French Indochina (previously spelled as French Indo-China), officially known as the Indochinese Union and after 1941 as the Indochinese Federation, was a group of French-dependent territories in Southeast Asia from 1887 to 1954. It was initially a federation of French colonies (1887–1949), later a confederation of French associated states (1949–1954). It comprised Cambodia, Laos (from 1899), Guangzhouwan (1898–1945), Cochinchina, and Vietnamese regions of Tonkin and Annam. It was established in 1887 and was dissolved in 1954. In 1949, Vietnam was reunited and it regained Cochinchina. Its capitals were Hanoi (1902–1945) and Saigon (1887–1902, 1945–1954).
The Second French Empire colonized Cochinchina in 1862 and established a protectorate in Cambodia in 1863. After the French Third Republic took over northern Vietnam through the Tonkin campaign, the various protectorates were consolidated into one union in 1887. Two more entities were incorporated into the union: the Laotian protectorate and the Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan. The French exploited the resources in the region during their rule, while also contributing to limited and uneven improvements of the health and education system in the region, designed to benefit the French and, to an extent, a tiny group of native elites, rather than most of the local population. Deep divides remained between the native population and the colonists, leading to sporadic rebellions by the former.
After the Fall of France during World War II, the colony was administered by the Vichy government and was under Japanese occupation until 9 March 1945, when the Japanese army overthrew the colonial regime. They established puppet states including the Empire of Vietnam. After the Japanese surrender, the communist Viet Minh movement called for an uprising, leading to the August Revolution. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, subsequently proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945. In 1946, the Franco-Chinese and Ho–Sainteny Agreements enabled French forces to replace the Chinese north of the 16th parallel and facilitated a coexistence between the DRV and the French that strengthened the Viet Minh while undermining the Vietnamese nationalists. That summer, the Viet Minh colluded with French forces to eliminate nationalists, targeted for their ardent anti-colonialism, which led to all-out the First Indochina War.
In 1945, France returned Guangzhouwan to China. To counter the Viet Minh and as part of decolonization, France, working with Vietnamese nationalists, formed the anti-communist State of Vietnam as an associated state within the French Union in 1949. This led to Cochinchina returning to Vietnam in June.Fac-similé JO du 5 juin 1949, Legifrance.gouv.fr. Laos and Cambodia also became French associated states the same year. French efforts to retake Indochina were unsuccessful, culminating in defeat at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. On 22 October and 9 November 1953, Laos and Cambodia gained independence, as did VietnamThe Pentagon Papers Gravel Edition Volume 1, Chapter 5, "Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960" (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) Trích: "France, as the third party in Vietnam, then became pivotal to any political settlement, its executor for the West. But France had agreed to full independence for the GVN on ngày 4 tháng 6 năm 1954, nearly six weeks before the end of the Geneva Conference. By the terms of that June agreement, the GVN assumed responsibility for international contracts previously made on its behalf by France; but, there having been no reference to subsequent contracts, it was technically free of the Geneva Agreements. It has been argued to the contrary that the GVN was bound by Geneva because it possessed at the time few of the attributes of full sovereignty, and especially because it was dependent on France for defense. But such debates turn on tenuous points of international law regarding the prerogatives of newly independent or partitioned states. France speedily divested itself of responsibilities for "civil administration" in South Vietnam" with the Geneva Accords of 21 July 1954, ending French Indochina.
History Background Early French encounters
French–Vietnamese contacts can be traced to 1658 when Jesuit missionaries Joseph Francis Tissanier and Pierre Jacques Albier arrived in Vietnam. Around this time, Vietnam was carrying out its Nam tiến ("Southward"), the occupation of the Mekong Delta, a territory being part of the Khmer Empire and to a lesser extent, the kingdom of Champa which they had defeated in 1471.Kahin.
European involvement in Vietnam was confined to trade during the 18th century, as the remarkably successful work of the missionaries continued. In 1787, Pierre Pigneau de Behaine, a French Catholic priest, petitioned the French government and organised French military volunteers to aid Nguyễn Ánh in retaking lands his family lost to the Tây Sơn. Pigneau died in Vietnam but his troops fought on until 1802 in the French assistance to Nguyễn Ánh.
19th century
French conquest of Cochinchina
The French colonial empire was heavily involved in Vietnam in the 19th century; often French intervention was undertaken in order to protect the work of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in the country. For its part, the Nguyễn dynasty increasingly saw Catholic missionaries as a political threat; courtesans, for example, an influential faction in the dynastic system, feared for their status in a society influenced by an insistence on monogamy.Owen, p. 106.
A brief period of unification under the Nguyễn dynasty ended in 1858 with French military intervention. Under the pretext of protesting the persecution and expulsion of Catholic missionaries, and following Charles de Montigny's failure to secure concessions, Napoleon III ordered Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly to attack Tourane (present day Da Nang).Tucker, p. 29.
Fourteen French gunships, 3,300 men including 300 Filipino soldiers provided by the SpanishChapuis (1995), p. 195. attacked the port of causing significant damage and occupying the city. After fighting the Vietnamese for three months and finding himself unable to progress further in land, de Genouilly sought and received approval of an alternative attack on Saigon.Chapuis (2000), p. 48.
