CHAPTER 2

A DIVIDED HOUSE AND A FRENCH IMPERIAL MERIDIAN?

GIA LONG’S SUCCESSORS, emperors Ming Manh and Thieu Tri, followed international events closely as they each tried to bring a long-divided Vietnam under control during their respective reigns (Ming Mang, r. 1820–41; Thieu Tri, r. 1841–7). Between 1823 and 1846, the Nguyen court dispatched at least twenty official delegations to island Southeast Asia, what the Vietnamese called the ‘southern lands’, to gather information. Others went to China. Emperor Ming Mang put some of the best and brightest in charge of these fact-finding missions and could even make exceptions for those who had been on the wrong side of his family’s victory in 1802. The pro-Tay Son ties of Phan Huy Chu’s family did not prevent him from leading an important mission to China in 1831 and another one to Indonesia in 1832. A decade later another northern emissary with a less-than-perfect résumé, Cao Ba Quat, left for the southern lands on a similar fact-finding mission. With the Opium War underway, the latter provided a detailed and alarmist account of the Western threat. The British ‘Red Hairs’, he warned, were now expanding their colonial control and naval power from Singapore to Hong Kong. The Nguyen rulers read these reports closely, questioned their advisors carefully, and pondered what the expansion of Western power in Asia could mean for their country.¹

Internally, Minh Mang ruled with an iron fist, convinced that it was the only way to bring order to this Vietnam that had never existed before. He respected his father, but the inefficiencies of the empire he had inherited exasperated him and he dedicated his reign to fixing them. As his ambassadors travelled abroad, the emperor embarked upon one of the most audacious and far-reaching state-building projects since the Le dynasty in the fifteenth century. This meant transforming what remained a very militarized polity into a Confucian-structured civilian government. It meant bringing into line many Le, Trinh, and Tay Son partisans who had never really accepted the Nguyen victory of 1802. It meant assimilating and civilizing non-Viet peoples. And it meant taming this unruly spiritual world that had moved south with centuries of colonial expansion and transformed into something quite unique as it connected with Cham, Khmer, maritime, river, and highland spirits.²

Revolutions always come with a price, however, especially when they occur at unpredictable international conjunctures. Minh Mang’s was no exception. Upon his death in 1841, he left behind a deeply fractured country that his successors did not have the time to heal. In 1854, just a few years before the French attacked, Cao Ba Quat died leading a rebellion against the court he had served. Then Le Duy Phung, an angry Catholic with the restoration of the Le on his mind and hungry peasants in his ranks, asked the French for help. While the French turned him down and the Vietnamese emperor had him executed, Vietnam remained a very divided house, as Europeans began to move menacingly into the Southern Sea.

HOLDING IT TOGETHER

Vietnam under Gia Long

When Nguyen Phuc Anh adopted the name of Gia Long and declared himself emperor of an unprecedented Vietnamese unitary state in 1802, he was deeply aware of the fragility of this new political entity and the explosive tensions that could still tear it apart. Unlike his counterparts in Thailand and Burma, who had also emerged victorious after decades of civil war in the eighteenth century, Gia Long stepped more lightly when it came to imposing central control. During his reign between 1802 and 1820, he maintained many of the flexible, moderate, and pragmatic wartime policies that had enabled him to take all of Vietnam. He allowed the Cham to keep their protectorate status and king. The large Khmer populations continued to practice Theravada Buddhism, speak their language, and run local affairs without molestation. The Chinese in Saigon-Gia Dinh, who had suffered greatly during the civil war, prospered under the victorious Nguyen emperor they had supported, as did the Catholic missions.

That said, Gia Long knew he had to establish some sort of order and consolidate a lasting hold on this new Vietnam, the northern part of which his family had never ruled. In the early years, he did what any victor does—he left his occupying army and officers in charge of maintaining order until he could bring in his own people, determine who in the ancien régime could be trusted, and figure out more generally what would be the best model for building a new state. He maintained the Nguyen monarchy declared by his ancestors in 1744 and authorized the creation of a restoration myth to connect it to a timeless royalist tradition. Unlike the Ly, Tran, and his own predecessors, however, Gia Long refused to elevate Buddhism to a national religion. Despite his time in Thailand and friendship with the Chakri Buddhist king there, the Vietnamese monarch never attempted to form a royalist alliance with the Buddhist church, its clergy, monasteries, and schools in order to centralize rule and push its power down to the grassroots. And he rejected out of hand suggestions that he should give Catholicism a try.

More secular-minded, Gia Long turned to Confucianism and Chinese models of statecraft as the best way for bringing all of Vietnam under his family’s rule. To this end, he issued a new law and penal code based closely on the Chinese model, defining correct social relations and laying out the nature of the state along Confucian lines. He restored a regional examination system that had fallen by the wayside during the war. New Confucian academies and schools reappeared across the land to train elites for government service. He dispatched envoys and diplomats to China, including the future author of The Tale of Kieu, Nguyen Du, to study what the Chinese were doing and bring back texts and ideas that could be used in a Vietnamese context. In a bid to show his northern critics that the Nguyen were just as ‘Confucian’ as their predecessors he created an imperial capital in Hue worthy of its name by closely modeling it on the Chinese one in Beijing.³

But once again, theory and practice are two very different things. It was not because Gia Long chose Confucianism as his preferred political model that it became operational overnight. It did not. Gia Long was a military man and proud of it. He had never had the time himself to undergo any formal Confucian training in his youth and probably never gave it any serious thought. He had built his reputation, his army, and his extraordinary victory in 1802 on pragmatism, personal initiative, deal-making, and the power of his word. Secondly, Gia Long knew just how fragile this new Vietnam born of thirty years of war was. The Trinh and Tay Son armies might have disbanded, but loyalties remained deeply divided. The wounds of war might have healed, but the scars remained. Hate and vengeance often lurked beneath a veneer of tranquility. The victorious emperor did not help when he tracked down all of the remaining Tay Son leaders he held responsible for killing his family and then killed what remained of theirs. Thirdly, Gia Long knew the political, military, and economic power of regional lords. His family was one of them and he had helped a new group emerge from a wartime power base in the Mekong delta. Indeed, Gia Long’s longtime ally and dear friend in Gia Dinh-Saigon, General Le Van Duyet, effectively ruled the south after 1802. The emperor rewarded other wartime allies with high-ranking positions in the center and the north. This is why, despite issuing a new Confucian law code, resurrecting the civil service exams, and creating a capital with its own Chinese ‘forbidden city’, the emperor kept a very military regime in place on the ground. For central Vietnam, the court ruled through four military camps and eleven military provinces. For northern and southern Vietnam, the emperor administered five such provinces respectively. During Gia Long’s reign, military lords were as much a part of Vietnamese political culture as was the Confucian monarchy. This duality reached back to the rise of the Mac, the Trinh, and the Nguyen houses in the fifteenth century, if not earlier.⁴

Nguyen political appointees thus tended to dominate the top positions in the postwar state, regardless of the outcomes of civil service exams. Many Le, Trinh, and Tay Son civil servants and advisors withdrew, refusing to serve the new dynasty. But many stayed on out of necessity or conviction to create this unprecedented Vietnam. Such men included Nguyen Du, Phan Huy Chu, and Cao Ba Quat. And of course, Gia Long never had or trained enough officials to run the lower levels of the northern bureaucracy. He maintained pre-existing civil servants in place as long as they continued to do their jobs faithfully.

