French Invasion Research Articles

Printing and publishing in Saigon-Cho Lon, Vietnam: Catalysts of colonial social and cultural transformation

In 1859, the French invasion of Gia Dinh marked the beginning of their acquisition of Cochinchina. Shortly after their arrival, France brought printers on their ships, along with firearms and artillery. The printers were intended to quickly disseminate the policies of the invading army to the inhabitants of the occupied territory. At the end of 1861, the inaugural official newspaper in Cochinchina, ‘Le Bulletin officiel de l’expédition française de la Cochinchine’, had been published. The Royal Printing House (l’Imprimerie Impériale), the first printing facility in Cochinchina, was also established at the end of 1861 to accommodate printing tasks, particularly the production of gazettes. In 1873, various private printing houses emerged in Saigon-Cho Lon. Printing and publishing efforts gradually assimilated into the social fabric of Cochinchina after serving as a tool of the invaders. They transformed into political and cultural institutions within colonial society, notably in Saigon-Cho Lon. The progression of these activities during the process was observable, at least for those granted permission to participate. The requirements of the colonial environment and the vitality of the private sector fuelled these new activities, although the colonial authorities deemed it necessary to exert control over them. This article offers additional information on the printing and publishing activities in Saigon-Cho Lon, Vietnam, highlighting the accomplishments of some distinguished printers.

Collecting empires: Dominik Bilimek and early subterranean zoology between politics and field research

The Moravian Cistercian monk and collector Dominik Bilimek (1813–1884) is considered one of the earliest European naturalists to conduct zoological research on subterranean fauna in Latin America. During the second French invasion of Mexico, from 1861 to 1867, he accompanied Maximilian of Habsburg, the newly enthroned emperor of Mexico, to the region. There, he explored the Grutas de Cacahuamilpa near Taxco de Alarcón, comparing its fauna to his earlier discoveries in Postojnska jama in Carniola (Slovenia). After the victory of the Mexican republican forces and Maximilian’s execution, Bilimek retained his role as curator of the emperor’s collections, which he took back with him to Europe and exhibited at Miramare Castle near Trieste. Prior to his Mexican venture, Bilimek had embraced the imperial goals and intellectual agendas of the Viennese central administration while teaching at the monarchy’s military institutes. Following the revolutions of 1848/49, extensive research undertakings—including geoscientific, biological, and archaeological surveys—were initiated to preserve the Habsburg monarchy as a supranational entity amidst internal and external crises, and to legitimize its territorial framework as both a natural and cultural unit. These developments coincided with the initial surge of zoological interest in Carniolan caves, which spurred efforts to gather similar findings in other karst regions of the monarchy. Drawing on historical sources, this article explores the intersection of political concepts and fieldwork practices in the early study of cave biology. Special attention is given to the sites, networks, and modes of collecting during this transformative period.

Mobilizing Frontiers

Since the late 17th century, the Mekong Delta has become a vibrant place for Vietnamese, ethnic Khmer, and ethnic Chinese settlements, forming mixed communities in terms of race and culture. As a new frontier, the Delta has continuously undergone state-sponsored “civilizing” processes. The resulting hybridity in folk culture gave birth to various religious sects, especially on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. From the view of late imperial Confucianism, these groups were judged as “heretical sects” and their leaders “heretical masters”. Despite being classified as “heretical”, these local “masters” and their communities still insisted on the core Confucian values of benevolence, righteousness and patriotism. Chinese secret societies and rebels escaped to the Delta in different times, bringing new ideas to the region, especially the cults of Five Lord Buddhas, Maitreya, and the concept of the birth of the wise king. Under French suppression, these “heretical masters” changed their religious strategies, supported local military leaders and secret societies to “fight the French and restore Đại Nam”. This research aims to investigate and analyse the “heretical” religious movements and ideological transformation of “heretical masters” in the Mekong River Delta in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thereby strengthening the argument that although Vietnam’s local religious elites were marginalized and suppressed by state governance (the Nguyễn dynasty, French colonialists), they always cared about national independence and social prosperity, and therefore transformed their sectarian strategies into a special form of religio-political hybridity. National independence was definitely prioritized, and therefore the concept of “loyalty” in the traditional Confucian view turned into “patriotism” in the new context of French invasion and colonialization. This study uses a mixture of extensive field data collected between 2015‒2017 and 2022‒2024 (the primary data source for this study) with limited original texts from the Nguyễn dynasty and the research findings of selective previous scholars, and applies the theoretical concept of “standardization” and/or “orthopraxy” from the pre-modern Confucian tradition to examine and analyse political-religious practices, ideological transformation, and implicit narratives among local religious masters in rural Southern Vietnam, confirming that the Mekong Delta has fostered an environment of cultural and religious dynamism and pluralism since the late 19th century.