Sailing to southern Vietnam, de Genouilly captured the poorly defended city of Saigon on 17 February 1859. Once again, however, de Genouilly and his forces were unable to seize territory outside of the defensive perimeter of the city. De Genouilly was criticised for his actions and was replaced by Admiral Page in November 1859 with instructions to obtain a treaty protecting the Catholic faith in Vietnam while refraining from making territorial gains.
Peace negotiations proved unsuccessful and the fighting in Saigon continued. Ultimately in 1861, the French brought additional forces to bear in the Saigon campaign, advanced out of the city and began to capture cities in the Mekong Delta. On 5 June 1862, the Vietnamese conceded and signed the Treaty of Saigon whereby they agreed to legalize the free practice of the Catholic religion; to open trade in the Mekong Delta and at three ports at the mouth of the Red River in northern Vietnam; to cede the provinces of Biên Hòa, Gia Định and Định Tường along with the islands of Poulo Condore to France; and to pay reparations equivalent to one million dollars.Chapuis, pp. 49–53.Llewellyn.Thomazi, pp. 69–71.
In 1864 the aforementioned three provinces ceded to France were formally constituted as the French colony of Cochinchina. Then in 1867, French Admiral Pierre de la Grandière forced the Vietnamese to surrender three additional provinces, Châu Đốc, Hà Tiên and Vĩnh Long. With these three additions all of southern Vietnam and the Mekong Delta fell under French control.
Establishment and early administration
In 1863, the Cambodian king Norodom had requested the establishment of a French protectorate over his country. In 1867, Siam (modern Thailand) renounced suzerainty over Cambodia and officially recognised the 1863 French protectorate on Cambodia, in exchange for the control of Battambang and Siem Reap provinces which officially became part of Thailand. (These provinces would be ceded back to Cambodia by a border treaty between France and Siam in 1906).
France obtained control over northern Vietnam following its victory over China in the Sino-French War (1884–85). French Indochina was formed on 17 October 1887 from Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina (which together form modern Vietnam) and the Kingdom of Cambodia; Laos was added after the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893.
The federation lasted until 21 July 1954. In the four protectorates, the French formally left the local rulers in power, who were the emperors of Vietnam, kings of Cambodia, and kings of Luang Prabang, but in fact gathered all powers in their hands, the local rulers acting only as figureheads.
Japanese women called Karayuki-san migrated or were trafficked to cities like Hanoi, Haiphong and Saigon in colonial French Indochina in the late 19th century to work as prostitutes and provide sexual services to French soldiers who were occupying Vietnam. Since the French viewed Japanese women as clean, they were highly popular. Images of the Japanese prostitutes in Vietnam were put on French postcards by French photographers.*陳碧純，「山打根的八番娼館」之讀後心得，亞太研究論壇卷期:28 2005.06，頁309-315。http://www.rchss.sinica.edu.tw/capas/publication/newsletter/N28/2806.pdf 佐藤トゥイウェン，「第 4 章「孝」に殉じた天草の「からゆきさん」」，『周縁の文化交渉学シリーズ 8天草諸島の歴史と現在』，関西大学文化交渉学教育研究拠点，2012年。 柏木卓司，『戦前期フランス領インドシナにおける邦人進出の形態-「職業別人口表 」を中心として-』 ， (アジア経済) 31(3) 1990 3: p. 78-98。 柏木卓司，「ベトナムのからゆきさん」，『歴史と人物』10月号，中央公論，1979，208頁。 神坂次郎，『おれは伊平次』，講談社文庫，2002/8。 平田豊弘，「松下光廣と大南公司」，『周縁の文化交渉学シリーズ 4 陶磁器流通と西海地域』，関西大学，荒武賢一朗編，2011年。 Ch. Lemire, Les cinq Pays de l'Indo-Chine française, l'établissement de Kouang-Tchéou, le Siam，Juillet 1899． Dean Meyers and My-Van Tran, The Cao Dai, Prince Cuong De and the Japanese in 1937–1939, THE CRISIS OF THE EIGHTH LUNAR MONTH, University of South Australia, IJAPS Vol. 2 (May) 2006. The Japanese government tried to hide the existences of these Japanese prostitutes who went abroad and did not mention them in books on history.
Beginning in the 1880s there was a rise of an explicitly anti-Catholic French administration in French Indochina. – Keith, Charles: Religious Missionaries and the Colonial State (Indochina), in: 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin (20 February 2015). . The administration would try to reduce Catholic missionary influence in French Indochinese society, as opposed to the earlier decades where missionaries played an important role in both administration and society in French Cochinchina.
From 1 January 1898, the French directly took over the right to collect all taxes in the protectorate of Annam and to allocate salaries to the Emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty and its mandarins. In a notice dated 24 August 1898, the Resident-Superior of Annam wrote: "From now on, in the Kingdom of Annam there are no longer two governments, but only one" (meaning that the French government completely took over the administration).
Early Vietnamese rebellions