinces of Annam, Binh Thuan and Khanh Hoa, and to constitute an Indochi-
nese Union centered in Saigon.
32
High commissioners and omcers did not all agree, however, and some saw that
it was refusal to recognize the national character of the Can Vuong movement that
led the policies of pacifcation from one defeat to another until 181 (see app. 1).
Men like the former general commissioner of Tonkin Jules Harmand (see app. i),
Col o nels Armand Servire and Thophile Pennequin, Captain Gosselin, and es-
pecially Governor- General J. L. de Lanessan had a clear- sighted view of the move-
ment. The conclusions that de Lanessan, then a Radical deputy, came to in 188,
following his mission to Indochina were categorical: It is in the name of patrio-
tism that Annam rose up after July 1,, in the same way that Tonkin had already re-
volted.
33
This was a lucid assessment of an uprising that was a response to the un-
pre ce dented national crisis that the installation of the protectorate and the partition
,i 1ui coioi.i momi1
of Tonkin had precipitated within Viet nam ese society. The imperial court surren-
dered to a barbarian invasion that it did not have the conceptual means to efec-
tively evaluate. With this capitulation, it was not only the dynastys supposed celes-
tial mandate that was shaken; the entire collective psychological fabric was ripped apart.
The cosmic order suddenly began to unravel: Now the sky is low, the earth is high,
34
as a pop u lar song proclaimed. In the midst of this terrible moral trauma, the only vi-
able response was to follow the call of legitimate power. In the eyes of the people,
Emperor Ham Nghi, exiled in the provinces of Quang Binh, represented the home-
land struggling against the foreigner, Col o nel Fernand Bernard noted.
33
The Can Vuong movement was widespread, but it remained fragmented in
chronologically staggered and poorly coordinated regional uprisings (see map 1.i).
Strictly speaking, Can Vuong designates only the uprising that took place in cen-
tral Vietnam between 188, and 1888 on the part of those loyal to the fugitive king.
But it can be applied to the entire Viet nam ese re sis tance in the sense that their lead-
ers often referred to an ideal royalty as the incarnation of the countrys in de pen dence.
There were four main centers of insurrection. In Annam, where colonial activity was,
in 188,, still unknown, the entire society rose under the direction of its intellectual
elite, in a sense in complete legality, to defend the throne. This was notably the case
in northern Annam, where supporters of Ham Nghi, or ga nized from Ha Tinh and
Quang Binh, and especially around the natural bastion of the high valley of Song Gi-
ang, from where it was relatively easy to reach Laos, had controlled the neighboring
provinces of Nghe An and Thanh Hoa, where the dynasty originated, starting in Feb-
ruary 188o. There, Christians, considered internal enemies, were massacred en
masse, especially in Quang Tri in September 188,, following the cry of Binh tay, sat
ta! (Hunt the Westerners, kill the Catholics!). These atrocious reprisals, which re-
sulted in around o,ooo dead and the destruction of a large part of the Christian com-
munities, left a long- lasting mark on the collective conscience. After the departure
of Thuyet for China in early 188,, the insurgents of northern Annam were never-
theless defeated, and Muong warriors delivered Ham Nghi to the French on Octo-
ber i, 1888. But one year later, in Thanh Hoa, the Hung Linh movement (188
i) developed, under the direction of the prestigious Tong Duy Tan, while the great
La Son uprising broke out in Ha Tinh and Nghe An in 18o, led by the former im-
perial censor Phan Dinh Phung until his death in December 18,.
In southern Annam, less than one hundred kilometers from Hue, where French
presence was sporadic, the two provinces of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai rose up
in a general revolt starting in July 188. More than fve thousand Christians were
ferociously massacred in Quang Ngai in mid- July. In 188o, the re sis tance to the
mandarin collaborators spread to Khanh Hoa and Binh Thuan. It collapsed the fol-
lowing year, however, under terrible blows from the mandarins rallied to Dong
Khanh, Nguyen Thanh in Quang Ngai, and Tran Ba Loc and troops coming from
farther south in Cochinchina.
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,
In the provinces of the Tonkin Delta, on the other hand, the re sis tance was some-
what diferent. Ravaged for a quarter of a century by revolts, Chinese bands, then
the war of 1888,, the country was in fact under no ones control. The intolera-
ble burden of provisioning the large colonial army, its violence, and the incessant
recruitment of carriers for instance, there were 1,ioo coolies charged with car-
ry ing io to i, kilograms each for 8oo fghters when the Borgnis- Desbordes col-
umn fought near Cho Moi in February 188 mobilized the peasantry as much as
the royal summons. Still, the action of the energetic mandarins Tan Thuat, in the
east, and Nguyen Quang Bich, in the west, was also essential. A situation of dual
power was established very quickly in most of the delta, especially in the vast plain
of Bai Say between Hanoi and Hung Yen: indigenous authorities won over to the
colonizer were replaced at night by the clandestine power of patriotic leaders. The
insurgents were or ga nized in several scores of armed groups, rarely smaller than
two hundred and ffty men, and supported by the walled villages, which, accord-
ing to General Henri Frey, were surrounded for the most part by a double or triple
enclosure, made up of a strong bamboo hedge, reinforced on the inside with an
earth wall, which creates a most serious hindrance; between these two successive
enclosures lay deep ponds; narrow, twisting alleys, through which a bufalo can
barely pass, divide the village into innumerable islands, which when necessary can
become as many distinct little forts and centers of re sis tance.
36
The mountain ranges that surrounded the delta, Dong Trieu, Bao Day, Tam
Dao, Yen The, covered with dense forests, were the most lasting bastions of guer-
rilla warfare. They have a permanent core, hardened, disciplined, maintained by
unceasing incursions, and joined, at the leaders call, by contingents provided
by villages of the region, Frey wrote. They are consistently or ga nized in An-
namese style into sections, companies, battalions, and even armies, which they have
pompously named: Army of the Vanguard, Army of the Rear Guard, Right Wing
of the Faithful Army.
37
The guerrillas, clothed in uniforms consisting of blue
shirts hanging to mid- thigh, short trousers, gaiters of strong canvas, espadrilles,
and straw hats, were all equipped with modern rifes quite often Winchester
repeating rifes, whereas the French still had single- shot Gras rifes machetes,
and revolvers for the group leaders.