“Repensar Portugal”: Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano e Eduardo Lourenço

Almeida Garrett (1799-1854) and Alexandre Herculano (1810-1877) are the two main authors representing Romanticism in Portugal or, at least of the first generation, which is inevitably confused with the struggles for the implementation of Liberalism in the country. Contemporaries, they corresponded with each other and wrote fictional works, which aimed to consider the role of Portugal, as a national and also cultural body. In short, they reflected, through literary production, on the homeland situation after the French invasions (1807), the trauma of the flight from the Court to Brazil (1807), the Liberal Revolution (1820) and the Civil War (1828-1834) between absolutists and liberals, both of whom took sides with the constitutionalists and, finally, ended up in exile. Upon returning, Garrett and Herculano formed a group of intellectuals who aimed to reflect on the country's destiny, immersed in so many crises. Regarding his works, Eduardo Lourenço (1923-2020), honored in this year of his centenary of birth, wrote important texts, also in order to “rethink Portugal”, as he invented in the writings of the two 19th century writers ways of pondering the Portuguese political, religious and cultural situations. We therefore analyzed excerpts from four narratives by nineteenth-century authors: O Arco de Sant’Ana: crónica portuense (1845/1851) and Viagens na minha terra (1846), by Almeida Garrett; O Monge de Cister ou a época de D. João I (1848) and “O pároco da aldeia (1825)” (1851), by Alexandre Herculano. These are texts written in the Shandian narrative style, in which the narrators' digressions are what interest us most in this study. In addition to O labirinto da saudade (1978) and Mitologia da saudade seguido de Portugal como destino (1999), by Lourenço, we will dialogue, in our investigations, with the productions of Maria de Fátima Marinho (1999) and Sergio Paulo Rouanet (2007), among other authors.

The Scottish Militia Issue and the Anxious Origins of Highlandism, 1759–62

This article re-evaluates the debates over a proposed Scottish militia that took place in the British public sphere at the height of the Seven Years War and French invasion and Jacobite rebellion scares, and locates within them the origins of the discourse of Highlandism. Accordingly, the real and imagined ethnic traditions and characteristics of Scottish Highlanders to some extent came to represent the entire Scottish nation, while concurrently rehabilitating and replacing former stereotypes of Highlanders as bellicose ‘savages’ and Jacobite ‘rebels.’ Further, the debates were not merely informed by domestic politics and intellectual agendas, as typically assumed in the historiography; they were also tied to the larger geopolitical and cultural entanglements of imperial warfare and continued threats from Franco-Jacobite fifth columns, as circulated in an anxious, mercantilist, wartime print culture. These discourses reveal that mid-century whiggish Britons continued to worry about French-instigated rebellion despite historiographical assumptions to the contrary, and experienced considerable uncertainty and concern for the intertwined problems of foreign enemies, overseas war and domestic politics. This context, the widespread doubts surrounding Scotland’s trustworthiness and relative status within the Union, and the defensive reactions among certain pro-militia ‘Scots’, show how commentators mobilised Highland soldiers in support of Scotland’s deservedness of political, institutional and cultural equality with England. This, however, was not an era of growing confidence, cumulative antigallican military service and a ‘long-eighteenth-century’ process of political and cultural consolidation, but rather a deeply uncertain time of burgeoning global conflict and entangled Scotto-Franco-British identity dynamics which must be more fully considered on their own problematic terms.

