Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  THE CASE FOR A REVIVED COLONIAL EFFORT had been argued during the Second Empire, though the emperor’s unpopularity limited the audience.4 The active expression of the argument was left to the initiative of admirals, acting almost independently under a colonial directorate within the Navy Ministry. In 1853 New Caledonia in the Pacific was added to France’s small cabinet of foreign curiosities, and the following year an energetic Naval Troops governor, Faidherbe, began to explore beyond the enclave of St Louis on the Senegalese coast of West Africa. During 1859 – 67 the Navy acquired Cochinchina (South Vietnam), and under the early Third Republic continued to pursue a piecemeal series of local initiatives, notably in West Africa.

  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the footholds that France had acquired spasmodically on African and Asian coastlines would increasingly be seen as jumping-off points for a more purposeful colonialism, and voices arguing for such a project began to be heard from a number of quarters. In 1874 a young academic, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, published his widely read and influential On Colonization by Modern Peoples, arguing that an advanced society had an economic, intellectual, social and moral duty to colonize, for the sake of its own survival and prosperity and for the benefit of humanity as a whole.5 France was caught up in the international enthusiasm for exploration and scientific discovery that was characteristic of this period – as was an energetic Catholic missionary movement, which urged a national duty to shed ‘the light of French Christian civilization’ on lands sunk in dark ignorance and barbarism. More pragmatic supporters of a blue-water policy were the commercial interests, particularly those clustered around the ports of Bordeaux and Marseille. Imaginative military men in the Naval Troops and Africa Army needed new outlets for their energies, and although it would have put their careers at risk to take a public stance on such matters, some senior officers had political and journalistic connections that channelled their opinions into the public debate.

  The thirty-odd years of France’s greatest colonial dynamism were to begin in 1881. Spurred on by the realization that it was being left behind by the other powers in the global search for raw materials and new markets, and hungry to re-establish national prestige after the humiliations of 1870 – 71, France was in a hurry. Its psychological inability to relax central government control had cost it the opportunity to ride into an empire gradually on the backs of merchant-adventurers, and it had thus missed out on the mature stage of mercantile imperialism represented by, for example, the East India Company’s slow expansion of British authority in the subcontinent between the early eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. After this long intermission, the only way for France to realize its revived enthusiasm for colonies was to send military expeditions to brazenly kick-start a French government presence in new territories, immediately following the first swashbuckling phase of commercial penetration. Thus, during this second major chapter in its colonial story, France more or less reversed the sequence generally followed by British colonialists.

  It is noticeable that many French enthusiasts for colonialism were on the political Left. As early as 1839 the socialist Louis Blanc had written, in his influential essay The Organization of Work, that ‘the genius of France is essentially cosmopolitan: to go beyond herself, to spread herself across the world . . . that is the role which History has long assigned to France’. He appealed to ‘the invincible ardour of our will’, and claimed that Algeria had been placed conveniently just across the Mediterranean by the laws of Providence. The attraction of colonies for theorists of the utopian Left was that they would provide a laboratory in which confused ideas for a new social order could be worked out in practice, among peoples powerless to resist such engineering. While supporters of overseas adventures were to be found at many points on the arc of French politics, in the 1880s the most coherent imperialist doctrine would be argued by governments of the moderate Left led by Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta.6

  UNDER THE THIRD REPUBLIC French prime ministers seldom saw a second Christmas in office. Embedded in mutual distrust, politicians were as intent on denying their rivals effective power as on harnessing it constructively themselves. Parliament was divided not between disciplined parties of clear ideological definition, but between many factions spread right across the spectrum from Catholic reactionaries to extreme Radicals. Administrations were formed by temporary and fragile coalitions of interest; these were usually clumped somewhere in the Republican centre, but occasionally included inhabitants of more marginal political territory who could, for a while, deliver the votes of a few more deputies. (For a rough modern model of the practical dynamics of the late nineteenth-century National Assembly we might take, perhaps, today’s Israeli Knesset.) Governments were vulnerable to partisans of particular issues or regional interests; chronic instability made it difficult for any cabinet to sustain coherent policies, which were also subject to ambush by the entrenched bureaucrats who were the only uninterrupted tenants of the ministries. One consequence was that a limited number of individual politicians rotated into and out of office on several occasions. One of these was Léon Gambetta; the past decade had slightly sobered the wild-bearded young balloon-rider of 1870, but in a Chamber with many cynical careerists he was still a charismatic conviction politician.