38
The chiefs were Viet nam ese and given mil-
itary mandarins titles: doc (Chief ) Tich (Nguyen Van Hien), a minor scholar from
the province of Hai Duong, who would be exiled to Algeria; doc Ngu (Hoang Dinh
Kinh, also called the cai Kinh), in the province of Lang Son; doi (Noncommis-
sioned Omcer) Van in the province of Bac Ninh, who would be executed in 188;
and de (Commanding Omcer) Tham, the renowned Hoang Hoa Tham (who com-
bined rural banditry with patriotic re sis tance), in Yen The. Some were Chinese,
like Luong Tam Ky (the head of the Yellow Flags), son of a Taiping, who was in-
stalled in the region of Cho Moi, in the north of Thai Nguyen. In the heart of the
jungle, these guerrilla troops constructed the powerful fortifed systems described
, 1ui coioi.i momi1
by Col o nel Joseph- Simon Gallini in his Trois colonnes au Tonkin (Three
Columns in Tonkin).
Finally, the upper region, close to the border with China, was in the hands of
Chinese bands that had hardly any relations with the Can Vuong. Certain bands,
permanently installed, were made up of former Taiping or imperial soldiers. Others
were itinerant and recruited from Hunanese and Hakka from Hainan who had set-
tled in Guangxi and Guangdong. Among these was Luong Tam Kys band, equipped
with a thousand rapid- fre rifes, which operated in the Dong Trieu in 18i. These
were professional bandits, small- scale local warlords who controlled the frontier
tramc in opium, arms, and women and children sold in China as slaves.
With the exception of the Chinese bands, these movements had common char-
acteristics. Their chiefs made open appeals through posters and placards to Emperor
Ham Nghi, corresponded with his entourage, which had taken refuge in Muong
country, and were certifed mandarins. At Quang Nam, for instance, Nguyen Dung
Hieu, one of the most important fgures of the Can Vuong, was vice- minister of
the war while acting as governor of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai.
39
It was, in fact,
a segment of the imperial po liti cal system that resisted more or less overtly de-
pending on the region in the name of the legitimate ruler. Chiefs of the re sis tance
taxed villages, recruited men, and ordered work duties, or ga niz ing a truly parallel
administration. When Nguyen Dung Hieu was captured in Quang Nam, fve seals,
two hundred and ffty blank omcial certifcates for mandarinal nominations, and
nine hundred tax registers were seized. Numerous mandarins, even in the court at
Hue, secretly aided the uprising or at least ofered some cautious support, while
many others resigned, to the point of provoking an administrative void in Tonkin.
This was only partially compensated for by the nomination of mediocre, venal civil
servants, who, as Jean Dupuis noted, took refuge in duplicity:
Alongside the omcial mandarins named by the French authority and therefore too
embarrassed to overtly conspire against us, there were at this time in every province
of Tonkin former mandarins who had been removed for having previously taken up
against us and who, in the heart of villages where they were hidden among their par-
ents and friends, were the real depositories of royal authority, governing as in the past,
although in hiding, and or ga niz ing their rebellion as best they could. The omcial man-
darins, who knew them well, naturally kept them informed of everything that per-
tained to the cause of the re sis tance and acted only in concert with them.
60
The Guerrilla War
The resistance its guerrilla warfare, its mobilization and dispersal of forces was
remarkably well carried out. Overall, confrontation remained limited to the level
of local guerrilla warfare, but the leaders of the Can Vuong repeatedly attempted
to move beyond this stage and rise above the provincial setting. This was the case
at the end of 188o, when they or ga nized a fortifed base in the heart of Thanh Hoa,
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,,
in Ba Dinh, threatening the French military apparatus at the strategic junction of
its Tonkin sector and central Vietnam, located between the plains and the Muong
country. At Ba Dinh, where the Can Vuong reached its peak, there was an unsuc-
cessful attempt to transition to a generalized and coordinated war.
61
The village
fortress mea sured 1,ioo by oo meters and was constructed in the three villages of
My Khe, Thuong Ta, and Mao Tinh (Ba Dinh: the dinh of the three villages), in
the middle of rice felds that were inundated under several meters of water, con-
nected to solid ground by four narrow dams. It was strongly protected by several
buried enceintes topped with bamboo. Commanded by a remarkable military chief,
Dinh Cong Trang, it was defended by about three thousand men. Three thousand
fve hundred soldiers among them Captain Joseph Jofre, the future commander
in chief of the French Army in 111owere needed, as well as fve thousand
coolies, twenty artillery pieces, and a siege of two months, beginning in December
188o, to capture it, which the French did on January i1, 188,.
62
Certain chiefs or ga nized audacious raids. In July 181, the doc Ngu (Nguyen
Duc Ngu) installed himself in the villages on the left bank of the Red River, oppo-
site Hanoi, and his men opened fre on the French concession, provoking panic
among the Eu ro pe ans. It took an hour to gather ffty colonial infantrymen to re-
spond, and the incident cost Governor General Georges- Jules Piquet his job. Nev-
ertheless, generally, the movements of armed groups did not extend beyond the
theater of two or three provinces (there were twenty- three of them at the time in
Tonkin), and their objectives remained limited. The re sis tance did not expand
beyond a rural war fought by partisans.
The Can Vuong movements troops were in fact mostly peasants. Several of its
chiefs came from among the notables or the wealthy peasantry. Others came from
marginal elements of rural society, like the chief Lo in the region of Son Tay, a young
peasant who became a tirailleur, then a deserter, and was assassinated in 188 at
the instigation of the authorities. The same was true of the renowned De Tham
(Hoang Hoa Tham), born around 18oo; he was a bufalo herder until he was en-
listed by the Black Flags in 188i. He resisted until 18o in the heart of the im-
pregnable forest of Yen The, with three hundred men armed with modern rifes,
supported by the surrounding villagers. A hero who merits our complete admi-
ration, just as he has that of all the Annamese, General Pennequin said of him in
111.
63
Gallini captured his forts in November 18,, and De Tham became a chef
soumissionnaire (under the authority of the French) in 18,. He resumed the strug-
gle in 11, until his assassination by Luong Tam Kys men, who were allied to the
French. It was indeed the peasantry that had to be fought, and it was to the xa, the
Viet nam ese village community, so solidly or ga nized, which supplied the re sis tance
with men and provisions, that the colonial army brought the war. The forest war
was dimcult in the mountains, and no less so in the rice felds, where attacks had
to be made against large Viet nam ese villages situated in the middle of the waters,
,o 1ui coioi.i momi1
entrenched behind impenetrable bamboo hedges, so that they could only be re-
duced through artillery and fre. The central feature of the war of pacifcation was
undoubtedly the battle to secure the submission of the rural community.