Strategies of unworlding in Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte (1985)

ABSTRACT Bonaparte’s famous pronouncement regarding forty centuries of history looking down on his soldiers from the top of the Pyramids, is emblematic of his imperialist aspirations in Egypt. It also implies the production of a ‘worlding’ (Spivak, 1985), by its inscription of imperial discourse upon colonized space, or more specifically in this case, a relatively short military occupation with lasting consequences. At the time of its release in 1985, the film Adieu Bonaparte directed by Youssef Chahine, displeased critics in the two countries that co-produced it. In France, it was seen as ‘chaotic’ and ‘anti-French’; in Egypt, rather than a film that properly showed the Egyptian resistance to the French invasion, it was deemed as a film ‘about love’. Arguably, these critiqued aspects of the film could be seen as part of Chahine’s strategy to counter the violence of Bonaparte’s worlding of Egypt, and to affirm a national self-determination that is responsible and responsive to the other. Working with Spivak’s term, I contend that Chahine resists and undoes Bonaparte’s hegemonic structure through a series of formal strategies that I call strategies of unworlding, among which the depiction and references to the Pyramids of Giza are notable examples.

The Perception of the French Policy of «Reunions» in the Second Half
 of the 17th Century by the Imperial Estates of the Holy Roman Empire

This article discusses the political position and perception of the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire regarding the French policy of «Reunions» of 1667–1697. The position of Brandenburg, Bavaria, Saxony, Braunschweig-Luneburg, Hesse-Kassel, Munster, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Palatinate, Baden-Baden, BadenDurlach and Württemberg has been analyzed to varying degrees by the author.
 Some attention is paid to attempts to create an alliance among some of the Imperial Estates to resist the expansionist policy of the French king Louis XIV. However, the effectiveness of such alliances was insignificant as an attempt to create
 a combat-ready army. 
 As a result of the study, the author can state that the policy of «Reunions» was generally perceived negatively by the Imperial Estates. A number of officials of the Empire – Brandenburg, Brunswick-Luneburg, Bavaria, Hesse-Kassel and some others had significant financial resources and sufficiently combat-ready
 military contingents. This gave them the opportunity not only to fear a French invasion of the Empire, but also to effectively resist it.
 Some of them could only temporarily use France to weaken the influence of the emperor. There was an understanding among the German princes that France was a strong absolutist state and being in its zone of influence meant the loss of territorial independence.

IDEAS OF EASTERN EUROPE IN THE MEMOIRS OF FRENCH MILITARY AND POLITICIANS OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS

The purpose of the work: to analyze the ideas about Eastern Europe in the memoirs of French military and politicians of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as to investigate their input to the formation of the concept of «Eastern Europe». Methodology: during the writing of the article, both general scientific (comparison, idealization, ascent from abstract to concrete, content analysis, scientific modeling) and special-historical (historical-genetic, comparative-historical, systemic-structural) research methods were used. Scientific novelty: it consists in the fact that works on the history of concepts and intellectual history, devoted to the thoughts and ideas of the French memoirists of the Napoleonic era about Eastern Europe, are rare. The author of the article proposes to increase scientific output in this direction. Conclusions: in the process of writing the work, the idea of Eastern Europe had been considered in the memoirs of French military and politicians of the Napoleonic Wars and their input had been highlighted to the formation of the concept of «Eastern Europe». French memoirists considered the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth a mistake that allowed Russia to gain a foothold in Eastern Europe, and they believed Napoleon's plans to restore Polish statehood as a way to create a balance in European politics. The French invasion of Russia was called as important for the whole of Europe, and the characterization of Russians as «savages» and «barbarians» became widespread, French memoirists had been considered creating a kind of «barrier» in the form of a revived Poland to protect against the Russians. Lithuania and Poland were perceived as the northeastern part of Europe, which separates European civilization from the huge Asian spaces and expansionist Russian Empire, whose continued westward expansion was seen as a threat to Europeans. Among the options for defining the cultural and civilization border between Europe and Asia, they proposed the former Russian capital Moscow or «Lithuanian-Russian» river Dnipro.