  In 1881 Gambetta headed a Republican faction that was important to another led by the more stolid figure of Jules Ferry, who had become prime minister in September 1880. Gambetta had for years been a supporter of outward-looking policies; Ferry had never previously shown any interest in colonialism, but early in 1881 Gambetta (himself convinced by a loose cannon in the Foreign Ministry) converted him to a sincere belief in the need to act boldly in Tunisia. The withdrawal of most French troops from Tunisia in May – June 1881 was influenced not by Bou Amama’s coincidental rising in western Algeria but by the prospect of elections in October; this reduction quickly proved premature, and the need for a subsequent ‘surge’ – naval bombardments and a second major landing – saw Ferry voted out of office on 10 November. He was succeeded by Gambetta, who himself lasted only until 30 January 1882, but during those three months he showed an energy recalling his glory days in 1870 – 71; perhaps his most relevant reform was to take colonial affairs away from the Navy Ministry and give them to a new under-secretariat in the Trade Ministry. After a brief interregnum, on 16 February 1883 the revolving doors deposited Jules Ferry in the prime minister’s office once again, and he immediately demonstrated that his stumble over Tunisia had not diminished his newly found passion for the colonialist cause.7

  THE ARGUMENTS FOR THAT CAUSE, as articulated by Ferry, were threefold. The first was commercial: only colonial expansion would secure for France the raw materials and the new markets for its manufactures without which its economy would be crushed by foreign competition. The second was humanitarian: how could France, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, shirk the task of leading towards reason and civilization those unfortunate lesser peoples still mired in ignorance and cruelty? The third was the straightforward appeal to national interest and pride: France could not resign herself to the role of a second-class power – its people ‘would not easily be content to count for no more in the world than a large Belgium’.8 Having lost the balance of power in Europe to Germany, France would wither into irrelevance if it did not reassert itself on a wider field, and it would become powerless to defend those overseas interests if it did not plant garrisons and naval bases in those regions not already swallowed up by other nations. The civilized countries were ‘extending their ancient rivalries into faraway fields of competition; the politics of the hearthside, of immobility, of withdrawing into ourselves, are nothing but an abdication’. France would remain great only by ‘carrying everywhere it was able its language, its customs, its flag, its weapons, its genius’.9

  The main obstacle to this ambition was simply the stubborn indifference of the French public as a whole to the world beyond their shores. To an introverted and still largely rural society, far horizons w
ere more frightening than attractive, and twelve years after Sedan military adventures did not command much enthusiasm even among xenophobes. There were also many who were happy to provide reasoned counter-arguments. Liberal economists condemned colonies as uselessly expensive distractions from the urgent task of industrialization at home: rather than finding undemanding new markets for goods with which the developed world was already saturated, France should throw itself into the competitive search for more modern products. Military conservatives argued against distractions from ‘the blue line of the Vosges’. The ultra-nationalist Paul Déroulède (last encountered at the barricade in the Rue Tourtille on 28 May 1871, and now the moving spirit of a League of Patriots) spoke for many who mourned for Alsace and Lorraine and disdained the prospect of colonial sideshows: ‘I have lost two daughters – and you offer me twenty servant-girls?’. Speaking for the Radicals in the Assembly, Georges Clemenceau (who as mayor of Montmartre had briefly enjoyed some influence in the Commune) declared his unabashed enthusiasm for what Ferry dismissed as the politics of the hearthside: ‘Personally, my patriotism lies in France . . . Do you not find the tasks of increasing the sum of knowledge and enlightenment in our own country, of developing its wellbeing, of increasing liberty and extending rights . . . do you not find these tasks sufficient . . . ?’

  Any cause that could arouse the visceral opposition of both Paul Déroulède and Georges Clemenceau was unusual: significantly, neither the Right nor the Left had a monopoly of either pro-colonialism or anti-colonialism. The dispute would bicker on for thirty years, quite separately from the major ideological confrontations that would dominate French politics, and it would be March 1894 before even a separate Colonial Ministry was finally created. 10 During the 1890s the colonial lobby led by the deputy for Oran, Eugène Étienne, would belatedly bring together supporters from right across the spectrum of party and faction to work for this one cause – businessmen of the French Colonial Union, devout Catholics of the Movement for the Propagation of the Faith, members of the burgeoning Geographical Societies, soldiers, sailors and social visionaries.11 On the one hand, since this single-issue pressure group was not particularly aligned with either of the deep tendencies in French society, it could never form a truly decisive parliamentary block. On the other, since the colonial lobby was increasingly well organized, funded and publicized, the serial instability of French governments throughout the period would, at particular moments, give the deputies who did support it opportunities to punch well above their weight in the Chamber.12

  Those moments would include any occasion when some British slight to France’s tender self-esteem inflamed public resentment. It must be remembered that during the thirty years following 1871 nearly every French-man instinctively loathed Britain with almost as much intensity as he did Germany; and since it was Britain, not Germany, that would sometimes frustrate France in the arena of colonial competition, chauvinists were always happy to blame any misfortune on the ancient enemy. French progressives might praise Britain’s stable political institutions, flexible education and easier relations between the classes, but patriots were constantly aggrieved by the international success of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ industry and commerce and the perceived arrogance that it bred. Some French commentators revealed an extraordinary indignation that simply making and selling things should be rewarded with such undeserved wealth, power and respect; in their world view, to elevate pragmatism above abstract principle was ignoble, and commercial enterprise was simply greed.13 While Britain’s self-esteem was anything but tender, and its long-estabished imperial position was far beyond the reach of French rivalry, it was no less inclined to automatic hostility. As early as May 1884 a Mr Cust, Honorary Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, delivered a paper on France’s colonial ambitions to the Royal United Services Institution in London after returning from a tour of Algeria:It is openly asserted by French publicists that the only chance for France maintaining her position as a Great Power in Europe is to found colonies in Asia and Africa, and the cherished desire of the French nation is to have a great African Empire. To give birth to such colonies as Australia and Canada they are confessedly unequal, as owing to well-known domestic habits their population is stagnant, and has no annual surplus of thousands to throw off. To govern great subject empires such as India they are not qualified, for they have not as a nation sufficient self-restraint to be content with the affairs of empire and to leave the property in land of the subject races absolutely unviolated.