But it was the literati, a hostile class par excellence according to Francis Gar-
nier,
64
who furnished the royal insurrection with the majority of its greatest lead-
ers: Mai Xuan Thuong in Binh Dinh; Nguyen Dung Hieu in Quang Nam; the great
mandarin Nguyen Quang Bich, one of the most famous scholars of his time, in
the region of Son Tay; Nguyen Thieu Thuat, former governor of the province of
Hai Duong, in the Bai Say; and the most remarkable of the chiefs of the re sis tance,
Phan Dinh Phung, in northern Annam. In 18,, he disposed of at least 1,ioo to
1,oo rifes. In ancient Vietnam, the literati were the true managers of a still ho-
mogeneous rural society, the equivalent of a lower clergy,
63
whose social func-
tions and infuence were im mense. Often of peasant ancestry, having competed
in literary examinations, they were numerous in villages, to which mandarins of
high rank customarily retired. Almost all of them dedicated themselves to the ad-
ministration of schools, and they possessed great moral authority. They were, ac-
cording to de Lanessan, the most intelligent, active, and the only infuential group
in the country, the ones blindly followed by the workers in cities and the farmers
in the rural areas, the ones who represented, and even the missionaries admit this,
the national party.
66
While the mandarinate, at least in its upper echelons, seems
mainly to have lent a strong hand to pacifcation, especially after 181, a part of
the village elite directed the insurgency until the end and gave it its traditional and
patriotic character, as well as its strength, because it mobilized the village networks
of authority, especially the powerful and solidly or ga nized lineages. Frdric Baille,
the former resident of Hue, wrote in his memoirs of the actions of Nguyen Dung
Hieu in Quang Nam:
This man, still young and of a rare energy, who gradually exhibited a renowned and
near legendary heroism, ended up carving out a true royalty in this province. . . . He
succeeded in giving to the insurrectionary movement of the Quang Nam the di-
mension and prestige of a national movement. It seems that he aroused patriotic fre
in minds that up until then were ill prepared for this idea. His infuence in the province
was extraordinary. On his orders, villages depopulated themselves, peasants set fre
to their cagnas [Annamese peasant houses] to leave a void before our columns.
67
Nguyen Dung Hieu was captured in September 188o and beheaded.
The Colonial War
Until 181, the protectorate army was held in check. The overly large expeditionary
corps it consisted of i,ooo men at the end of 188, and, with troop rotation, tied
up a total of 1oo,ooo,
68
whereas the British conquered upper Burma during the same
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,,
period with only ii,ooo revealed itself to be poorly adapted to the po liti cal and
strategic situation it was supposed to master. These mediocre troops, in part
recruited from dubious units the zephyrs of the disciplinary companies, the
Foreign Legion, sometimes those convicted by military tribunals were chronically
ravaged by epidemics, such as cholera in August through September of 188,, which
killed of the corps.
The French commanders were long incapable of analyzing their adversaries,
whom they indiscriminately called pirates. They only understand the cannon,
Col o nel Gustave Borgnis- Desbordes declared of his colleagues. They oscillated be-
tween a strategy of launching heavy columns in pursuit of the rebels more than
two hundred in Tonkin between 188, and 181 and creating a network of i,
dispersed military stations (postes) to police specifc areas, which devoured reserve
units.
69
They were also torn by rivalries between the Army and the Navy, between
generals and high- level civil servants. Starting in 188,, these rivalries aggravated
the permanent confict between the Ministry of Foreign Afairs and the Ministry
of the Navy and the Colonies; the residents general, under orders of the former,
were determined to maintain the protectorate, whereas the latter favored creation
of a direct administration.
In a report dated March 1888, General- Governor Jean Constans (188,88), sub-
sequently minister of the interior during the Boulangiste crisis, deplored the steril-
ity of this regime of small military stations that cover the territory and multiply
indefnitely and the unceasing comings and goings of columns seeking adven-
ture, the unannounced requisitioning of coolies, which removes able- bodied men
from cultivation to make them beasts of burden who die in pain and leave the roads
strewn with their corpses.
70
The Red River Delta in fact experienced all the hor-
rors of colonial war: requisitions of coolies, of supplies, and of livestock, the sack-
ing of the dinhs (common houses), the burning of villages, summary executions,
baonnettades (as de Lanessan called them) ordered by General de Ngrier, not to
mention the epidemics, the decrease in production, the fight of peasants. As the
re sis tance grew, repressive violence became widespread, as is testifed by innumer-
able narratives, such as this ordinary activity log of the Bay Say column during
the dry season of 188,8o, which is eloquent in its terseness:
18/: the manhunt did not fnd anything, but on its return it picked up two small
groups of Annamese installed amid the rushes in shacks built on stilts these
stray people were executed.
1/: a fying column of ,o legionnaires search a village: a large number of pirates
leave at full speed and run away northward, led by two men on horse back. These
groups fall under our fre. . . . A good number of them are left on the feld. At
o:1,, the village is invaded. . . . A group of i, pirates escape. . . . Half of them are
executed, shot from the exterior observation stations.
71
,8 1ui coioi.i momi1
From 188, to 1888, the French Army and the Viet nam ese militia it recruited
succeeded only in preventing the concentration of guerrilla troops; in occupying
certain points along the border, notably, the sectors of Cao Bang, Lang Son, and
Mong Cai; and in capturing Ham Nghi on October i, 1888, though this did not
prevent the perseverance of the re sis tance carried out in his name. It was neces-
sary to negotiate with several guerrilla chiefs. Through such negotiations, the Chi-
nese Luong Tam Ky became chef soumissionnaire in the summer of 18o and was
granted the administration of the region of Cho Chu, the right to arm ,oo linh co
(soldiers), and an annual salary of 1,o,ooo francs.
72
There was no progress until 18o in fact, quite the opposite. As Charles Four-
niau has shown, during the dry season of 18o1, the Can Vuong reached its high-
est point, a fact explained by the rejection of foreign domination by a peasantry
that was deeply weakened by the burden of the colonial war. Colonization faced a
situation of intense crisis, of extreme upheaval and misery, aggravated by the ter-
rible foods of the Red River. Famine appeared. In the upper region, the French
confronted close to ten thousand men armed with rifes, while in the delta more
than two thousand fve hundred were or ga nized into thirty- seven guerrilla groups.