But as Cao Ba Quat’s revolt would show, Gia Long had to exercise great caution in this northern land where so many elites had served the Trinh, the Le, and even the Tay Son. Indeed, former Tay Son supporters had scattered all over central and northern Vietnam, running into the highlands. None of these groups necessarily saw 1802 as a definitive victory. Nor did they subscribe to the new dynasty’s restoration myth which placed the Nguyen of Hue at the center of a seamless Vietnamese tradition they all knew to be patently false. Many considered the Le, the Red River, and Hanoi to be the real repositories of Vietnamese identity, history, and culture. Loyalty thus remained a constant problem. Nguyen Du’s Tale of Kieu tells the story of the tragic destiny of a heroine who sold herself into prostitution in order to save her family, but some also read it as a subversive reflection on the fate of those who had to serve a dynasty that was never really theirs, never truly legitimate. Rather than attacking all of these forces head on and risking renewed civil war, Gia Long reformed rather than remade what remained a royalist military regime with Confucian characteristics.⁵

The new emperor did promote greater centralization and state control in other ways. He clamped down on all sorts of social and religious unrest. He presided over the creation of new roads, dikes, and canals in order to promote economic development and unity. The construction of the ‘mandarin route’, the precursor to today’s Highway 1, reflected the Nguyen desire to connect the new Vietnam. By circulating administrators from north to south—and vice versa—he sought to stitch the different Vietnams into one administrative body. A new postal service moved information, decrees, and reports across the land, as did the circulation of a standard currency. Gia Long continued military and civilian colonization programs as the best way of increasing agricultural production and relieving population pressures, but his state also cleared land and built dikes. Defense spending remained a priority. Between 1778 and 1819, the Nguyen state produced over 1,482 ships for war and trade while several French-style Vauban fortresses went up along the Vietnamese coast.⁶

Minh Mang’s Revolution?⁷

Gia Long’s son, Minh Mang, was a very different type of leader. Born in 1791, he was too young to have remembered much of the civil war, nor of the near-extinction of the dynasty at the hands of the Tay Son. While he certainly respected what his father and his allies had done, the new emperor was a firm believer in creating a strong civilian-run state instead of the military one he had inherited. He deplored this hybrid system in which ‘failures were seen as achievements and nothing was seen as something’. Minh Mang shared his father’s view that a royal alliance with Buddhism was inoperable, and certainly not with Catholicism, which the young emperor seems to have despised from an early age. Trained in the classics, he saw Confucianism as the best political ideology for making Vietnam work, but only on the condition that he achieve what his father had been unable to do—dismantle the military state, eradicate local privileges and warlordism, terminate special rule for non-Viet peoples, subordinate religions, rituals, and their spirits to state control, and then Confucianize the state and society from the top down. Rational to the point of obsession, intelligent like few before him, Minh Mang devoted his twenty-year reign to creating a modern, centralized state. Ruthless, he would let nothing get in the way of that goal.⁸

Essential to getting this project off the ground was the reintroduction of the Confucian ministerial service, the civil service examination system, and the selection of regional and provincial leaders based on merit, transparency, rotating assignments, and bureaucratic loyalty. In 1821, only a year after assuming the throne, the young emperor established provincial exams on a regular, triennial basis and then opened the metropolitan exam in Hue to the best and brightest, regardless of their regional location or their family’s past. In so doing, he sought in part to assuage northerners who resented his father’s reliance on southerners and military men to run the Red River. He was also betting that the more Confucian-minded northern elite, both the Le and Trinh, would welcome the rebirth of the examination system, providing them with a stake in this new Vietnam and a reason to shift their loyalties to the Nguyen for good. Like the Le, Minh Mang saw in Confucianism, its exams, and the bureaucracy undergirding it, a powerful instrument for political integration and an administrative vehicle for diffusing the court-centered ideology to the lower levels, to local officials and villagers alike.

Mirroring the Thai and Burmese rulers building modern states to the west, Minh Mang agreed that centralized authority turning on rational bureaucratic control could allow for more efficient economic development. Taxes on people and trade would provide the money needed to invest in major infrastructure projects, purchase foreign imports, and pay the salaries of the expanding civil service. Better bureaucratic control extending down to lower levels would allow for the mobilization of the large amounts of labor needed to build new dikes, roads, and bridges. The emperor also supported efforts to promote international trade. He knew that decades of war had allowed an illicit commerce to develop independently of state control. (His father had benefitted from this in wartime.) The emperor accordingly cracked down on the smuggling of rice and opium and in its place promoted state-run commerce with Singapore, China, and the West through approved Chinese, Vietnamese, and European merchants. The Nguyen organized the large Chinese trading community into congregations so as to better control and tax them. The sale of opium now went through a state-controlled Chinese monopoly.⁹

The expansion of European colonialism into the region reinforced this internal consolidation. Minh Mang knew that the Westerners arriving in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in Europe in 1815 were very different from the ones who had helped his father. In 1819, the British acquired Singapore as a colony and overseas base, while the Dutch expanded their direct hold over Indonesia’s interior. In the mid-1820s, when the British extended their rule from India into Burma by force of arms, Minh Mang urged his Chakri counterpart to support the Burmese—rejecting the request of a Burmese delegation in Saigon seeking an alliance against the Thais. He dispatched dozens of missions into Asia, one reporting back from British Calcutta in 1830. The emperor always had an eye on the rapidly changing international situation.¹⁰

But what concerned him most was consolidating his hold over Vietnam. Ironically, the source of the greatest armed resistance to his revolutionary project was not in the foreign north, but in his own southern backyard from whence his father had conquered all of Vietnam and where he had been born. Upon taking the throne in Hue in 1802, Gia Long had left powerful military men in charge of the south. Foremost among them was Le Van Duyet, Gia Long’s charismatic general, close friend, and godfather to Minh Mang. General Duyet and his officers ruled the south for the Nguyen. Though fiercely loyal to their emperor, they also enjoyed considerable privileges in the southern delta, ruling over local fiefdoms and maintaining their own troops. Indeed, behind this southern general stood an array of other people and interests. They included Catholic missionaries, Chinese merchants, non-Viet peoples, local strongmen, and probably Buddhist millenarians too. Most of them had served Gia Long during the Tay Son wars and appreciated the local autonomy they had received in return. Few of them were ‘Confucians’. In fact, the Confucian examination system could only get you so far in this part of the country, where deal-making and heterogeneity were a fact of life. But where General Duyet and his southern entourage saw this as politics as usual and never dreamed of revolting, Minh Mang began to see these people and their looser politics as an obstacle to the modernization, centralization, rationalization, and homogenization of the Vietnam he was determined to build. This is how southern loyalty began to transform into southern sedition and separation.

Upon coming to the throne, the young emperor bided his time; but he let it be known that change was on its way, everywhere. In 1824, General Le Van Duyet intimated to a friend during a trip to Hue to defend Catholic allies in trouble with the court and explain why the Vietnamese should forge an alliance with the Burmese that:

The court recruits civil officials and wants to make a proper ruling system with them. Both of us have risen in the world from a military background. We only know straight expression and quick action, thus violating manners or official rules, sometimes. We are originally different from them. We had better give up our positions [. . .] to avoid possible mistakes.¹¹

The two southern generals tendered their resignations, but Minh Mang wisely refused them. He waited until Duyet died in mid-1832 before making his move in the south, although he had already begun dismantling the military government from Quang Binh upward. As he did so, he replaced it with a civilian-run system based on provinces and governors with the court in charge and the civil service exams in operation. To those tempted by revolt, he sent a clear message that same year, ordering that the surviving male descendants of the Tay Son brothers were to be arrested and executed pour l’exemple. In 1833, with General Duyet finally gone, the emperor decreed the abolition of the semi-autonomous southern military regime based in Saigon-Gia Dinh and ordered its replacement with a civilian government ruling over six provinces with civil governors at the helm. The emperor now divided the kingdom of some eight million people into thirty-one provinces and 283 districts, all falling under three regional administrative groupings: Nam Ky (South), Trung Ky (Center), and Bac Ky (North). To mark the start of this revolutionary project, he changed the name of the country to ‘Dai Nam’, the land of the Greater South.

This administrative transformation included the ideological unification of the civil service and society through the twin policies of ‘cultivation’ (giao hoa) and ‘Sino-Vietnamese acculturation’ (han phong hoa). In 1834, the court promulgated the Ten Articles edict, requiring mandarins to honor Confucian commandments such as filial piety, respect for elders, and moral obligations to the emperor. Civil servants received instructions to explain and apply these edicts at the village level as an instrument of social control. Minh Mang cracked down on heterodox religious beliefs and practices, especially but not exclusively in the Mekong delta, where an astonishing mosaic of religions, millenarian movements, cultures, ethnic groups, and loyalties reigned. He countered these by promoting state-sponsored ancestor worship. To this end, the emperor presided over the creation of a vast network of temples, altars, shrines, indeed an entire pantheon of officially approved heroes, all of which sought to associate the local populations with the court. Minh Mang had no problems grafting this state religion on to local Cham and Buddhist spirits and deities if it reinforced the court’s legitimacy and thus reached the people. But religion had to be under his state’s control.¹²

Minh Mang reversed his father’s indirect rule over non-Viet peoples. Viet civil servants increasingly assumed the administration of Khmer villages, ending centuries of protectorates and indirect rule. Land was surveyed and taxes applied to non-Viet peoples who had been exempted or lightly imposed upon in the past. Accompanying the establishment of direct rule over the Cham were the efforts made to assimilate all non-Viet peoples to a Sino-Vietnamese Han culture, the Vietnamese language, Chinese characters; in short, an inclusive ‘Dai Nam’ identity defined from the capital, from the top down, as part of an East Asian Han civilization. The court required Khmer children in Hue to learn Vietnamese, use chopsticks, and wear Viet-style clothes. Pre-existing Khmer Theravada temples started to disappear as Sino-Vietnamese Mahayana pagodas appeared in their place. By advocating Han ‘cultivation’ and ‘acculturation’, the Vietnamese emperor sought to legitimate local state-building and colonial assimilation. And when the Khmer rose up, Minh Mang smashed them just as he crushed the Cham, Catholics, or anyone else who defied (or even appeared to defy) his control over state power and ideology.¹³

Like the Le in the fifteenth century, Minh Mang’s internal state-consolidation manifested itself externally in the form of aggressive colonial expansion. In 1835, the emperor terminated the vestigial political power of the Cham by formally incorporating Panduranga into the Nguyen administration (see chapter 14). In 1813, in response to the Cambodian king’s request for help to dislodge the Thais, Gia Long had already dispatched General Le Van Duyet to Phnom Penh and placed Cambodia under a protectorate. But in the 1830s, Cambodia proper became a province of the Dai Nam empire. Minh Mang’s court dispatched Confucian-trained Viet governors and civil servants to administer provinces and districts throughout Cambodia. Hue authorities controlled military and economic affairs and applied there many of the same assimilationist policies used against the Khmer minority described above. The court levied taxes, issued orders to build roads, encouraged Viet and Chinese immigration westward, and even hoped to substitute Mahayana Buddhism for its Theravada version inside Cambodia. The Nguyen expanded control over areas in eastern Laos, too, including Samneau, Savannakhet, and Tran Ninh. By 1840, the empire of Dai Nam already looked a lot like French Indochina. Imperial expansion and state consolidation often went hand in hand in modern Vietnam.¹⁴

Like his predecessors, Minh Mang justified the conquest of Cambodia on Han cultural grounds borrowed from the Chinese. Only superior Confucian culture and institutions could civilize the ‘barbarian’ (cao mien or man) Cambodians, he argued. As members of an East Asian Confucian world, the Vietnamese had a duty to introduce modern Sino-Vietnamese administrative institutions and civilization to Cambodia. The Nguyen would bring superior technology to better exploit the riches of this country. And long before the French had done so, the Vietnamese court had already portrayed the Khmers as ‘lazy’ and ‘disorganized’. As Minh Mang explained the Vietnamese mission civilisatrice to his commanding general in Cambodia in the 1830s:

The barbarians [in Cambodia] have become my children now, and you should help them, and teach them our customs. . . . I have heard, for example, that the land is plentiful and fertile, and that there are plenty of oxen (for plowing) . . . but the people have no knowledge of [advanced] agriculture, using picks and hoes, rather than oxen. They grow enough rice for two meals a day, but they don’t store any surplus. Daily necessities like cloth, silk, ducks and pork are very expensive [. . .] Now all these shortcomings stem from the laziness of the Cambodians [. . .] and my instructions to you are these: teach them to use oxen, teach them to grow more rice, teach them to raise mulberry trees, pigs and ducks. [. . .] as for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese. (Our habits of dress and table manners must also be followed. If there is any outdated or barbarous custom that can be simplified, or repressed, then do so).¹⁵

But behind the civilizing mission stood colonial force. Dai Nam mistreatment of Khmer laborers recruited to build the great Vinh Te Canal in the Mekong delta in the early 1820s had already led to a brief but violent revolt. Nguyen troops crushed it, but Minh Mang’s renewed efforts in the 1830s to transform Cambodians into loyal Dai Nam subjects sparked revolts among both discontented elites and hungry peasants. When the authorities in Hue moved to do away with Theravada monasteries and suppress the Khmer monarchy altogether, anticolonial resistance surged, increasingly backed by the Thais. This eventually allowed the Cambodians to regain a fragile Thai- and Dai Nam-backed independence in 1848. (The death of Minh Mang in 1841 helped.) While the territorial limits of the Nguyen state returned roughly to those of 1802, had the Thais not intervened the borders of present-day Vietnam and Cambodia would have been very different.¹⁶

Minh Mang’s territorial consolidation was not limited to the south, however. A policy no less aggressive occurred in non-Viet areas in the northern highlands of Tuyen Quang, Thai Nguyen, Cao Bang, and Lang Son. Until Minh Mang, Vietnamese emperors had followed the Chinese lead in ruling indirectly over these multi-ethnic borderlands. This system, called tusi in Chinese and tho ty in Vietnamese, allowed hereditary Tai leaders to continue administering their people and lands in exchange for their loyalty to the Vietnamese empire, payment of taxes, and support in wartime. In 1829, Minh Mang did away with this hereditary system in favor of one judged more modern and centralized with his state-trained Viet mandarins at the helm. However, local resistance to this revolutionary change in exercising power was immediate. A local chief, Nong Van Van, led a two-year revolt in 1833–5. Minh Mang’s troops would squash it, but the emperor would end up allowing the Nong family to maintain its local leadership. The emperor had no choice. He needed this family’s collaboration in order to rule such distant areas of the empire. Direct administration was impossible in these faraway lands and there were never enough Viet civil servants to be found in Hue who were willing to serve in such an alien environment (see chapter 14).¹⁷

The question, however, was whether Minh Mang’s successors could keep such audacious internal state-building and aggressive colonial expansion on track at the same time as imperially minded Europeans were moving deeper into the region, including a resurging France. While Minh Mang’s revolution of the 1830s established the administrative foundations of this unprecedented Vietnam, his policies generated anger, divisions, and resistance among elites and their constituencies from the Red River and Mekong deltas deep into Laos and Cambodia. Minh Mang’s successors, Thieu Tri and Tu Duc in particular, never had the time to heal these wounds, which covered so much of the country. And the French would take advantage of this divided Vietnamese house in order to promote their own colonial cause.

Vietnamese Catholicism and Minh Mang’s State-Building Project

The pretext the French would use to justify their attack on the Nguyen in 1858 was the court’s persecution of Catholics. However, in 1802 no one could have predicted such a scenario. Gia Long might not have trusted the Catholics and certainly had no intention of becoming one, but his relationship with them was better than any other monarch in Vietnamese history up to that point. Many European missionaries and Viet Christians had helped him to regain his kingdom and unify the country. In exchange, Gia Long accorded them considerable postwar privileges, not least of all the right to practice their religion freely and rebuild their devastated Church. The emperor allowed his Catholic advisor during the Tay Son wars, Bishop Pigneau de Béhaine, to be buried in Saigon. He delivered a funeral oration praising his friend for all that he had done for the country. Little wonder that European and Vietnamese Catholics continued to recognize the legitimacy of Nguyen rule. And in any case, Catholics never exceeded 5 percent of the total Vietnamese population.¹⁸

What transformed Catholicism into a major problem was the collision of two separate projects occurring against the backdrop of European colonial expansion into Asia. The first was the reinvigorated Catholic mission in Dai Nam following the restoration of the Catholic monarchy in France in 1815 and in the context of the religiously liberal Vietnam emerging under Gia Long. The second was Minh Mang’s Confucian-inspired revolution designed to eliminate heterodox threats to rule from Hue and to place Dai Nam and all of its religions under the emperor’s tight control. This is why trouble between Catholics and the Vietnamese court only became a divisive problem during Minh Mang’s administrative revolution in the 1830s—not before. Let us focus first on how Catholicism became such a problem for Minh Mang’s state-building project and then turn to the international conjuncture in order to understand how and why the French found it a useful pretext to justify colonial conquest.

While Minh Mang never hid his personal disdain for Catholicism and would go after Catholics with a vengeance, he was not necessarily singling them out for persecution, at least not at the outset. He pursued others who challenged or appeared to challenge his revolution with the same ruthlessness. This included southern warlords, Cham and Khmer anticolonialists, and defiant peasants, as well as Vietnamese Buddhists and Muslims. In the early 1830s, he sent his troops to attack Cham Muslims who declared a jihad on the Nguyen for Minh Mang’s attack on Islam and who made a last stand to save their land from Vietnamese colonization. Minh Mang crushed Buddhist-minded revolts in the Mekong delta and did the same in Nguyen Cambodia, all the while seeking to promote and impose a Confucian orthodoxy in the place of all of this ‘heterodoxy’. In January 1833 the emperor issued the first kingdom-wide prohibition of Catholicism. A series of subsequent edicts ordered the destruction of churches and the dispersion of congregations and required Vietnamese believers to recant or submit to royal power. Many Catholics, Europeans and Vietnamese, fled the country or headed into the highlands. Others fell into government hands. This attack on religion was an essential part of the wider administrative revolution discussed above, reaching from the Chinese border in the north to the Mekong delta in the south.¹⁹

What sent Vietnamese Catholicism down a particularly dangerous path and politicized it profoundly was missionary participation in the Le Van Khoi revolt in the south between 1833 and 1835. Le Van Khoi was the adopted son of General Le Van Duyet. Opposed to Minh Mang’s efforts to take control of the south following his father’s death, Khoi solicited the support of various groups who also resented their increasing loss of autonomy and religious freedom. Khoi quickly found allies among the Chinese settler community, exiles from northern Vietnam, and even among disgruntled Nguyen civil servants. Catholics, both Vietnamese believers and European missionaries, joined him in the hope that he would restore the religious freedom they had enjoyed under Gia Long. They had nothing to lose, given the emperor’s recent decrees and the hard-handed methods he used to enforce them.²⁰

In May 1833, the southern insurrection began when Le Van Khoi called on people to oppose Minh Mang and remember what his father, the ‘great general’ Le Van Duyet, had done. It was, this time and not before, a southern, separatist call to arms. It also confirmed Minh Mang’s worst fears. In any case, the revolt spread rapidly until all six provinces of the south—called Nam Ky under Minh Mang’s 1833 administrative reform—were in rebel hands. Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Cham, Khmer, and Chinese joined its ranks. It took Minh Mang’s imperial army over two years to smash the revolt and retake the citadel from the rebels holed up in Saigon. Khoi died before falling into imperial hands. However, the emperor showed no mercy toward the survivors. Of the prisoners taken in Saigon, 1,200 men and women were buried alive. Minh Mang ordered Le Van Duyet’s tomb in Saigon to be razed to the ground. The emperor held this family responsible for having planted the seeds of southern secession. That said, it could be argued that the emperor’s inflexible methods had created a separatist problem where there had never truly been one. The emperor was, after all, born a southerner himself . . .

Although Christians were but one group among several opposed to the emperor’s policies, their participation in this revolt convinced Minh Mang that Catholics were inimical to his ability to rule and had to be uprooted once and for all. The public execution of dozens of Vietnamese and European missionaries implicated in the southern revolt, including the gruesome one of Father Marchand, served as a warning to all that he would brook no opposition to his rule. While Minh Mang’s son would temporarily moderate these policies, state-sponsored persecution of Catholics continued until the signing of a treaty with the French in 1862.²¹

This was where Minh Mang’s methods intersected with both the international situation and a French domestic situation that transformed the issue of Catholics in Vietnam. Firstly, this intensive attack on Vietnamese Catholicism coincided with a renaissance of French imperial expansion, to which we will return below. Secondly, imperial persecution of Christians occurred just as French Catholicism and missionary activity in particular was undergoing something of a nineteenth-century renaissance. The restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne in 1815 meant the resurgence of the Catholic Church and of its missionary work, both of which had suffered during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Nowhere was this better seen than in the creation in France in 1822 of the Association de la propagation de la foi (Association for the Propagation of the Faith) and its prolific press, the Annales. Run initially by the Missions étrangères de Paris (MEP) in Paris and backed by the Vatican, this association and its magazine reported widely on the missions, their work, and needs. From the 1830s onward, the MEP and new Catholic media outlets provided readers with detailed accounts of missionary suffering at the hands of the ‘cruel’ Nguyen. By the time of his death in 1841, Ming Manh was well known to French Catholics as a ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘barbarian’ despot. The lurid details of the ruler’s persecution of missionaries attracted a larger readership, solicited sympathy, and generated sizeable financial contributions for the MEP mission operating clandestinely in Vietnam. This and the revival of French Catholicism further strengthened the MEP in Vietnam with the dispatch of a new generation of mainly French missionaries. Highly energized, these young men resumed their proselytizing with zeal. This, in turn, only confirmed Minh Mang’s fears that the Catholics were a fifth column, when that had not, initially, been the case.²²

Lastly, Nguyen persecution of Catholics coincided with the coming to power in 1852 of Napoleon III and the beginning of the Second Empire in France. Not only was Napoleon III a Catholic monarch, but he was also set on making France a global imperial power. This boded ill for the security of Dai Nam, whose leaders failed to grasp how their continued persecution of Catholics in this rapidly changing international context could transform Vietnamese Catholicism into the pretext Napoleon III needed to attack Vietnam. The Nguyen also persecuted Muslims, but they could do this with impunity—the Ottoman empire was in no position to intervene on their behalf in the 1850s in faraway Asia. It was Vietnam’s disaster that—on the far side of the world—political and technological changes were happening that suddenly gave Catholics a powerful and determined sponsor.²³

Internal Instability and International Threats

Minh Mang’s successors, Thieu Tri (1841–7) and Tu Duc (1847–83), did their best to hold Vietnam together following the death of their illustrious predecessor. In the face of dual internal and external threats, they increased their control over foreign affairs, with the Europeans being of particular concern. The court monitored the Opium War, which allowed the British to colonize Hong Kong in 1842 and then join in an international colonial coalition in charge of treaty ports and concessions running down China’s entire coast. The French obtained a concession in Shanghai in 1847. The Americans did too. In that same year, the French navy intervened in Da Nang to free Catholic missionaries, inflicting a humiliating defeat on the Nguyen. The court reacted by limiting travel abroad for its subjects and sought to control foreign trade by confining it to specific ports and licensing Chinese merchants to serve as intermediaries.

Was this the ‘closing off’ of Vietnam under the Nguyen? It was not so much that the Nguyen were turning inward or isolating themselves from the outside world, as that they were trying to keep the coastal colonization of China from extending straight into Vietnam. They also wanted to control access to international contacts, ones which internal foes could use against them to reverse their father’s revolution, or worse. The Nguyen must have been aware of the Chinese Qing dynasty’s inability to keep precisely such international contacts and trade out of the hands of political competitors residing along the southern coast, most notably Ming loyalists, pirates, religious millenarians, and a stream of unemployed, hungry peasants. Nguyen efforts to control external contacts also had much in common with the sakoku or ‘locked’ foreign policy that the Tokugawa house had adopted in seventeenth-century Japan to stop the Portuguese from arming the Shogun’s internal rivals. It may not have been suited to the international context of the nineteenth century, but there was a logic to what the Nguyen were doing and, as in Japan, ‘locked’ did not necessarily mean ‘closed’.

More than anything else, the Nguyen wanted to monopolize contacts with the outside. This is why the state-sponsored rice trade with Singapore and southern China continued to flourish, as did commerce with Hainan, Thailand, and Cambodia. Nguyen rulers continued to purchase and adapt Western military technology and weapons to their local needs. Until the 1830s, Vietnam was home to a surprisingly modern shipbuilding industry. In 1838, the emperor purchased a Western steamship and ordered his engineers to learn how to make one. In fact, the emperor informed his subordinates of the importance of mastering modern naval warfare: ‘I indeed have a cursory knowledge of one or two of the tactics of the Western countries, but I want you all to examine them and become familiar with them . . . and make your findings and calculations into books. We will order soldiers to study them day and night.’ Meanwhile, the Nguyen continued to dispatch diplomatic missions abroad to report on international events, including a delegation led by the Catholic advisor Nguyen Truong To (a firm believer in implementing far-reaching reforms of a Western kind). Unlike the Japanese, however, Thieu Tri and Tu Duc never really had enough time before the French attacked to realign reform away from its Confucian trajectory toward a capitalist-minded one. Instead, they found themselves scrambling from one crisis to another. And like the Qing, the Nguyen not only had to deal with the outside world, but they continued to encounter challenging problems inside, not least of all deep factionalism in the court.²⁴

Environmental problems also undermined the ability of the Nguyen to hold Vietnam together as the French huddled off the coast. Natural disasters, drought, hunger, and disease undermined popular support for the court at this crucial conjuncture. A massive cholera epidemic spread across the kingdom in the late 1840s, combining with famine to kill an estimated 8 to 10 percent of the rural population, roughly 800,000 deaths out of a total estimated population of eight million people. Vietnam was not China, but, proportionally, this environmental tragedy ranked among the deadliest ones marching across the Asian continent at that time. The court struggled to supply rice and relief to the poor all the while taxing them in order to generate badly needed revenue. The peasants were selling their lands to rich landholders in order to survive, and land concentration in the north increased while the potential tax base decreased. Revenues then declined as peasant unemployment took off. Unable to pay civil servants adequately, corruption spread while loyalties realigned, further weakening Hue’s authority. A vicious cycle ensued.²⁵

The Nguyen monarchy did its best to provide emergency relief through aid, as well as through land and welfare policies. Maintaining, improving, and expanding dikes were important concerns for rulers, as was the maintenance of a network of granaries to get people through tough times. State-sponsored shelters for the poor and the elderly existed and there was no attempt to stigmatize poverty. Non-governmental charity groups, mutual aid societies, and relief programs did their best to help the poor, filling in where the state could not. Buddhist clergy across the country did their best to alleviate the suffering. One Buddhist offshoot was particularly active in the south during the cholera epidemic of 1849, the Buu Son Ky Huong sect (or the Mysterious Fragrance of the Precious Mountain). However, as suffering spread, conversions to Buddhism in the Mekong delta took off, something that only reinforced Hue’s opposition to religious meddling in state affairs. Meanwhile, in an ever-stronger financial position thanks to revived Catholicism in Europe and generous donations, MEP missionaries continued their own religious and charitable activities outside state control. And this, as well as increased Catholic conversions among the poor, further fed the ‘religious problem’. Minh Mang’s successors responded with repression.²⁶

However, the very fact that these religious groups continued to function in spite of repeated prohibitions left no doubt that the Nguyen were not in full control at the local level or able to alleviate, much less defuse, major socio-economic problems, hunger above all. In all, some 415 revolts arose to challenge the Nguyen emperors during the first six decades of the nineteenth century. To shore up support, Tu Duc issued decrees exhorting the population to respect state-sponsored tutelary spirits and remain loyal. Between 1848 and 1883, Hue printed some 13,000 certificates, of which over 8,500 applied to villages from Quang Tri northward, but only 3,000 for southern villages. Northern loyalty to the court had clearly become a major concern.²⁷

Rural unrest worsened, loyalties eroded, and new forms of accommodation had thus begun to form as the international situation changed rapidly in the 1850s and the possibility of external intervention and foreign support of local actors increased. In 1854, Cao Ba Quat led his revolt against the court in the name of a Le restoration. Other loyalists teamed up with Catholics, who had already been realigning their relationships with the West as bloody Nguyen persecutions continued. Le Van Duy’s overtures to the French in the early 1860s were driven by the suffering Catholics had endured since the 1830s; but driven too by a wave of peasant hunger sweeping through the countryside. Many Khmer, Cham, and Tai anticolonialists saw the possibility of recovering their earlier independence via foreign intervention against the Nguyen. When the French attacked Vietnam as part of a renewed European assault on China during the Second Opium War (1857–60), the Nguyen state not only remained a politically divided house, but it was also a socially exhausted one.

A FRENCH COLONIAL MERIDIAN AND THE IMPLOSION OF DAI NAM²⁸

French Colonial Expansion into Asia

The French intervened in southern Vietnam in 1858 for a number of reasons. Spreading Catholicism was among the least important of them. Most importantly, colonial possessions provided national and international prestige. Napoleon III firmly believed this. Between 1852 and 1871, through an activist and interventionist foreign policy, he did everything possible to re-establish his country’s grandeur at the global level. His successful participation with the British in the Crimean War (1854–6) against Russia confirmed the return of a European-minded France, as did his meddling in Italian affairs and Papal politics. Outside of Europe, Napoleon sought to build an empire capable of rivaling that of the British, but in fact he could also pursue the same goal in collaboration with the British, as in the Crimean, and especially as the Second Opium War showed in Asia. He promoted the French colonial presence in Algeria, personally traveling to the colony in 1860 and again in 1865. With the United States mired in civil war during that same period, he intervened in Mexico to establish a French sphere of influence in the Americans’ backyard. The campaign ended in a fiasco; but it signaled his determination to make France a global player.

Secondly, the French might have lost their North American empire to the British in the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and their continental one upon Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, but wider forces flowed out of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as the industrious and industrial revolutions and the related emergence of new forms of banking, financing, and insurance. These pushed France in expansionist directions long before the Third Republic took over. Driving this new ‘imperial meridian’, as scholars of British imperialism have put it, were proactive merchants, bankers, financiers, insurers, shipbuilders, and free-trade minded theorists. These ‘gentlemen capitalists’ in Britain and France pushed their governments to open global markets to European industries and finance and to pursue increasingly aggressive colonial policies in Asia in particular. Major French banks and companies established offices in the concessions and ports their government gained during the Opium Wars. Many of the French traders, bankers, and financiers pushing Napoleon III to intervene in Vietnam were already deeply involved in China and others parts of East Asia, indeed the world. These businessmen probably held Napoleon III’s attention for longer than any French missionary telling horror stories about cruel Vietnamese rulers. No account of the French conquest of Vietnam can be fully understood without taking into account the resurgence of Atlantic imperialism in the nineteenth century, its connection to the coastal colonization of China, and the rise of a French ‘meridian’ in the Afro-Asian world. The French were part of this ‘Great Divergence’ that saw Western states, including Japan, push a new economic order on the rest of the world through the creation of formal and informal empires of a capitalist nature.²⁹

Napoleon III did not need much convincing. The emperor fully supported the industrialization and modernization of France. Industrial expansion and financial institutions thrived under the Second Empire, whose leader sought to promote French commercial interests through foreign trade and conquest, formally and informally. He was convinced that colonies would provide much-needed markets for finished industrial products as well as supplying primary materials at bargain prices. He was sympathetic to the emergence and needs of new French banks, insurance companies, and their global expansion. The collapse of older industries, notably Lyon’s silk manufacturing in the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced commercial pressure to penetrate the Asian market. Lyonnais capitalists were involved in what one scholar has called ‘municipal imperialism’.³⁰

Unsurprisingly, naval expansion became a priority both for Napoleon III and those promoting the colonial project. Prestige, commercial, and colonial expansion depended on it. In order to trade with the Far East, however, the French needed strategic bases from which they could fuel and repair their ships, protect their commercial exchanges, and eventually attack. The French possessed Algiers in the Mediterranean and a concession in Shanghai, but they depended on British goodwill for access to China via Singapore and Hong Kong. Admiral Prosper de Chasseloup-Laubat, the Minister of the Navy and Colonies during the vital period between 1860 and 1867, was a vocal supporter of the colonization of southern Dai Nam. Saigon or Danang, he continually repeated to anyone who would listen, could serve as France’s Hong Kong. Moreover, he insisted to the emperor, the Mekong River starting in Saigon could provide an independent water route to the Chinese Eldorado they all wanted to reach. The French ruler listened.

Lastly, the general scramble for Asian colonies in the mid-nineteenth century pushed Napoleon to act. The Second Empire’s attack on Dai Nam in 1858 coincided with the India Act a year earlier, which formally transferred most of the Indian subcontinent from the private imperial hands of the East India Company to the British Crown. Between 1852 and 1885, the British completed their colonization of Burma, transforming it into a province of British India. To the east, the Americans sent Admiral Perry and his ‘black ships’ to Japan in 1854 with an ultimatum to open the country to trade or suffer the consequences. (The former enemies of the Tokugawa overthrew the Shogun and created a new regime, that of the Meiji, whose leaders were determined to industrialize and colonize on a par with the West.) In April 1857, Napoleon III formed a special committee on Cochinchina—the European term for Nguyen Vietnam—and consulted extensively with missionaries, business leaders, and concerned ministers about possible colonial expansion into the Mekong valley. It was in this regional and global context that French missionaries implored their ‘Catholic emperor’ to intervene on their behalf. Napoleon was sensitive to what they were saying, not only because of his own Catholicism but because their persecution would provide him with the perfect pretext for intervening in Cochinchina in 1858, as it would in Lebanon in 1860 and Korea in 1866.³¹

All of this is why, whatever his reasons, Emperor Tu Duc could not have selected a year worse than 1857 to execute two Spanish missionaries. At the end of the year, having attacked Guangzhou with the British during the Second Opium War, Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly received authorization to launch a punitive raid against Dai Nam, together with the Spanish based in their colony in the Philippines. The French attack on Vietnam was part of the wider Atlantic assault along the East Asian coastal arc running from Shanghai to Saigon. A year later, in September 1858, de Genouilly led a joint Franco-Spanish attack on Danang and occupied the small port town. In early 1859, backed by the French government, the navy expanded its offensive to include Saigon. French forces occupied the town after heavy fighting, before pushing into the surrounding provinces. France was now engaged in its most important colonial war of conquest since the one undertaken in Algeria (1830–47).

The French Conquest of Vietnam

The imperial capital city, Hue, was on its own against the French. Qing China was no more in a position to assist its southern tributary ally than the Ottomans had been able to help their North African subjects in Algeria or hold the line against the Europeans in the Crimea. The Qing themselves were facing a combined Franco-British coastal assault during the Second Opium War (1856–60). Moreover, the massive Taiping peasant rebellion originating from Guangzhou was threatening to bring down the entire Qing dynasty from the inside (1850–64). To the west, the Thais refused to help the Vietnamese in Cochinchina, keen not to give the Europeans a pretext to invade. The Vietnamese thus fought alone against the French in Nam Ky until 1862, when the Hue court finally signed the Treaty of Saigon, ceding to the French the three eastern provinces of southern Dai Nam (Gia Dinh, My Tho, and Bien Hoa). Emperor Tu Duc ordered his forces to cease fighting and reversed the policy of persecuting Catholics in all territories remaining under Hue’s control. Determined to reach China, the French further expanded their hold on the Mekong delta region, when, in 1863, they established a protectorate over Cambodia and eyed up Lao territories on both sides of the Mekong. In 1867, the French then also occupied the three remaining western provinces of Nam Ky as the French colony of Cochinchina started to take shape.

Tu Duc believed that he could regain his lost southern provinces through negotiations by according favorable trading rights and treaty ports to the French. The Chinese had done this; he could do the same. He sent a mission to Paris to negotiate the return of the three provinces in exchange for coastal concessions. (He never recognized the French occupation of the three other provinces.) The problem, a classic one, was that the emperor’s advisors were divided into ‘peaceful’ and ‘warlike’ factions. His decision to sue for peace rather than continued war in 1862 caused widespread dissatisfaction and sapped his authority at a crucial moment in Vietnam’s history. During the regional examinations held in Hue in late 1864, candidates openly opposed the court’s conciliatory policy toward the French and linked that subject to the need to destroy Catholics, who they felt were on the enemy’s side. This defiance was such that the emperor had to call in imperial troops to disperse his own officials. Further investigation revealed that this event was part of an attempt to start a war, wipe out the Catholics once and for all, and replace the ruler, if need be. While all felt they had the best interests of the country in mind at the moment of its greatest need, divided loyalties now penetrated the highest levels of the government itself. To make matters worse, as a childless emperor, Tu Duc’s untimely death in July 1883 brought longstanding and extremely divisive succession problems into the open.

Tumultuous events in Europe ended the Second Empire’s expansion up the Mekong. Napoleon’s disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 marginalized the French in Europe, reignited civil unrest in France, and gave rise to a nascent yet fractious Third Republic. In Cochinchina in the 1870s, however, French navy men remained at the helm and they often operated independently of the divided metropolitan ruling class. Joining them were merchants and bankers. All of these men shared a desire to find a river route to reach the Chinese market. When French exploration teams headed by Francis Garnier and Doudart de Lagrée finally concluded that the higher reaches of the Mekong were un-navigable, they shifted their attention to the Red River region.

These increasingly brash merchants and admirals took the lead in expanding their colonial interests beyond Cochinchina, nudged by the financial and commercial lobbies discussed above. They had all found their place in the new French Republic as if little had changed in 1870. In 1873, Admiral Marie Jules Dupré, Governor of Cochinchina, dispatched Francis Garnier to Hanoi to obtain the release from the Dai Nam authorities of a French merchant, Jean Dupuis. Keen to trade with southern China, Dupuis had tried to sail up the Red River without authorization. Garnier was sympathetic to this enterprise and Dupré tacitly backed both of them. However, negotiations broke down as Garnier moved to seize control of Hanoi, declare the Red River open to navigation, and threaten unilaterally to impose a French protectorate over Tonkin.

While Tu Duc sought to negotiate a way out of full-scale war, local Vietnamese commanders enlisted the support of Chinese irregulars of diverse ethnic origins called the Black Flags to attack Garnier’s men. Hostilities therefore began without either the nascent Third Republic’s leaders or even the Vietnamese emperor in Hue authorizing the attacks. The Black Flags overwhelmed Garnier’s small force and killed the explorer. The Third Republic was unwilling to go any further—not least because of the real risk of war with China. The government in Paris reined in its officials on the ground. The violence in Hanoi had, however, forced Hue to recognize formally the loss of all of Cochinchina (now including the three western provinces of Nam Ky) in a second treaty signed in Saigon in 1874. For the time being, French troops withdrew from the north, trade on the Red River resumed, and Dai Nam remained independent, albeit in its reduced form.

French nationalist and colonialist policies became more aggressive after 1877, when the republicans consolidated their power over the Legitimists (monarchists). At the helm of the metropolitan government was Jules Ferry, one of republican France’s most celebrated leaders. He was determined to break with France’s monarchical and Catholic past in favor of replacing it with an equally ardent Republic. The French were no longer subjects of a monarchy or the Church, but rather citizens of a modern nation-state, based on democratic institutions and the separation of Church and state. As prime minister (1880–81, 1883–5), he pushed through legislation establishing secular public education, supported major infrastructure programs integrating the country, and helped make Paris and the French language the center of national life.

Ferry was also the republic’s most vocal colonial advocate. Pushing him, like Napoleon III earlier, was the colonial lobby of banking, financial, and insurance interests. Economic stagnation in France also led politicians and business leaders to agitate for renewed colonial expansion. The French economy experienced a long period of recession between 1873 and 1897, reaching a low point in 1884–5. Trade deficits were chronic. Protectionism was on the rise in Europe and the Americas. Colonies, many leaders concluded, or at least hoped, could provide the export markets and sources of growth that they so desperately wanted. Revealingly, in 1881, the government detached the question of the ‘colonies’ from the navy and attached it briefly to the Ministry of Commerce. In 1875, influential French financiers focused their attention on Asia by creating the Bank of Indochina (‘Banque de l’Indochine’, also known as the BIC). This increasingly powerful institution helped underwrite the colonial development of what became French Indochina and issued its unique currency—la piastre indochinoise—until 1955. It also financed private and public investment throughout Asia, into China, and much further still during the twentieth century. The French bank Crédit agricole is, in part, a descendant of the Bank of Indochina.³²

The Third Republic and Jules Ferry’s justifications for colonial expansion differed little from those of the Second Empire and the British: geopolitics, national prestige, and liberal economics. Ferry may have added the notion of a special republican mission civilisatrice to underscore the noble, liberal-minded goals of republican colonial ideology, but in practice this differed little from the British notion of the ‘white man’s burden’. Social Darwinism and a hodgepodge of nineteenth-century racialist theories helped French republicans justify why the ‘strong’ and the ‘white’ should rule over the ‘weak’ and the ‘colored’. And French republican colonial expansion relied on the use of brute force, just like the British, the Americans, and countless others before them in world history.

Ideologically, however, French republicans used empire in ways the British did not. After the humiliating defeat of 1870 and now faced with the reality of German preeminence in continental Europe, republicans saw in colonial expansion a way of affirming a new sense of national identity and ‘grandeur’ which they badly wanted. For nationalist leaders on the left and the right, the idea of La plus grande France (or Greater France) took on an ideological life of its own, with remarkable staying power in elite circles until the late twentieth century. Although French public opinion remained overwhelmingly uninterested in colonial expansion and its wars to maintain the empire, government ministries and colonial lobbies joined forces to promote a favorable colonial ideology in France through the organization of exhibitions, art shows, travel and tourism, books, newspapers, and educational information. Meanwhile, a wide range of scientific, geographical, and medical associations became interested in the non-Western world which colonialism introduced and the laboratories, specimens, and art objects it could provide. The impact of ‘empire’ on the ordinary Frenchman or woman was minimal, but its effect on officials, administrators, officers, and scholars was not.³³

Few republican leaders expressed philosophical or moral opposition to suspending their belief in the rights of man when it came to conquering the rest of Vietnam. Ferry had already led the charge against Tunisia in 1881 and Madagascar two years later. Unlike his predecessors, however, Ferry was ready to risk war with China in Asia to get his way over Dai Nam. He got his chance when another naval officer, Henri Rivière, implicitly backed by colonial authorities in Saigon, led a small contingent to Hanoi in late 1881, ostensibly to free merchants held by Dai Nam authorities. In a replay of Garnier’s hubris, Rivière was convinced that he could easily take control of Tonkin, and thereby force Paris to follow suit. In April 1882, he occupied the Hanoi citadel. The Dai Nam court sent troops, Black Flag soldiers backed them, and, most importantly, this time China agreed to honor its tributary obligations. In mid-1882, the Qing dispatched troops to their southern border, where they occupied vital Dai Nam border towns such as Lang Son and Son Tay. Undaunted by this Chinese display of force, Rivière confidently marched on. But once again, things did not go according to plan. As Chinese troops looked on, Vietnamese and Black Flag troops routed the Frenchman’s contingent.

While Rivière had created yet another fiasco in Tonkin, he was right about one thing: the Third Republic was committed to colonial expansion in Asia. Upon taking over the premiership for the second time in February 1883, Ferry transformed Rivière’s defeat into a heroic moment of truth which required the French government to commit itself to achieving victory and building an Asian empire. War resumed in July–August 1883, when Admiral Amédée Courbet arrived at the head of naval forces. To force the Nguyen hand in the north, he attacked the capital of Hue and achieved a bloody victory over the imperial army on the beaches of Thuan An. The French writer and active naval officer Pierre Loti accompanied French troops into the heat of battle at Thuan An. He watched ‘la grande tuerie’ (the ‘slaughter’ is how he put it) from the ship’s deck. He noted the shells raining down on the adversary, walked among the Vietnamese corpses strewn across the dunes after the French victory, and interviewed French soldiers about ‘what they had just done’. Based on all of this, he wrote a very disturbing series of articles on the violence of colonial conquest, the nature of men at war on both sides, speaking of both the humanity and inhumanity on display that day: ‘We killed a lot; it was almost robbery’. Outraged by Loti’s less than heroic account of republican soldiers committing war atrocities, Ferry ordered Loti to be discharged from the army.³⁴

Thanks to this military success, French diplomat and leading colonial architect Jules Harmand obtained from the Nguyen court their signatures on the Treaty of Hue in August 1883 which ceded Tonkin to the French as a newly created protectorate. As Harmand warned the Nguyen court in the aftermath of the battle of Thuan An, failure to conclude a treaty meant annihilation:

Now, here is a fact which is quite certain; you are at our mercy. We have the power to seize and destroy your capital and to cause you all to die of starvation. You have to choose between war and peace. We do not wish to conquer you, but you must accept our protectorate. For your people it is a guarantee of peace and prosperity; it is also the only chance of survival for your government and your Court. We give you forty-eight hours to accept or reject, in their entirety and without discussion, the terms which in our magnanimity we offer you. We are convinced that there is nothing in them dishonorable to you, and, if carried out with sincerity on both sides, they will bring happiness [sic] to the people of Vietnam. If you reject them, you must expect the greatest evils. Imagine the most frightful things conceivable, and you will still fall short of the truth. The Dynasty, its Princes and its Court will have pronounced sentence on themselves. The name of Vietnam will no longer exist in history.³⁵

Tough talk and one battle victory was not enough to ensure Dai Nam’s submission, however. The Black Flags stayed put in the north, allied with local Vietnamese forces refusing to lay down their arms. Most importantly, just across the border, Chinese forces remained in their positions. The Qing court still rejected the French right to remove Dai Nam from the Middle Kingdom’s orbit. Like their mid–twentieth-century successors, the Qing were not keen on having hostile and expansionist-minded foreigners on their southern doorstep. Hostilities resumed when Courbet attacked the border town of Son Tay, hoping to defeat local Black Flags and Chinese troops before Qing China could send in reinforcements. Sporadic fighting continued into 1884 as the French increased the size of their contingent. After Son Tay, the French-occupied Bac Ninh. Unwilling to go any further, the Qing ultimately agreed to negotiate and signed the Tianjin Accord in May 1884. In so doing, they renounced their tributary relationship with Dai Nam and recognized the French protectorates in Dai Nam, in Annam and Tonkin. The Chinese withdrew their troops, leaving Lang Son in Vietnamese hands. A ‘second’ Treaty of Hue (called Patenôtre) entered into effect in June 1884, allowing the French to take over the whole of Dai Nam. The signature of this treaty also obliged the Hue court to melt down the seal presented by the Qing to Gia Long which symbolized the tributary relations which had bound the two countries for half a century. Although connections between China and Vietnam would remain, the French had extricated Dai Nam from its tributary position in the East Asian order in order to link it through treaties to a new imperial nation-state directed from Paris.³⁶

However, French colonial conquest was still incomplete. The reoccupation of frontier towns did not go as planned when local Chinese commanders at Bac Le refused to budge. Rather than ironing out differences through diplomatic channels, French commanders preferred issuing ultimatums and using force. Ferry’s government demanded the immediate Chinese evacuation of Tonkin and the payment of a 250 million franc indemnity to help cover the costs of conquest. Outraged by Chinese recalcitrance, the French blockaded and then attacked a number of southern Chinese ports. The navy even moved on Taiwan. What had been until now a rather localized colonial war of conquest suddenly set off a wider regional conflict and confirmed yet again the wider context of the French conquest of Vietnam and its connections to China.

This expansion led to increased political opposition in the National Assembly to Ferry’s ‘obsession’ over Tonkin. (His adversaries ridiculed him as Ferry le Tonkinois.) Events came to a crescendo on 28 March 1885, when Ferry received a pessimistic telegram informing the French government that the army had abandoned Lang Son and that a Chinese attack on the delta was imminent. In reality, no such Chinese attack was in the works. Nor was the temporary evacuation of Lang Son an impediment to French progress in occupying the border towns. However, news of the ‘fall of Langson’ raised fears of a ‘colonial Sedan’ (which was where the Prussians had surrounded Napoleon III and his army in 1870). What interested Ferry’s opponents most was the chance to bring down the prime minister over Tonkin. Ferry ardently defended his colonial policy, setting out all the reasons why the Republic had to grow its empire; but in the end it did not prevent a vote of no confidence and the fall of his government in April 1885 over a war that was already over.

This is why the disappearance of Ferry’s government did little to change the outcome of Franco-Chinese relations or the destiny of Dai Nam. Despite what they had argued against Ferry, his conservative adversaries were hardly anticolonialists. More than anything else, the Langson affair had served internal political needs in France. The new government quickly achieved a favorable settlement with the Chinese. Ferry’s nemesis, Georges Clémenceau, would go on to champion the Republic’s colonial cause. Worried by simultaneous Japanese aggression in Korea, the Qing reaffirmed the validity of the Tianjin Accord with the French. In June 1885, a formal peace treaty ratified by the French Senate ended the Sino-French war. Dai Nam no longer existed as an independent state.³⁷

To the west, the French also dismantled Thailand’s tributary relationships with Lao states located throughout the Mekong River valley. Although ships could not navigate the Mekong all the way into China, the British conquest of northern Burma nonetheless determined the French to secure their control over this waterway to the Chinese border. Relying on diplomacy, force, and exploratory missions, such as the one led by Auguste Pavie, the French contested and rejected Thai claims to these tributaries. In the end, however, force was necessary to remove them from Bangkok’s own colonial hold. In 1893, the French dispatched gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok, trained their cannons on the Chakri Royal Palace, and blockaded the Thai coast when the court refused to comply with an ultimatum to cede left-bank Lao territories.

The Bangkok court was no more ready to go to war in 1893 than Hue had been a decade earlier. Thai King Rama V had no independent Asian allies to whom he could turn: Burma was British, Qing China was imploding, the Japanese and the Americans were determined to join the colonial club in Asia, while the British had their own designs on his kingdom. The Thai king signed a treaty in October recognizing the French colonization of what would become Laos—a collection of military territories and kingdoms (Luang Prabang, Champassak, and Vientiane) organized loosely in the form of a protectorate. In 1907, the Thais further ceded the Cambodian provinces of Sisophon, Battambang, and Siemreap, the home of the magnificent Angkor Wat temple complex, to the French. Rather than go to war over Thailand, the French and the British left it independent as a buffer state.³⁸

By the end of the nineteenth century, colonial conquest in Asia had destroyed centuries-old states, reshaped internal political and social relations, destabilized populations, and reconfigured the geopolitical map of Asia. A concert of Asian nations largely centered on imperial China vanished with the Qing dynasty in 1911, and a new one would not truly appear until after the Second World War as Chinese nationalists of all kinds struggled to create a nation-state on top of a centuries-old imperial empire which seemed to be falling apart like that of the Romans before it. As the Thais and Japanese rapidly moved to create independent nation-states based on the Western model, the French, Dutch, and British began building imperial ones on the vestiges of the states they had confiscated. For the French, this colonial state would be known as ‘Indochina’.