Imperialism in Asia - France in Indochina

France in Indochina

France, which had lost its empire to the British by the end of the 18th century, had little geographical or commercial basis for expansion in Southeast Asia. After the 1850s, French imperialism was initially impelled by a nationalistic need to rival the United Kingdom and was supported intellectually by the notion that French culture was superior to that of the people of Annam, and its mission civilisatrice— or its "civilizing mission" of the Annamese through their assimilation to French culture and the Catholic religion. The false pretext for French expansionism in Indochina was the protection of French religious missions in the area, coupled with a desire to find a southern route to China through Tonkin, the European name for the northern region of northern Vietnam.

French religious and commercial interests were established in Indochina as early as the 17th century, but no concerted effort at stabilizing the French position was possible in the face of British strength in the Indian Ocean and French defeat in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. A mid-19th century religious revival under the Second Empire provided the atmosphere within which interest in Indochina grew. Anti-Christian persecutions in the Far East provided the pretext for the bombardment of Tourane (Da Nang) in 1847, and invasion and occupation of Da Nang in 1857 and Saigon in 1858. Under Napoleon III, France decided that French trade with China would be surpassed by the British, and accordingly the French joined the British against China in the Second Opium War from 1857 to 1860, and occupied parts of Vietnam as its gateway to China.

By the Treaty of Saigon in 1862, on June 5, the Vietnamese emperor ceded France three provinces of southern Vietnam to form the French colony of Cochinchina; France also secured trade and religious privileges in the rest of Vietnam and a protectorate over Vietnam's foreign relations. Gradually French power spread through exploration, the establishment of protectorates, and outright annexations. Their seizure of Hanoi in 1882 led directly to war with China (1883–1885), and the French victory confirmed French supremacy in the region. France governed Cochinchina as a direct colony, and central and northern Vietnam under the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, and Cambodia as protectorates in one degree or another. Laos too was soon brought under French "protection."

By the beginning of the 20th century, France had created an empire in Indochina nearly 50 percent larger than the mother country. A Governor-General in Hanoi ruled Cochinchina directly and the other regions through a system of residents. Theoretically, the French maintained the precolonial rulers and administrative structures in Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Laos, but in fact the governor-generalship was a centralised fiscal and administrative regime ruling the entire region. Although the surviving native institutions were preserved in order to make French rule more acceptable, they were almost completely deprived of any independence of action. The ethnocentric French colonial administrators sought to assimilate the upper classes into France's "superior culture." While the French improved public services and provided commercial stability, the native standard of living declined and precolonial social structures eroded. Indochina, which had a population of over eighteen million in 1914, was important to France for its tin, pepper, coal, cotton, and rice. It is still a matter of debate, however, whether the colony was commercially profitable.