University Governance and the Culture of Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Charcas

Abstract The article analyzes how the University of Charcas participated in public affairs in Chuquisaca (present-day Sucre) during the late colonial era. I show that following the Jesuit expulsion in the 1760s, the claustro (academic senate) became a center of university life. This body held annual elections to appoint the rector and passed governing rules for the university that allocated academic chairs based on public tenders. The faculty forcefully defended their newly gained autonomy from ecclesiastical and royal authorities, and its representative practices were instrumental in consolidating a culture of dissent that helped destabilize the unanimity principle underlying the monarchical imaginary, a principle that deemed nonconforming opinions a societal pathology incompatible with the sovereign's will and the common good. The rise of this contentious politics helped set the conditions for Chuquisaca's general uprising after the French invasion of Spain in 1808.

SOCIAL HOUSING OF 1950S IN TLEMCEN (ALGERIA): AN ARCHITECTURAL VIEW

The French administration had manifested its interest for social housing since the centenary of the French invasion in Algeria, in 1930, this period was characterized by the strong demographic growth and the rural exodus towards urban centers, and it intensified in the 1950s. It aimed to house both European and Muslim citizens, adopting different housing […]

REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION IN SPAIN AND IN SPANISH AMERICA. RIEGO’S FAILURE AND THE LIBERAL TRIENNIUM (1820-1823)

The liberal triennium is presented as a crossroads in the History of Spain and in much of America. A crossroads where the trajectories of the European and American continents converge. In these years, respect for the freedoms of the citizens was demanded. The right to freedom under the law, freedom of opinion and association, freedom of political action and choice. These movements have a predominantly liberal and nationalist political-social character. The different national projects of the overseas territories have an explanation and the possibility of building a liberal regime on the Peninsula under the protection of the Constitution of Cádiz depart for the future. Rafael de Riego's coup against Ferdinand VII of Spain, was one more in the long chain of those that took place in the period 1814-1820. Majority of then failed but Riego finally achieved the objective. The liberal faction reached the power to carry out a series of political, social and economic changes from an ideological base opposed to that of the Old Regime. The French invasion took place, which came to reestablish the absolutism, Riego led the resistance in Andalusia at 1823 but he was defeated, captured and executed. Riego’s dream disappeared.

Kontekst polityczny Konstytucji z Kadyksu z 1812 r.

The article presents the political context of the enactment of the Constitution of Cádiz. The crisis of power in Spain, caused by the French invasion of this kingdom, lasted from 1808 to 1814. Both the majority of Spanish elites and, above all, the wide circles of society did not accept Joseph Napoleon I Bonaparte, continuing to recognise Ferdinand VII Bourbon as the legitimate king. The Spanish War of Independence created ideal conditions to act for the liberals, whose aim was to adopt a modern constitution. This paper outlines the process by which parties with divergent political views, such as absolutists, reformers and liberals, led to the enactment of the Spanish Carta Magna. After the end of the war and the return of Ferdinand VII Bourbon from France to Spain, the king refused to sign the constitution and once again governed as an absolute monarch. The Constitution of Cádiz was no longer in force and the fragility of its foundations became apparent.

Printing and publishing in Saigon – Cho Lon (1861-1913)

In 1859, the French invasion of Gia Dinh marked the beginning of their takeover of Cochinchina. Soon after their arrival, France brought printers on their warships, along with guns and cannons. The printers' purpose was to quickly convey the pacification policies of the invading army to the people of the occupied land. By the end of 1861, the first official newspaper in Cochinchina, “Le Bulletin officiel de l'expédition française de la Cochinchine”, was published. The Royal Printing House (l'Imprimerie Impériale), the first printing house in Cochinchina, was also established at the end of 1861 to accommodate printing jobs, especially the printing of government gazettes. In 1873, several private printing houses appeared in Saigon-Cho Lon. Printing and publishing operations gradually assimilated into Cochinchine's social activities after serving as an “instrument” of the invaders. They evolved into a political and cultural institution in colonial social life, notably in Saigon-Cho Lon. The progression of these activities during the procedure was observable, at least for those allowed to take part in them. The needs of the colonial environment and the dynamism of the private sector stimulated these new activities, even if the colonial authority felt it necessary to control them. Based on the publications that were published during this period and are still stored in libraries, archives, and personal bookcases, etc., the author of this article would like to provide additional information about the printing and publishing activities in Saigon - Cho Lon, particularly through the operations of several prominent printing houses.

British Liberalism and the French Invasion of Mexico

AbstractNapoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico mystified some British observers. For many others, however, it raised urgent questions about the duties of European civilization and the future of global order. This article argues that the affair forced attitudes toward other European countries' overseas imperial projects into sharp political focus, and that in doing so it revealed incipient shifts in the center of gravity of Victorian liberalism. France's Second Mexican Empire split opinion in the Liberal Party and press, throwing light on wider disputes about the parameters of legitimate imperial intervention, the reach of the principles of nationality and self-determination, the political needs of disordered multiracial polities in less-developed parts of the world, and Europe's proper relations with Spanish America. But most Liberals who engaged with the enterprise condemned it, a fact that lays bare a changing balance of power between what historians have called “liberal imperial” and noninterventionist arguments in the 1860s. The failure of the intervention, moreover, did much to affirm powerful partisan narratives about French politics, which helped to buttress the electoral ascendancy of the Liberal Party.

SOME FACTORS AFFECTING ACTIVITIES OF THE SOCIO-ECONOMY OF THE CHINESE IN THE SOUTH REGION OF VIETNAM UNDER THE PERIOD OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL GOVERNMENT (FROM 1862 TO 1945)

The Chinese migrated to Vietnam very early and they quickly became a part of the population that played an important role in the economic and social development of Vietnam from the 17th century to the present. The Chinese are also one of 54 ethnic groups in our history of nation building and defense. Especially during the period of French invasion of our country, the economic and social activities of the Chinese in Vietnam in general and in the South in particular had many changes, becoming a significant economic competitive force with French capitalists in Indochina. Keywords: Socio-economic activities of the Chinese; Southern region; Vietnam; French colonial government; Chinese.

Independence and Constitution: The Spanish Nationalization of Personal Experience During the Peninsular War and its Aftermath

The deconstruction of the ‘War of Independence’ (1808–1814) as a Spanish nationalist myth was a necessary step in advancing our knowledge of the history of the Age of Revolutions in Spain and of Spanish nation-building itself. However, it set aside those who had in fact experienced those events through a genuine Spanish nationalized lens. Using a corpus of autobiographical sources written between the 1780s and the 1830s, this paper argues that political concepts of Spanish nationhood were already available before the liberal revolution unleashed by the French invasion, that anti-liberals used the language of nationhood in their ego-documents too, and that ideas of independence and constitution pervaded social cleavages and ideological divides. Arguably, then, the War of Independence had both mythical and real dimensions in terms of the history of national identities. Therefore, the great issue in nineteenth-century Spanish nation-building would have not been a congenital ‘lack’ or ‘weakness’ of nationhood but an intense cultural war for its definition along political lines.

The Renaissance in Italy: A History

The Renaissance in Italy: A History

Las fortificaciones sicilianas a finales del siglo XVII

During the reign of Charles II the military architecture of the Kingdom continued with the presence of a series of towers and fortifications at the fortress near the towns. When the war of Mesina came to an end, the government of the Count of Santisteban focused on the strengthening the Spanish domain in Mesina. The following years were characterized by improving the defenses of Mesina; Augusta, badly damaged after the French invasion; and Syracuse. To sum up, this paper analyzes the plans and the reforms presented by engineer Carlos de Grunenbergh to the Count of Santisteban for a defensive improvement of the Kingdom of Sicily.