73
Tonkin, Resident Louis Bonhoure wrote, is an im mense Vende [alluding to the
great peasant uprising in that region against the revolutionary National Conven-
tion in 1,] where the insurgent bands appear at night and disappear in the morn-
ing, dispersing and gathering in the blink of an eye.
74
For the re sis tance, after the
failures of 1888, it was the beginning of a second wind, which was marked by the
movement of Phan Dinh Phung in Nghe Tinh (18o,).
Nevertheless, the re sis tance of the mandarins was defeated. The interpretations
invoked a century later to account for this failure can never fully explain it. Who
can provide an account of the rupture and unrest that explains how an uprising
against foreign domination yielded to national lassitude and resignation: Un-
doubtedly, the major strategic weakness of the Can Vuong was its dispersal, the
impossibility of a coordinated efort on the part of the forces of Tonkin and An-
nam. This was linked as much to Frances military superiority in its confict with
a numerically limited adversary, which, deprived of Chinese help, often did not
have frearms the colonial war brought two unequal technologies into confict
as to the exploitation by the French authorities of the horizontal divisions of Viet-
nam ese society and the internal weakness of the Can Vuong. David Marr has well
demonstrated that the Can Vuong movement was strongly infuenced by region-
alisms and remained dependent on existing structures of authority. The audiences
of its leaders were often limited to lineages and villages where they were rooted.
73
The uprising was confronted with a wait- and- see policy on the part of the rural
elite that is dimcult to evaluate. It is plausible that in Tonkin, the members of this
elite ultimately resigned themselves to accepting foreign domination in the hopes
that it would put an end to the violence that was ravaging the rural areas.
1ui coioi.i momi1 ,
Furthermore, extensive dissidence provided precious support to the colonial
power. The Christian villages were a considerable help to the French troops that
disembarked in 188, and were especially emcient, since their clergy solidly or ga -
nized them and their very existence was being threatened. Victims in Annam, but
not in Tonkin, of the atrocious massacres of 188, there were perhaps forty thou-
sand victims, in the course of the summer, out of about a hundred and forty thou-
sand Christians in the protectorate of Annam the Christians participated in ter-
rifying reprisals against the intellectual elite and rebel peasants and provided many
coolies to the expeditionary corps (more than fve thousand during the battle of Ba
Dinh). In addition, the conficting relationships between the montagnard minori-
ties and the imperial administration weakened the re sis tance precisely in those re-
gions where French troops would have had dimculty maneuvering, although the
Tai of Lai Chau and the Muong showed evidence of a signifcant loyalty to Ham
Nghi and Ton That Thuyet. Finally, the desire to defend the Nguyen was not unan-
imous, for example, among the patriots of the Binh Dinh, who seem to have pre-
served a vivid memory of the struggles of the Tay Son insurgents of the eigh teenth
century.
Above all, in spite of its pop u lar following, the Can Vuong was not a modern
national movement that included a project of social transformation and general
modernization. It was therefore not capable of assuming the historical challenge
of progress posed by French imperialism and colonization. In fact, this question
was only asked by colonization. Even if some within the movement were sensitive
to the problematic of modernization, the primary ideal of the resistant mandarins
and their partisans was defense of the Confucian order and its guarantors, the im-
perial state and the village community, against the Western barbarians. They ad-
dressed themselves above all to the controlling class of literate civil servants, prop-
erty own ers, and rural notables. A proclamation found in a refuge of the Yen The
in 18o reads:
The Western demons will not disturb the kingdom any longer. May all those who
provide them with fsh and meat come to our ranks, may students and the scholarly
elite of the north and the south, the mandarins who have positions and those who
are awaiting one, the children of the mandarin families, may those who are prepar-
ing for the undergraduate examinations and those who have passed them, may all
the district chiefs and all the village chiefs gather in troops and pursue the pirates [the
French].
76
Patriotism, as vigorous as it was, defned itself in Confucian terms of the prince-
subject relation as fdelity (trung) and loyalty (nghia), two virtues linked to that of
flial piety (hieu trung). It was fundamentally attached to the past, conservative, and
loyalist. Thus, when the literati seized the citadel of Quang Ngai in July 188,, they
quickly sought to legitimize their action by naming as their leader Prince Tuy Ly,
oo 1ui coioi.i momi1
the uncle of Tu Duc, who had been exiled to the town by Regent Thuyet.
77
As
Charles Fourniau has remarked, unlike the great Chinese pop u lar revolts of the
middle of the nineteenth century, the Can Vuong did not make even the smallest
of social claims. Its only source of legitimacy was imperial power. The re sis tance
of the intellectual elite and part of the peasant society was tied to the existence of
a nation- state, certainly ancient, but also of a royal nation, whose or ga niz ing ref-
erence point was a monarchical state, which had separated a millennium before
from the empire- world of China. The nation identifed with the dynastic state, but
a modern national ideology did not exist. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it
was still the case that the reigning conception of Vietnam implied an emperor, dy-
nastic loyalty, and a Confucian vision of human relations, a double legitimacy that
found itself hijacked, through the formula of the protectorate, in ser vice of the for-
eigner. Suddenly, the po liti cal reference points of this national consciousness be-
came confused.
Therein resides the fundamental contradiction of the Can Vuong, which was
in a position to exploit colonization from the moment it sought and attained an
alliance an obviously conficting one with the dynasty and the majority of the
mandarinate. In this regard, colonization in Vietnam was not simply a conquest
by the outsider, but just as much an internal pro cess in which a relatively large
number of Viet nam ese to some extent participated. It was therefore necessary
for the colonizers to abandon their dream of a pure and simple annexation of the
country.
A frst step in this direction was sketched out empirically by the great physi-
ologist Paul Bert, who was named resident general of Annam and Tonkin on Jan-
uary 1, 188o, by Freycinet, at the same time as the two residents superior of
Annam and Tonkin, Charles Dillon and Paulin Vial, who were highly perceptive
Catholic administrators. Bert was a Gambettist deputy from the Yonne, the inspirer
of the educational laws of 188o8i in France, ex- minister of public instruction in
the great ministry of Gambetta in 18818i. He was ambitious and imperious,
and imbued with the Republican faith in the trinity of democracy, science, and
progress, which according to nineteenth- century French Republican culture were
to be universalized through colonization. He was also a brilliant scholar, who in
18o had succeeded Claude Bernard as the chair of physiology at the Facult des
sciences de Paris and had discovered animal transplants. Once he entered into pol-
itics, he believed in the grafting of the Republican model onto the civilizations of
the Far East: Indochina was founded as much by the Republic of scientists as by
that of military omcers and merchants. Along with his team (Antony Klobukowski,
Dumoutier, Pne- Siefert, Joseph Chailley), he was favorable, especially when it came
to Tonkin, to annexationist theories and was fundamentally hostile to the man-
darinate. He installed the regime of the protectorate, laid out by the decree of
January i,, 188o, which confded its control to the Ministry of Foreign Afairs and
1ui coioi.i momi1 o1
subordinated military power to civilian power. He also installed the apparatus of
the provincial residents.
