Imperialism in Asia: Encyclopedia II - Imperialism in Asia - France in Indochina

Imperialism in Asia - France in Indochina

France, which had lost its empire to the British by the end of the eighteenth century, had little geographical or commercial basis for expansion in Southeast Asia. After the 1850s French imperialism was initially impelled by a nationalistic need to rival Britain and was supported intellectually by the concept of the superiority of French culture and France's special mission civilisatrice—the civilizing of the native through assimilation to French culture. The immediate pretext for French expansionism in Indochina was the protection of French religious missions in the area, coupled with a desire to find a southern route to China through Tonkin, the northern region of northern Vietnam.

French religious and commercial interests were established in Indochina as early as the seventeenth century, but no concerted effort at stabilizing the French position was possible in the face of British strength in the Indian Ocean and French defeat in Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. A mid-nineteenth century religious revival under the Second Empire provided the atmosphere within which interest in Indochina grew. Anti-Christian persecutions in the Far East provided the immediate cause. In 1856 the Chinese executed a French missionary in southeastern China, and in 1857 the Vietnamese emperor, faced with a domestic crisis, tried to destroy foreign influences in his country by executing the Spanish bishop of Tonkin. Under Napoleon III, France decided that Catholicism would be eliminated in the Far East if France did not go to its aid, and accordingly the French joined the British against China in the Second Opium War from 1857 to 1860 and took action against Vietnam as well. By 1860 the French occupied Saigon.

By a Franco-Vietnamese treaty in 1862, the Vietnamese emperor ceded France outright the three provinces of Cochin China in the south; France also secured trade and religious privileges in the rest of Vietnam and a protectorate over Vietnam's foreign relations. Gradually French power spread through exploration, the establishment of protectorates, and outright annexations. Their seizure of Hanoi in 1882 led directly to war with China (1883-1885), and the French victory confirmed French supremacy in the region. France governed Cochin China as a direct colony, and Annam (central Vietnam), Tonkin, and Cambodia as protectorates in one degree or another. Laos too was soon brought under French "protection."

By the beginning of the twentieth century France had created an empire in Indochina nearly 50 percent larger than the mother country. A governor-general in Hanoi ruled Cochin China directly and the other regions through a system of residents. Theoretically, the French maintained the precolonial rulers and administrative structures in Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos, but in fact the governor-generalship was a centralized fiscal and administrative regime ruling the entire region. Although the surviving native institutions were preserved in order to make French rule more acceptable, they were almost completely deprived of any independence of action. The ethnocentric French colonial administrators sought to assimilate the upper classes into France's "superior culture." While the French improved public services and provided commercial stability, the native standard of living declined and precolonial social structures eroded. Indochina, which had a population of over eighteen million in 1914, was important to France for its tin, pepper, coal, cotton, and rice. It is still a matter of debate, however, whether the colony was commercially profitable.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "France in Indochina", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki