French Indochina Research Articles

A Narrative Cartography of the French Indo-China War: A Journalistic Perspective

While cartography continues to be a major form of geographic study, an important line of cartographic research has moved away from the “scientific” framework of cartographic inquiry, and instead studies the narratives and social construction of maps. This article seeks to understand the visual representation of the French Indo-China War using journalistic maps from the New York Times. In doing so, it hopes to reconstruct how the policies and events of this conflict were visually represented to the American public. It draws upon critical cartographic frameworks to deconstruct the visual narrative and interpret the assumptions that were inherent within the maps. The overall visual impact of the conflict suggests an attempt to simplify the conflict into a Western narrative of national emergence without a deeper discussion of identity, ethnicity, and sovereignty at a subnational level.

Assimilating Weather Data into a Digital Event Gazetteer of Airborne Parachute Operations during the French Indochina War

Abstract Modern datasets cataloging historical events, known as digital event gazetteers, feature spatiotemporal data regarding events that enable analysis through parameters including location and other descriptive information of those events. Weather and climate data represent two dimensions of spatiotemporal information, which can enhance understanding of historical events. A recently published digital event gazetteer of airborne parachute operations [opérations aéroportées (OAPs)] during and prior to the French Indochina War, spanning from 1945 to 1954, represents an opportunity to associate discrete historical events with weather information. This study outlines a methodology for assimilating weather data into the construct of a digital event gazetteer and then demonstrates example analyses of how the weather and climate conditions in Indochina may relate to OAPs during the war. A synoptic classification, utilizing the self-organizing maps procedure, is performed using daily mean sea level pressure data from 1945 to 2010, from a twentieth-century reanalysis dataset, to characterize weather patterns over the Indochina Peninsula. Since observations are sparse during the years of the conflict, the resulting weather patterns are associated with modern precipitation observations in the area, as a representation of wet and dry patterns during the war. The appropriate daily weather pattern is then assigned to each OAP in order to investigate its relationship with the weather and climate patterns of Indochina, including the influence of monsoon seasons, and how the resulting precipitation patterns affected combat operations across the theater. Additionally, specific OAPs of various missions are analyzed to investigate how weather patterns may have affected operation planning during the French Indochina War.

The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980. By Christina Elizabeth Firpo . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. 280 pp. ISBN: 9780824847579 (cloth).

The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980. By Christina Elizabeth Firpo . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. 280 pp. ISBN: 9780824847579 (cloth).

仏領インドシナにおける対日漆貿易の展開過程 : 1910年代〜1940年代初めの現地日本人商店からの考察

仏領インドシナにおける対日漆貿易の展開過程 : 1910年代〜1940年代初めの現地日本人商店からの考察

Review: Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960 by Mai Na M. Lee

Review: Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960 by Mai Na M. Lee

Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960. By Mai Na M. Lee . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. xxi, 401 pp. ISBN: 9780299298845 (paper, also available as e-book).

Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960. By Mai Na M. Lee . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. xxi, 401 pp. ISBN: 9780299298845 (paper, also available as e-book).

L’amiral d’Argenlieu en Indochine, une croisade contre le communisme ?

The action of Admiral Georges Thierry d’ Argenlieu is frequently described in the hinge of the anchor and the cross. Born in 1889 in a very traditionalist catholic family, he was successively a naval officer, then a friar and priest in the mendicant order of the Carmelites ; he acquired a real political theology, which expressed itself in the radical opposition to Nazism as to Communism. In 1939 was called as a reserve Navy officer ; he rose to admiral rank in the Free French Naval Forces. He showed great qualities, but was inflexible and proud. After the defeat of Japan, d’Argenlieu was sent to French Indochina as High Commissioner to restore colonial rule, but there was a claim for independence by the Vietminh, a communist movement. D’Argenlieu had to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh, head of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. More and more obsessed by the communist risk he did not want to see the importance of the nationalist feeling for Vietnam. He tipped over to logic of Cold war.

The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 by Christina Elizabeth Firpo

Reviewed by: The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 by Christina Elizabeth Firpo Marie-Paule Ha The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 By Christina Elizabeth Firpo. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. Christina Firpo's book is a reconstruction of the history of the removal of Eurasian children in French Indochina from the late nineteenth century to the postcolonial era. The mixed-blood children at the center of this near century long saga, known in the colonial parlance as "métis non reconnus," were the illegitimate offspring of Frenchmen and their Native concubines. Born out of wedlock, many of the métis had been abandoned by their European fathers, who, for various reasons, did not legally recognize them as their progeny. As a result, these children were denied French citizenship and its many legal, social and economic privileges. Raised by their mothers in the Indigenous milieu, they were given the lower status of Native subjects. While the plight of these unrecognized métis in Indochina has been the subject of a number of previous studies, Firpo's book is the first one to provide a detailed and systematic investigation of their removal from the native milieu by the métis protection system and their institutionalization in French-run organizations in Indochina and the métropole. In her reconstruction of this saga, the author tracks the many shifts in the policies and attitudes of the French towards these fatherless mixed-blood children from the inception of the métis protection system to its dissolution. Starting with the discussion of the creation of the first métis protection societies by French civilians in the 1880s in Chapter One, the book moves on chronologically to show, in the ensuing chapters, how political events, social and economic changes both inside and outside Indochina such as World War I, the Great Depression, the Japanese occupation, the French Indochina War and the advent of decolonization shaped the evolution of the métis protection system as well as the French perceptions and treatments of the métis. The main contention of the book is that the French intervention to "save" the fatherless mixed-blood children from poverty was prompted not solely by benevolence, but also by "colonial self-interest" (5). Members of the métis protection societies and colonial administrators were convinced that letting métis grow up under the care of their Native mothers would not only be deleterious to the children's wellbeing, but more importantly, their abandonment by their fathers could also foster in them resentment and rebellious sentiments against the colonial state. Besides defusing these potential dangers, the métis' removal scheme also served the goal of grooming these half-French fatherless children to become loyal collaborators of the colonial state by providing them with a French education and nurturing in them an identification with French culture. For there was a widely held belief among colonial administrators that these bilingual and bicultural "Frenchmen" were best suited to perpetuate French presence in Indochina as they could act as a counterweight to the emerging power of the Indigenous elite (Chapter Four). One of the book's strengths is its use of a wide range of primary materials in both French and Vietnamese that include government documentation and the personal narratives of the métis and their mothers. The juxtaposition of these sources brings forth poignantly the huge gap between the official rhetoric of "saving" the children and the emotional cost the coercive separation from their mothers caused to the latter. The letters of the Native women also belie the protection societies' adamant belief that they were unfit mothers only interested in exploiting their children for financial gains. Among the many shifts in the colonial administration's handling of the métis question discussed in the book, one significant change is the redefinition of French identity. Instead of limiting Frenchness to the White phenotype as used to be the practice in the colony, the Fédération des OEuvres de l'Enfance Française d'Indochine (FOEFI), a civilian charitable organization supported by the French government to take care of the abandoned mixed-blood children after...

Sex and the Colonial City: Mapping Masculinity, Whiteness, and Desire in French Occupied Hanoi

Based on an analysis of sexually explicit cartoons from a Hanoi newspaper, this essay is a gendered reading of the colonial encounter in French Indochina. Using previously untapped sources from the pre-1954 collection in Vietnam's National Library, I engage critical theories of masculinity and whiteness to create a thick description of life in the colonial city. From a feminist perspective, I argue that imperialism's racial, gender, and class hierarchies combined with the Third Republic's paternalism and misogyny to give French men unprecedented power over their Asian subjects, especially Vietnamese women, be they prostitutes, concubines, or victims of sexual assault. This intersectionality created an openly predatory sexual culture in the overwhelmingly male white community of colonizers. These cartoons show specific locations in Hanoi and greater colonial Asia, providing insight into the lived experience of the colonial city and information to literally map these white men's sexual desires in the city.

‘Unwanted Scraps’ or ‘An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People’? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo

AbstractIn the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called “coolie” labor.

The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890-1980, Christina Firpo

The Uprooted: Race, Children and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890-1980, Christina Firpo

Building Psychiatric Expertise across Southeast Asia: Study Trips, Site Visits, and Therapeutic Labor in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, 1898–1937

AbstractThis paper examines a series of research trips undertaken by French physicians in Indochina to the Dutch East Indies between 1898 and 1937 to study what they saw to be a successful model of a modern psychiatric service that had been developed there. Dutch experiments with forms of “open door” care and the use of patient labor as therapy, premised on earlier ideas of moral treatment, seemed to hold both therapeutic promise and the key to resolving pressing economic concerns faced by colonial psychiatric institutions. French physicians saw in neighboring Java fundamental ethnological and geographical similarities to Indochina, and Dutch successes in psychiatric assistance there raised the prospect of adapting practices the Dutch had developed to their own program in Indochina throughout the interwar years.

Shane Strate. The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The Lost Territories: Thailand's History of HumiliationShane StrateHonolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015, xii+253p.The notion of the winners being the ones who write history does not always ring true in the case of Thailand. In Thai historiography, loss and humiliation have also found their way into service as a predominant ideological foundation backing up various state strategies, from the preservation of certain political regimes, the creation of faces of the enemy, to the need to construct the nation's identity. The Lost Territories: Thailand's History of Humiliation by Shane Strate discusses the pertinent topic of how national humiliation has been politically exploited, and thus became politically useful, in supporting ethnic chauvinism and military expansion, and in the modern day, ironically, the glorification of Thai monarchs, even when it distastefully reveals the vulnerabilities of the Thai state.In August 2015, the military government of General Prayuth Chan-ocha completed its mission to resurrect the glorious days of Siam's past kings. The (Rajapakdi means loyalty to the monarchy) houses giant statues of seven Siamese kings from all four dynasties- Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Thonburi, and Rattanakosin. This is a project eerily similar to that seen in the Myanmar capital of Naypyidaw, which showcases the three great kings of Burma-Anawratha, Bayinnaung, and Alaungpaya-supposedly serving to legitimize the then military government of General Than Shwe. Undoubtedly, the Rajapakdi Park is designed primarily for a similar purpose: injecting a sense of royal loyalty at the time when Thailand is once again in the custody of a military regime.Refreshing the magnificent past of Siamese kings is not merely about celebrating Siam, or Thailand, as a great nation with uninterrupted independence. As emphasized in Strate's book, National Humiliation has re-emerged alongside the well-known Royal-Nationalist as a dogmatic tool to sponsor a form of anti-Western imperialism. Whereas the Royal- Nationalist ideology stresses the widely known argument of Thailand being the only nation in Southeast Asia not to be colonized by Western powers, the Humiliation discourse unveils the dark side of Thai relations with the West, through unfair treaties, extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss. The West was assigned as the harboring ill intention to disparage the Siamese national pride. But as history tells it, Siam, either under the absolute monarchy or military rule, has continued to overcome obstacles and threats posed by the evil other. Strate calls it a tragic heroism characterized by suffering and foreign oppression (p. 43).Strate elaborates precisely on how the Humiliation discourse has been discursively used to achieve specific agendas of the Siamese state. There were benefits in depicting Siam as a vulnerable state surrounded by big and small enemies in the region. The book focuses mainly on two periods: Siam under the absolute monarchy during the peak of colonialism and Thailand under the military regime at the turn of the Second World War, including its aftermath. Through these different periods, Siam, while selectively adopting some Western elements, such as its modernity and concept of sovereignty, openly detested its imperialist bullying that paved the way for Siamese heroes to emerge. In other words, national tragedies gave birth to national heroes. But these same national tragedies also allowed such heroes to hold on tightly to their rule, perhaps no less brutal than the bullying West.Whichever themes one choose to examine-Royal-Nationalist or Humiliation discourses- they are used to primarily defend the political interests of the Thai elites. For example, following the Thai invasion of French Indochina in 1941, as Strate explains, the Thai aggression was not the result of Japanese prodding, but it was born out of the military regime's (of Phibul Songkhram) search for political legitimacy (p. …

Impartial reporter or écrivain engagé? Andrée Viollis and the transformation of French journalism, 1918–40

This article argues that French journalism, which historical development has often characterized as backward in comparison to its Anglo-American counterpart, changed more profoundly in the interwar years than is often acknowledged in scholarship into journalism history. Based on a textual analysis of the reportages Andrée Viollis wrote about her 1931 trip to French Indochina and China, situated against the background of French journalism history, we challenge the dominance of the Anglo-American conception of the objectivity regime as a factual, impartial and depersonalized standard for professional journalism. Viollis’ work illustrates how in France the reflective reporting—in the sense of mixing factual description with argumentation and opinions—of engaged intellectual writers lost ground to their particular version of fact-centred reporting by so-called grand reporters, who interpreted objectivity as impartial reporting that was nevertheless structured by the mediating subjectivity of the reporter. These were, contrary to the rhetorically gifted écrivain engagé, expected to convey social reality in a descriptive manner, avoiding explicit political and ideological views. Yet reporters’ personal experiences played a pivotal role, expressed in an evocative, literary style that was inspired by literary naturalism.

The Values of Versatility: Pharmacists, Plants, and Place in the French (Post)Colonial World

AbstractColonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.

The Impact of the Logistical Dilemmas of Operation Masterdom on the Allied Re-entry into French Indo-China, 1945

The Impact of the Logistical Dilemmas of Operation Masterdom on the Allied Re-entry into French Indo-China, 1945

Semi-Colonialism Distilled:The Société française des distilleries de l'Indochine and the Siamese Government in the Early Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, the Societe francaise des distilleries de l’Indochine , principal supplier to the alcohol monopoly in French Indochina, sought to extend its operations into Siam. This led to a protracted dispute with the Siamese government over the rights that the company enjoyed under the unequal treaties that Siam had signed with the Western imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. After sustained pressure from the French government, the Siamese government was forced to resolve some legal ambiguities in favour of the SFDIC. This dispute thus captures the essence of Siam’s semi-colonial relationship with the West.

France and the Gulf of Tonkin Region: Shipping Markets and Political Interventions in South China in the 1890s

In the period of “new” imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France strived to create a sphere of influence in southwest China. To foster such imperialist policies, France’s policy makers regarded French companies operating in East Asia as instrumental. One such firm was Auguste Raphael Marty’s Tonkin Shipping Company, based in Haiphong, French Indochina, which operated steam coasters across the wider Gulf of Tonkin region. In the region’s highly competitive shipping market, Marty strived to achieve a monopoly when favorable conditions permitted during the final phase of the Sino-Japanese War. His profit-driven strategy caused huge losses for Chinese shippers and ultimately resulted in their boycotting his ships through the Tsap Yet syndicate. When French officials intervened on Marty’s behalf in negotiations with the Chinese government, the Syndicate was finally dissolved. It was followed by an agreement between the Chinese firm of Yuen Cheong Lee and Co. and the German firm of Jebsen and Co., based on long-established mutual trust between the owners. Although Marty received monetary compensation for his losses, he ruined his relationship with Chinese merchants. This case study presents little-known facts about the interactions among foreign firms in China and demonstrates the Chinese ability to react efficiently to unfair business practices.

Dreams of the Hmong kingdom: the quest for legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960

Countering notions that Hmong history begins and ends with the oSecret Waro in Laos of the 1960s and 1970s, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom reveals how the Hmong experience of modernity is grounded in their sense of their own ancient past, when this now-stateless people had their own king and kingdom, and illuminates their political choices over the course of a century in a highly contested region of Asia. China, Vietnam, and Laos, the Hmong continuously negotiated with these states and with the French to maintain political autonomy in a world of shifting boundaries, emerging nation-states, and contentious nationalist movements and ideologies. Often divided by clan rivalries, the Hmong placed their hope in finding a leader who could unify them and recover their sovereignty. In a compelling analysis of Hmong society and leadership throughout the French colonial period, Mai Na M. Lee identifies two kinds of leadersupolitical brokers who allied strategically with Southeast Asian governments and with the French, and messianic resistance leaders who claimed the Mandate of Heaven. The continuous rise and fall of such leaders led to cycles of collaboration and rebellion. After World War II, the powerful Hmong Ly clan and their allies sided with the French and the new monarchy in Laos, but the rival Hmong Lo clan and their supporters allied with Communist coalitions. Lee argues that the leadership struggles between Hmong clans destabilized French rule and hastened its demise. Martialing an impressive array of oral interviews conducted in the United States, France, and Southeast Asia, augmented with French archival documents, she demonstrates how, at the margins of empire, minorities such as the Hmong sway the direction of history.

Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 388 pp. $39.95

If Hajimu Masuda would consider a new subtitle for his book, he should remove “Korean Conflict” from it. To the degree that I can untangle his interlocking arguments, he believes the Cold War and Korean War are inadequate descriptors of the root causes of the international conflict and domestic oppression of the 1950s. On the other hand, the Korean War awakened and deepened popular fears of another global conflict, the violence of which would beggar World War II.Masuda divides his book into three parts. The first section deals with the immediate postwar period, 1945–1950, as experienced by the United States, China, and Japan. This comparison of an undamaged and highly affluent victor in North America with two war-ravaged countries in Asia, including one that had dissolved into civil war, is far-fetched. In the second part, Masuda claims that Korean War–era mobilization policies in China and the United States created a public “Cold War” mentalité that exaggerated any real threat. To make this argument, Masuda sedulously ignores the impact of nuclear war fears (excessive to be sure) in the United States.The third section of the book makes comparisons of the suppression of domestic dissent justified by the fear of subversion. Although there may be some merit in using China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines as comparative case studies, the inclusion of the United States and Great Britain, where legal relief and media exploitation remained possible, is inappropriate.Matsuda sets out to argue that the Cold War, defined as a global competition for influence between the United States and the Soviet Union, was an “imagined reality” (p. 9). To do so, he must ignore too much of the history of the 1950s and attach too much influence to the Korean War outside Northeast Asia.Like the Platte River, Masuda's research is wide and shallow. Although his use of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean sources is impressive, most of these sources, like those in English, are contemporaneous social commentary or scholarly cultural history, not documentary evidence. The book has no central intellectual focus or theme other than the observation that many people suffered from police-state actions justified by anti-Communism or socialist revolution.The strongest linkage between domestic oppression and a foreign threat appeared in the People's Republic of China. Masuda's treatment of the “Hate America” campaign, clearly linked to the Korean War, is the most persuasive part of his book. In fact, he might have made more of the Chinese fears of an unholy trinity of counterrevolutionary allies: the United States, Japan, and Taiwan.Masuda admits that excluding the Soviet Union and the two Germanys from his analysis weakens his comparative focus. This is a crashing understatement. The omission of these countries also destroys any symmetry to his use of the United States as a case study in which the crusade against imagined subversives linked dissidents to the Soviet Union, not to China. Masuda's argument that the U.S.-Soviet rivalry had little influence on the politics of decolonization is persuasive, although it is a point already established by Odd Arne Westad and Michael West.The revolutionary threat was China, which had influence in Burma, French Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, to lump the United States in the same “decolonizer” category as Japan and Great Britain—and to exclude Portugal and the Netherlands—is a bit of historical sleight-of-hand.Whatever my reservations about Cold War Crucible, Masuda has written a serious study of the nature and influence of regional and national politics on postwar Asia. He makes the important point that the Korean War was all too real to Asians, not a “fantasy” or “imagined reality” that can be called the Cold War. The unresolved issue is whether the question is one of history or historiography.