  What they mean by a colony is a country like Algeria, in which French citizens are encouraged to settle on lands from which the ancient proprietors have been ousted, not, however, cultivating them entirely by themselves, but by the agency of the indigenous races reduced to serfage. Their object . . . is to make such colonies the strictly guarded commercial preserve of the mother country, the raw products . . . being collected mainly for the advantage of the conquering race. The manufactured products of the mother country are to be poured into the subject country, all competition [from] other European countries being barred by protective duties: the raison d’être of a colony is to constitute an exclusive mart for the home manufacturer.

  Even in the mode of acquisition . . . the French nation has a method of its own. Neither the Russian nor the English nation can plead innocence in the matter of annexation, but, when each case is examined, it will be found that there has been no deliberate design conceived beforehand of seeking an entirely new country for conquest . . . The French nation, however, usually selects the spot which seems suitable to their operations; an explorer is sent forward, and makes a Treaty which founds rights; the Treaty is of course broken by the Native Power – and it is naively admitted that it is meant to be broken; and invasion and annexation follow . . . 14

  WHILE WE CAN ALMOST HEAR THE GROWLS of agreement from behind a dozen heroic moustaches, Mr Cust’s audience need not have been too concerned about France’s ‘exclusive mart for the home manufacturer’. By the late 1890s the British Empire covered 11 million square miles, with a population of around 400 million people. Between 1880 and 1914 the French empire would expand from about 270,000 square miles to just over 4 million, but its population from about 5 million to only 48 million. The initial expense of military invasion was negligible: that whole column of the ledger, worldwide, from 1830 to 1913, totalled only 1 milliard francs (a thousand million, or a billion) – equivalent, in 1900, to just two years’ French government revenue from taxes on alcohol. But over the same period the cost of continuing military occupation and pacification was 8 milliards, and that of investments in civil infrastructure another 4 milliards – the latter, money that economists argued would have been better spent on France’s own mines, railways and ports, to allow its industry to serve more efficiently customers with a lot more to spend than Arabs, Africans and Indochinese.

  Set against these capital outlays, in overall terms of profit and loss the return on the empire was questionable. An analysis of its value in 1913 shows that while its colonial trade represented 13 per cent of France’s global exports and 9 per cent of its imports, the total trailed in third place behind its trade with Britain and Germany. While the absolute volume of French trade with French colonies was perhaps twice that achieved with them by foreign countries, foreigners did not have to provide inwards investment, so their profit margins were much wider. Moreover, both British and German industry proved more alert in discovering and satisfying the actual preferences of the French colonial marketplace (for example, Lancashire textile mills were quick to tailor their production to match the strict sumptuary laws that governed Indochinese clothing, while French agents persisted in trying to sell bolts of cloth in standard French measurements.)15 Individual French industries and the shareholders of private companies did, of course, make considerable profits out of the new empire; but while the colonies did contribute materially to the growth of some sectors of the French economy, overall they mainly saved existing lame ducks rather than spurring vigorous new
activity that would earn future dividends on the world market. Among the ailing industries saved by the new colonial trade was one based around Marseille: the manufacture of straw hats.16

  If this seems a rather modest return on the gold and blood invested, nevertheless, in spring 1883, Jules Ferry was convinced that such an investment was absolutely necessary in North Vietnam.

  PHYSICALLY AND HISTORICALLY, the thousand-mile north to south length of Vietnam – in the nineteenth century still collectively called by its old Chinese name of Annam, ‘the pacified south’ – is divided into three distinct parts, traditionally described as two rice-baskets joined by a carrying-pole. The north, Tonkin, is the heavily populated Red river delta (hereafter, simply the Delta), walled in by forested hills and mountains astride its borders with China – with Yunnan province to the north-west, and Guangxi to the north-east. Its capital Hanoi and all other important towns were sited on the navigable Black, Red and Clear river complex slanting down from Yunnan to empty into the Gulf of Tonkin (see Map 4). South of the Delta is the heart of the old kingdom, the narrow carrying-pole specifically known today as Annam; here the seat of national authority was established in the imperial city of Hué on the Perfume river. Further south still, beyond the wild Central Highlands, is the second populous rice-basket: Cochinchina, where the southern capital Saigon sat on the lower Mekong river.