Fearful Vassals: Urban Elite Loyalty in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, 1776–1810

Fearful Vassals: Urban Elite Loyalty in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, 1776–1810

Brasil em projetos: História dos sucessos políticos e planos de melhoramento do reino; Da ilustração portuguesa à Independência do Brasil

Brasil em projetos is the first book in the series An Other History of Brazil, published by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas and dedicated to historical syntheses of the “construction of the nation” for a broad audience as it reflects on the bicentenary of Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 (p. 9). Thus, the history of Brazil in projects is itself a project, one that offers a dialogue between the past and the present and fosters “a better understanding of our history” that will strengthen “the fight [to make] a more just and democratic country” (p. 9). This is not a run-of-the-mill gesture to the civics lesson. As Jurandir Malerba explains, between 2016 and 2019 as he was writing the book, Brazilians witnessed a concerted assault on the democracy that they had forged in the late 1980s. Since then the crisis of democracy, of political and civil rights, and of the idea of government dedicated to the common good has only deepened.A prolific historian of nineteenth-century Brazil, Malerba seeks in this volume to trace the “systems, plans, programs, proposals, projects” for Brazil, formulated by political elites, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1820s (p. 27). In doing so he draws extensively on primary sources and lucidly assesses a labyrinthine historiography. No other event in Brazilian history, he observes, has elicited so much writing, debate, and disagreement. Did the conflict amount to an “amicable separation” or encompass more revolutionary change (p. 239)? For Malerba it was a process that bore the marks of successive projects to make Brazil productive and unified but that ultimately consolidated the class interests of landowning, enslaving elites.The seven chapters in part 1 examine elite projects to define the place of Brazil in the Portuguese empire beginning with mid-eighteenth-century reforms of the marquês de Pombal. The instrumental, pragmatic, and statist character of innovation, from education to commercial policy, was the hallmark of an Enlightenment in Portugal that, Malerba argues, betrayed a revolutionary potential. Histories that cast the Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment as “singular because [it was] ‘mitigated,’ ‘applied,’ ‘pragmatic,’ or ‘Iberian,’ ‘despotic,’ ‘Catholic,’ or ‘late’” mistake some “other phenomenon” for an Enlightenment (p. 93). Perhaps. Yet such an assessment depends on an idealized version of the Enlightenment at odds with enlightened commitments to racialized and gendered differences and exclusions that marked even more radical ruptures.The Pombaline period was also a watershed because it laid the groundwork for a lineage of future statesmen and projects determined to realize Brazil's greatness. At the turn of the nineteenth century it was Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho who navigated the turbulent waters of rivalry and war with a vision of a productive American colony tethered to an imperial center in mind. Here Malerba persuasively takes on the lexicon of Brazilian independence, including its prevailing framework: the crisis of the colonial pact. The colonial pact, he explains, was based on metropolitan-defined mechanisms for extracting wealth. Rather than systemic and structural, its crisis stemmed from the immediate financial ramifications of the Napoleonic Wars. Thus the broader context was, in fact, “a crisis that is not a crisis, and a pact that is not a pact” (p. 83). The period was generative nevertheless especially of an elite identity defined by a sense not of being Brazilian but rather of belonging to a class with an increasing understanding of its interests and enemies.The six chapters in part 2 focus on the period of transformation that began with the French invasion of Iberia and the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Brazil in 1808. The legacy of João VI's reign included the maintenance of the monarchy on both sides of the Atlantic and the creation of important connections between a wealthy local elite in Rio and royal authority. The question to be posed, Malerba insists, is not whether Dom João played a role in instigating a process of independence but rather how he and his advisers shaped relations between elites and the state and how these relations guaranteed that the institution of slavery would endure transatlantic revolutionary and abolitionist challenges.The four chapters in part 3 examine the process of independence through the lens of projects for a new nation-state. Here the dominant figure, a political and intellectual descendant of Souza Coutinho, is José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva. A man of the Old Regime, as Malerba describes him, Andrada e Silva both harbored racialized understandings of Indigenous and African capacities and argued that the slave trade and slavery were incompatible with Brazil's future nationhood. Such a project was too “radical” for powerful landowning enslaving elites who instead forged a new state to preserve social and economic inequalities (p. 306). As Malerba observes in concluding his erudite and engaging survey, dismantling these inequalities, and their successive iterations, requires a new project for Brazil.