Above all, it was imperative, in Berts mind, to develop po liti cal dialogue with
a part of the Viet nam ese society and its elitesto make the Annamese nation
our associate.
78
During his short Indochinese mandate he died in Hanoi in
November 188o this policy was, however, undermined by the propagation of the
simplistic idea of an opposition between the Tonkinese and the Annamese, set in
motion by the establishment of the function of the kinh luoc (imperial commis-
sioner invested with a delegation of imperial power), imposed on Hue on July i,,
188o, in Tonkin. This act removed the north of the country from the direct con-
trol of Hue and or ga nized the partition of the country, a division that would be the
foundation of French Indochina until its collapse in 1,. What did Paul Bert rec-
ommend: In Tonkin, we must have a demo cratic policy, pacify through the peas-
ant natives . . . hence the convocation of an ephemeral commission of elected
notablesin Annam, we must reassure the literati, rebuild the prestige of the king,
pursue an aristocratic policy, pacify through the literate natives.
79
Paul Berts approach failed, but not completely. It pushed him to Vietnamize
pacifcation, which he dared confde regionally to mandarins like Nguyen Than,
whose ferocious campaign of 188, put an end to the re sis tance in Quang Ngai and
who in 18, crushed the insurrection of Phan Dinh Phung. Infuenced by the British
model of the Indian Army native units led by a Eu ro pe an omcer corps the pro-
tectorate would increasingly call on local troops. Starting in the summer of 1888,
the number of Eu ro pe an troops fell to fourteen thousand men, supported by twenty-
two thousand Viet nam ese soldiers.
80
In Annam, there would never be more than
,oo Eu ro pe an troops in a territory that was a thousand kilometers long.
81
In Tonkin,
in 18, there were only ,,ooo Eu ro pe an soldiers and omcers in comparison with
1i,ooo colonial infantrymen. Indochina was controlled and held by a military
apparatus largely composed of the colonized. Bert laid the fscal, bud getary, and
structural basis for the protectorate, established the Garde indigne, inaugurated
the facilities of the port of Haiphong, and sketched the frst outlines of a railroad.
The failure of the annexationist and assimilationist theories to provide the foun-
dation for the colonial regime led little by little to the idea that to counter national
re sis tance, war must frst and foremost be a po liti cal act. This idea appeared with
Governor- General Richaud (18888), who, although he was won over to the strat-
egy of heavy columns, discerned that the key to pacifcation was the village com-
munity, whose notables had to be won over one way or another. It triumphed with
J.- L. de Lanessan, a deputy of the Republican Alliance, nominated governor- general
on April i1, 181, at a point when colonization was at a complete impasse. In that
year, this former naval physician, an important botanist and zoologist, editor of
the works of Bufon, professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and an atheist,
materialist Republican who initially belonged to the radical extreme Left,
82
regained
oi 1ui coioi.i momi1
control of the situation. Through his action, a new intellectual confguration was
brought to bear on colonial administration, based on a scientifc reading of the
relationships that had to be established with subject peoples, inspired by the two
fundamental theses of transformist French anthropology of the end of the cen-
tury: the hierarchical classifcation of societies on the ladder of progress, and the
law of competition and solidarity that was believed to rule the living and govern
the social.
83
De Lanessans project conceived of colonization as the transforming agent of
backward countries. Revived by Durkheimian moralism, it led in 1o, to the af-
frmation of a new concept in Republican colonial policy: association. De Lanes-
san was one of the frst to experiment with it, before formulating its theoretical con-
tent in 18,: colonization was a phenomenon that was natural and historic,
composed simultaneously of competition and cooperation, and by the production
of a directed complementarity between Eu ro pe ans and native peoples in pur-
suit of the development of the world.
84
He founded his politics on the triple recog-
nition of the unity of the Viet nam ese people, the national character of the re sis -
tance, and the organic ties that united the Confucian mandarinate to the rural
society and elite. What was his project: To govern Annam and Tonkin by de-
pending on all the active powers of the country: the king, the court and the Secret
Council, mandarins, and the literati elite
83
in short to defne the terms of a com-
promise with the po liti cal structures of Dai Nam and mobilize what it preserved
of its social legitimacy, even if this meant reestablishing the unity of both the pro-
tectorates of Annam and Tonkin. He argued that the French should govern with
men from the national conservative party, with those who are considered repre-
sentatives of the Annamese nationality and of the integrity of the empire, such as
the regent Nguyen Trong Hiep, who had a great deal of infuence. The protectorate
had to make sense to the Viet nam ese, and this po liti cal ofer would be understood
by their elites.
Through this project, villages benefted from a lightening of recruitment and req-
uisitions, as well as from certain aspects of a developing program of public works,
and taxes were standardized. Pacifcation operations were entrusted to the Garde
indigne and to the linh co recruited in the villages, and as little as possible to the
regular army. At the same time, adopting the strategy recommended by an excep-
tional omcer, Col o nel Thophile Pennequin, and continued by the next genera-
tion of omcers Armand Servire, Joseph Gallini, Hubert Lyautey, Pierre Famin,
and others de Lanessan avoided the mistake of occupying only the lowlands, while
superfcially overseeing the highlands, which in fact strategically commanded the
deltas. In August 181, the mountainous periphery, populated by Tai, Tho, and
Nung minorities, was divided into four military territories, entrusted to the ad-
ministration of omcers. The policy of races, of which Gallini made himself the
theorist,
86
valorized the linguistic, social, and po liti cal ethnic minorities and acted
1ui coioi.i momi1 o
to reinforce them through moderate taxes, the reduction of work to a minimum,
the eviction of Viet nam ese mandarins, and the restoration or consolidation of the
power of customary chiefs (quan lang) and administrative tolerance of their con-
trol of contraband opium. This allowed for the creation of an emcient counter-
guerrilla force through the distribution of ten thousand rifes, duly checked, to the
Tai and Muong villages. The war in Indochina, then, was the beginning of a vast
change in the thinking of the French military elite, which, following the Gallini-
Lyautey school of thought, ended up creating a theory of colonial war, conceived
of as a war that was as much po liti cal as military. It was a theory presented by
Lyautey in his famous article Du role colonial de larme (On the Colonial Role
of the Army) in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1oo.
Finally, the attitude of China was no less decisive. The retreat of the Chinese
troops and the Black Flags in 188, deprived the re sis tance of vital support. The sup-
port that China granted to the authorities of Tonkin following the Sino- Japanese
war of 18 and the 18 Gallini missions to Marshal Su, military commander of
Guangxi, deprived the Chinese bands of a part of their supplies and the indis-
pensable sanctuaries in Chinese territory. A line of bunkers was rapidly built to
block the border, while a second line of militia stations encircled the Red River Delta.
The Franco- Chinese convention of May ,, 18o, instituted an emcient mixed po-
lice system that would assure the control of the border until 1o. In Tonkin, the
Chinese were photographed and forced to carry identifcation cards. Every mili-
tary territory was methodically cleansed by the slow advance of a line of provi-
sional posts the tactics of the oil stain defned by Pennequin and opened up
by the construction of a network of roads and mule paths. The mountainous zone
was thus pacifed between 18i and 18o.
In the meantime, the mandarinate, until then hesitant, seems to have responded,
for complex reasons having to do with its culture of ser vice to the state and man-
agement of society,
87
to de Lannessans ofer, as proven by the attitude of the in-
fuential regent Nguyen Trong Hiep (181oi). The mandarinate moved toward
collaboration starting in 181i. Its role would be decisive. The brief participa-
tion of the respected personality Hoang Ke Vien in the pacifcation of Quang Binh
in 188, was one of the earliest signs of the potential rallying later incarnated in the
fgure of Hoang Cao Khai, the kinh luoc of Tonkin. De Lanessan sought to rein-
force the authority of the court and reamrmed its sovereignty over Tonkin. The
Viet nam ese civil servants, through the network of infuences and domestic and per-
sonal relations that united them to the great lineages, local literate elites, and no-
tables, were in a position to purge village communities. Thus, in 18i, the rela-
tionship of po liti cal forces was reversed. Leaderless, cut of from external aid, and
hunted in the Tonkin Delta, the re sis tance was forced to withdraw into the mid-
dle region, where it became fragmented and separated from the villages. Its po liti -
cal and military horizon gradually narrowed to the mountaintops where it camped.
o 1ui coioi.i momi1
The defection of the court deprived the re sis tance of any credible po liti cal project.
From that point on, it could no longer achieve victory solely by mobilizing an el-
ementary patriotism, particularly since peasant support weakened as the peasants
themselves became exhausted after such suferings.
After 181, struggle was hopeless. At the end of 18,, Phan Dinh Phungs guer-
rilla band was destroyed. In December, the great resister died in the forest of the
high valley of Song Giang, in Quang Binh. After the defeat of the La Son move-
ment, of which Phung was the leading light, the last of the major re sis tance forces,
military initiative passed to the French, where it would remain for a long time.
The government was able to pay for the submission not only of authentic ban-
dits such as Luong Tam Ky but also of the last leaders of the anticolonial guer-
rilla war, like the De Tham in Yen The, frst in April 18 and then again in 18,.
The fnal campaign against the last pockets of re sis tance in the highlands took
place between 18, and 18o. The following year, French forces controlled the
entire country.
THE OCCUPATI ON OF LAOS AND THE FORMATI ON
OF A ZONE OF FRENCH I NFLUENCE I N SOUTH CHI NA
Once Vietnam was conquered, the problem of closing of the Indochinese fron-
tiers to the west came to the fore. The tributary strategies of Hue and Bangkok had
long been in confrontation in the vast Lao and Shan hinterland: in 18o, Siam had
annexed the small state of Vientiane, deported a part of its population to the west
of the Mekong, and then imposed a tribute on Luang Prabang; the principality of
Xieng Khouang and northeastern Laos, however, became dependent on Vietnam in
the middle of the century.
88
By the end of 188,, Frances vague initiatives in Burma
the Franco- Burmese commercial treaty of January 1,, 188,, the Deloncle mission
to Mandalay in May, and the initiatives of Consul Haas had failed. The British
occupied the country in November, which displaced the Franco- British- Siamese
confrontation more to the east, to the Mekong basin.
89
At stake in the question of the Mekong from then on were three major issues.
The frst of these was the future of the Lao principalities, the deeply weakened de-
scendants of the ancient kingdom of Lan Xang and the Tai domains (seigneuries),
which fell under a system of multiple tributes that maintained their autonomous
existence. The region was divided between the royal principality of Luang Prabang,
a tributary of Siam, Vietnam, and more loosely of China; the surviving princely
powers of the ancient states of Vientiane, Xieng Khouang, and Bassac; the princi-
pality of Chiang Khaeng, a tributary of Siam, whose capital was the small center of
Muong Sing, which controlled the passage between Burma and Yunnan; the con-
federation of Sipsong Panna (the twelve principalities) on the high banks of the
river, a tributary of China and Burma; and the confederation of Sipsong Chau Tai,
1ui coioi.i momi1 o,
or ga nized in domains (muong) in the hands of hereditary princes, the chao fa, who
belonged to aristocratic lineages, located on Laotian- Vietnamese border near the
Black River and controlled by the Tai aristocracy, especially by the powerful Deo
Van Tri family in the region of Lai Chau. The second issue was the regional status
of Siam, which was then on the path of modernization, and whose military posts
had advanced after 188,, thanks to the weakening of Vietnam, onto the left bank
of the Mekong toward the Annamese cordillera, to the plateau of Tran Ninh and
the high banks of the Black River. The last issue raised by the Mekong confict was
the opposition between Paris and London. France claimed the right to the em-
pire of Dai Nam, whereas the United Kingdom, whose commercial interests in Siam
were considerable, hoped to connect the principalities of the upper Mekong to
Burma or, at least, to make them into bufer states between British India and
French Indochina.
90
The British also hoped to extend their trade to Yunnan, even
though after 188, London had abandoned the Colquhoun plan of building a rail-
road between Moulmein (Burma) and Simao (Yunnan), which was supported by
the chambers of commerce of London and Manchester but ran into major topo-
graphical and climatic obstacles. Nonetheless, Tonkin was in danger of suddenly
losing its geo graph i cal and economic importance.
After 18o, the Colonial Party of Eugne Etienne and Thophile Delcass; a
Laotian lobby (the Syndicat franais du Haut- Laos) or ga nized in 1888 by a future
deputy of Cochinchina, Franois Deloncle; and also Gabriel Hanotaux, the infu-
ential minister of foreign afairs from 18 to 188, and his entourage of diplomats
connected to imperialist politics, pressured France into abandoning its former plans
to neutralize Siam by transforming it into a bufer state between the British and
French colonial domains. In Paris, the Indochinese Union would be considered
for a time as the initial base for a vast Southeast Asian empire, encompassing Siam
and the Lao principalities. Auguste Pavie, vice- consul to Luang Prabang in 188o,
then general commissioner to Laos, had explored the country. Pavie, a fascinating
self- taught freethinker and nonconforming colonist, was in the midst of conduct-
ing the most systematic study of central Indochina up to that time, for which he
traveled some ,,,ooo kilometers and explored o,,,ooo square kilometers during
his two major scientifc missions of 18o1 and 18,.
91
He was named vice- consul
of Luang Prabang in 188, he arrived in February 188, and disputed the claims
of the Siamese over this land. During an attack by the Tai of Deo Van Tri against
the principality in retaliation for Siamese raids against Lai Chau, as well as during
forays of the Chinese bandits (the Ho) into the principality, he managed to per-
suade Oun Kham, the king of Luang Prabang, caught in the crossfre, to ask for
Frances protection. In the beginning of 1888, Son La, Lai Chau, and Dien Bien
Phu in the Tai country were occupied by military columns and, thanks to the ac-
tion of Pavie, the Tai aristocracy, in par tic u lar the powerful Deo Van Tri fam-
ily, rallied to the French in April 18o. In February 18i, Delcass announced,
oo 1ui coioi.i momi1
following a report from Deloncle and a petition signed by two hundred deputies,
that France was taking back the left bank of the Mekong.
A Franco- Siamese crisis ensued in 18,. From April to May 18, gunboats
traveled up the middle region of the Mekong, while three military columns escorted
the Siamese garrisons beyond the river. In spite of the dispatch of British ships to
Bangkok, a French feet occupied Chantaboun, in the Gulf of Siam, on July 1, 18,
and Pavie, sent as consul general to Bangkok the previous year, delivered an ulti-
matum to the Siamese government on July io. Delcasss objective was to impose
a protectorate on Bangkok. This explains the French demands, the application of
a naval blockade, and the threat of occupation of the provinces of Angkor and Bat-
tambang, which had been ceded in 18o,. Tension was strong between the French
and the British, and compromise was late in coming. Through the treaty of October
1, 18, under pressure from London, Bangkok accepted the evacuation of the
left bank of the Mekong and the demilitarization of a zone of i, kilometers on the
right bank. A combined Franco- British commission was elected to negotiate a set-
tlement on the question of the upper Mekong. It was a dimcult confrontation, since
toward the end of 18, pressure grew in Paris from the Colonial Party and the
general government of Indochina; both were in favor of a protectorate in Siam, in
view of the general dividing up of the Far East that the Sino- Japanese war of 18,
seemed to herald. Bangkok could be part of the prize reserved for us, wrote Gabriel
Hanotaux in June 18,.
92
It was fnally the risk of a military confrontation with Britain, the protector of
Siam, at a time when tension was increasing regarding the upper Nile, the African
counterpart of the Mekong question, that led France to accept the British propo-
sition of October 18, calling for a condominium over Siam. The French- British
agreement of January 1,, 18o, led to the resolution of the confict to the advan-
tage of Indochina; but France abandoned its project of a protectorate over Siam.
The upper Mekong would form the border between Burma and Indochina. The
principality of Chiang Khaeng was split in two along the river: the western half
was included in British Burma and the eastern half in French Laos. The chao fa of
Chiang Khaeng, Sali No, could do nothing but protest; his function would be done
away with in 11o, during the plot of the last holder of the title. Siam was divided
into three zones: a central bufer zone, the valley of Chaophraya, in which the two
countries committed themselves not to send troops or acquire privileges, and two
zones of infuence on either side, British to the West and the South, French to the
East. The advantages, granted by China to France and Britain concerning Sichuan
and Yunnan, would be expanded to the nationals of both powers.
This was in efect a vast regional trade- of between the basin of the Mekong,
henceforth French, and the west and south of the Malay Peninsula, henceforth
under British infuence. In 18,, after the departure of Pavie (nominated in 18
commissaire gnral of Laos and president of the commission to delimit the up-
1ui coioi.i momi1 o,
per Mekong frontier), the Lao principalities were regrouped into two territories
and entrusted to two general commissioners: upper Laos, with Luang Prabang
as its capital, and lower Laos, of which the chief town was Khong. On April 1,
18, they would be merged into a single superior residency, installed in Vien-
tiane. Subsequently, Siam would have to cede territory that had been recognized
in 18 on two occasions: the province of Champassak and the harbor of Krat in
Laos in 1o; the two provinces of Battambang and Angkor in Cambodia and
that of Sayaboury in Laos, in return for the restitution of Krat, through the treaty
of March i, 1o,. The latter was confrmed by the 1io agreement confrming
the demilitarization of the Mekong frontier and specifying the borders along the
river. The division of the Indochinese peninsula, then, was fnally completed on
this date.
Finally, during the same period, the initial goal of the conquest of Indochina, the
penetration of the Chinese market, the only reserve the future holds for us, ac-
cording to Ulysse Pila, was achieved but revealed to be somewhat disappointing.
The Beijing convention of 188, opened three cities in southern China to French
trade and granted the latter most favored nation status. In 188, the consulate of
Mongzi in Yunnan was created, of which the frst two incumbents, Emile Rocher
and Dejean de La Batie, were emcient promoters of French interests. When a group
of Paris banks, with governmental guarantee, granted a loan of oo million francs
to Beijing to fnance the war indemnity that China had to pay to Japan in 18,, this
allowed France to gain recognition, through the agreement of June io, 18,, of the
transfer of Muong Sing on the upper Mekong, the priority for the mining conces-
sions of Yunnan, Guangxi, and western Guangdong, along with the right to extend
railroad lines from Tonkin into Chinese territory. As a result, stimulated by the
Quai dOrsay and by the Ministry of the Colonies, French capital became interested
in equipping China. Vast projects of liaison between the Yunnan tin, copper, and
iron mines and the Tonkin coal mines emerged following various exploratory mis-
sions in southern China, from 18, to 188, sponsored by the Comit des forges.
93
The action of Paul Doumer, ex- minister of fnances, who became governor-
general of Indochina in May 18,, was decisive in this regard. Following his jour-
ney to France in the summer of 188, he garnered support from politicians and busi-
nessmen for the railway and mining projects in South China and campaigned for
the annexation of Yunnan. Some would go so far as to dream of a successful vari-
ant of the ongoing confrontation at Fashoda (on the banks of the White Nile in the
Sudan, where the British and French were then politely deadlocked) on the upper
Yangtze. With the accords of June 1i, 18,, and April 1o, 188, Beijing ceded to the
pressure, committing itself not to alienate any territory to a foreign power in the
three provinces adjacent to Tonkin all the way to the mouth of the Xijiang, con-
ceding to French interests the Lang SonNanning and Lao CaiKunming railway
lines, and granting France a - year lease on the bay of Guangzhouwan, so that it
o8 1ui coioi.i momi1
could build a coaling station there. In several months, the bases of a vast zone of
French infuence were thus established in southern China.

At the end of this half century, thanks to the emergence of a new Asian order, France
was assured of the control of an im mense territory of ,o,ooo square kilometers,
the most populated of its new colonial empire, and of a group of ancient civiliza-
tions and states. Through Indochina, as much as through its colonies in North
Africa and sub- Saharan Africa, France, now republican, succeeded in converting
itself into an imperial society (socit imperiale), to use Christophe Charles term.
94
On the Indochinese peninsula, the management of the relations between peoples
had been profoundly changed. A mode of recognition between po liti cal entities and
authorities based on symbolic relationships like the rites of legitimization prac-
ticed by the frst masters of the earth, such as the Souei in Cambodia; the bor-
rowing of royal titles from Indian traditions; the possession of talismanic protec-
tive images, or palladia; tributary allegiances to the Chinese empire (in the cases of
Dai Nam and of the muong of Luang Prabang) or Siam (in the case of the Khmer
monarchy) was replaced by the modern delineation of borders, the signing of
international treaties, and the imperialist or ga ni za tion of Indochinese space. French
Indochina, far from being an artifcial construct, was the result as much of the dy-
namic of events, of the shock of antagonistic initiatives, as of a program traced out
in advance. In metropolitan France, the arrival of a certain cultural confguration,
the new scientifc, industrial, and Republican culture, made this Indochinese mo-
ment possible. This confguration, in turn, found itself consolidated by the cre-
ation of Indochina. Indeed, between 18o, and 188, the other possible path
that of noncolonial imperialistic expansion in Asia, notably by French imperialism,
carried out through the transformation of the native states into dependent part-
ners of the West, all the while maintaining their po liti cal independence was only
progressively put aside in the Indochinese realm. France ignored this other path
not only because of international constraints and the multiple demands of nineteenth-
century French society but, just as much, owing to the inability of the Viet nam ese
elite to conceive of their future in this other, noncolonial vision of Western
expansion.
Reducing the Khmer kingdom to a de pen den cy was certainly a dimcult task. The
uprising was so widespread in 188,8o that the colonizers, in order to keep
Vietnam their principal objective had to resort to royal mediation and abandon
their project of a pure and simple annexation. As Alain Forest and Milton Osborne
have shown, they were unable to capture the mechanisms of Khmer po liti cal power
without reinforcing the kings symbolic power as the master of existence.
93
In Cam-
bodia, colonization had to be patient, and the identifcation of the nation with its
royal rulers would continue to be reinforced.
1ui coioi.i momi1 o
It was diferent in Vietnam, where the French had to defeat a lengthy armed
opposition and to break the monarchy morally, ideologically, and po liti cally. The
result of this dimcult power struggle was largely determined by the attitude of the
Chinese empire. Constrained to give up its tributary system in Southeast Asia by
the war of 1888,, Beijing outlined what would be Chinas Indochinese policy
until 1,o: while respecting the Franco- Chinese compromise as essential, it sought
to control Frances Viet nam ese adversaries through calculated and limited aid, post-
poning long- term southbound expansion and the transformation of the peninsulas
future modern nation- states into satellites.
The ambiguous and contradictory attitude adopted from 188 to 1888 by the
Viet nam ese Confucian monarchy and bureaucracy, prisoners of their own ideo-
logical tradition, had dire consequences. The actions of Ton That Thuyet, Ham
Nghi, and some mandarins and scholars certainly legitimized the re sis tance, which
would evidently not have had the same impact without it. On the other hand, the
fnal rallying of the court and the mandarinate to the protectorate with the aim of
preserving the monarchy, the dynasty, and Vietnams Confucian hierarchy, no mat-
ter at what cost a logical corollary to the Franco- Chinese accord of June o, 188,
weakened and probably shattered the nations dynastic and royal amliation. In the
eyes of the literate elite, the Confucian monarchy was permanently discredited, and
a breach opened between it and pop u lar patriotism that would never close. The re-
sult was the opposite of what was established in Cambodia: the nation, the dynasty
and, as a consequence, the monarchy were separated. Not only did the dynasty lose
its celestial mandate, but its maintenance on the throne by the foreigners made
any continuation of this mandate impossible and potentially disqualifed the royal
function. Patriotism had to look for other paths.
Thus, from 18o to 18,, the Viet nam ese re sis tance found itself in an ideolog-
ical void a state of moral, po liti cal, and cultural searching. This was all the more
serious for colonization, inasmuch as the Can Vuong had passed on a ferce spirit
of denial to the defeated Viet nam ese society. In 1oo, a perceptive omcer, Col o nel
Fernand Bernard, thinking of the long- term consequences of the defeat of the
literati, underlined the emotional violence he saw appearing: This whole period,
he wrote, has left a hatred that the years will not ease in the hearts of the Annamese
and the Eu ro pe ans.
96
Bernard saw in the defeat of the literati the origin of a po-
liti cal psychology common to most Eu ro pe ans: We can conclude that this fnally
subdued people will not recover the powerful instinct that, so often in its history,
has raised it up against the invader. We believe that we possess the ultimate method
for keeping it in submission. However, he added, repressed feelings persist in the
depths of souls. In the countryside of Annam, they are still thinking of the pro-
scribed emperor, of Ham Nghi and his counselors, of Thuyet and Phan Dinh Phung.
A nave legend has already been created suggesting that they still live in the moun-
tains, ready to emerge when the moment arrives.