THE FRENCH IN INDO-CHINA
Much as we all hate to be fed plain knowledge, preferring our learning
disguised with the sauce of entertainment, like castor-oil in
orange-juice, I fear we must taste a few of the bitter spots in the
history of Indo-China before we can properly savor the present position
of France in her greatest Far Eastern possession.
All the land from Tonkin to Cochinchina was conquered and colonized by
the Chinese more than two centuries before the beginning of the
so-called Christian era. From that time China ruled the region off and
on; it was in fact five times a Chinese colony. Once, shortly before
Christ, a woman of Annam governed for three years, but after another
brief hiatus or two China held unbroken sway from the third to the tenth
century, until the revolution of 968 A.D. During that millennium Annam
took on a complete Chinese culture, and has kept most of it down to this
day. Then there were various native dynasties until 1407, when, under
the Ming, China again ruled until 1428. Even after that, though there
was no interference from Peking, and the Manchus held Tonkin only in
name, the people of the Eminent South, like Siam, Burma, and other
former dependencies, paid a modest tribute to the northern emperor, as
the easiest way out of risking more fighting. Koang-de, the Annamese Son
of Heaven, was still considered a vassal of the emperor of China—the
occupants of the throne at Hué are in fact still proud to claim descent
from the Chinese imperial family of before the days of the pigtailed
Manchus. Toward the end of Chinese domination the Annamese could
function even in China proper as mandarins, generals, and still higher
officials, so that the line between the two peoples was almost
obliterated.
In the mess that followed the Manchu conquest of China, a Tonkinese
fisherman founded a new dynasty, which ruled at Hanoï until the end of
the eighteenth century. Then, the country having naturally broken in two
in the middle, a rebellion overthrew the ruling Nguyen family of the
south and the Tai might have taken the country in hand, had there not
arisen that epic hero among the Annamese, Nguyen-anh, who in 1802 took
the name of Gia-long. This founder of the present dynasty united under
one rule what are to-day three of the five divisions of
Indo-China—Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina—establishing his capital at
Hué, being the first to group under the jade scepter everything from the
frontiers of China to the banks of the Mekong.
But his victory was not so complete or so simply won as this may sound,
and strictly speaking he did not rule as master, for he had to pay for
calling in outside help. As usual it was a squabble between native
factions that gave the less naïve Europeans their chance. Though they
had already begun to visit these shores in the way of commerce during
the sixteenth century, the French first had official contact with Annam
in 1787, when the future Gia-long was fighting to recover the position
of his family. Finding himself, in his war with the Tai and three
brother usurpers, in imminent danger of being driven out of his native
land, he ill-advisedly followed the suggestion of the French bishop of
Adran and sent an embassy to France asking for protection. He got it,
with a vengeance. Also the wise bishop, who thought this a fine chance
to counterbalance the growing political power of England in India, got a
splendid tomb and a lot of Indo-Chinese streets named after him. Fearing
perhaps that the embassy would not put things strongly enough, the
bishop went to France in person and got promise of help from Louis XVI,
or whoever ruled in his name. Before the assistance was delivered,
however, Gia-long-to-be had to make a treaty with Louis promising to
cede to France the islands of Touron and Poulo Condore off the coast of
Cochinchina and give the French a concession at Tourane. Then the French
sent troops from Pondicherry and helped Nguyen-anh to overthrow his
enemies and to acquire by 1801 sway over all the present Indo-China
except Cambodia and the Laos, in short to become Gia-long the Great.
Though Gia-long died in 1820 without perhaps suspecting the truth, this
opening wedge eventually led to the establishment of French authority
over all Indo-China. But the successors of Gia-long showed themselves
“very ungrateful” to the French. His immediate successor, his natural
son Minh-mang, broke off with Europe in order to get the support of
China, and after considerable rough work, including the massacring of
many native Christians, died by falling off a horse, a failing he seemed
to have in common with some modern princes, leaving behind him
seventy-one children, of whom forty-nine were sons—not a bad record for
a man who died young. The choice among these must have been difficult,
and it does not seem to have been particularly successful, for the son
who followed him under the name of Thieu-tri left no great fame behind
him. But then came Tu-duc, who massacred many more native Christians and
their European missionaries. Though they probably wanted to be martyrs
anyway, the killing of the ecclesiastics was made the pretext for the
declaring of war. A Franco-Spanish squadron took Touron and finally
Saïgon; Tourane was seized by the French; Tu-duc, besieged in his own
capital at Hué, gave up all Saïgon Province; and by 1867 all lower
Cochinchina had passed into the possession of France and became the
French colony it has remained ever since.
Cambodia was already considered a protectorate of France; for Norodom,
father of the present octogenarian king, Sisowath, had for better or for
worse placed his country under the protection of the French in 1863. The
French gradually crowded upon the Chinese in upper Tonkin, to make up
for the British advance in Burma, and there was long and sometimes
severe fighting, with “some splendid feats at arms,” according to French
historians. There was an opposition or anti-imperialistic party in
France, but as usual this minor opinion was crowded into the background.
This time the French intrenched themselves in the citadel of Hué and put
on the throne a new emperor, the old one fleeing among the Moï after
massacring several thousand more native Christians. The war for the
possession of Tonkin lasted a long time. In 1873 Dupuis and a hundred
French soldiers captured Hanoï, though it was the Portuguese and Dutch
who had long had “factories” in the rich delta of the Red River; and
China, which had given her Tonkinese vassals no more assistance than she
did the Burmese against the British, was at length forced to acknowledge
all Tonkin to be under the “protection” of France. Thus by 1885 the
whole of present-day Indo-China, from end to end and from Siam to the
China Sea, a country about the size of Texas, therefore larger than
France, was consolidated under French rule; except that the Angkor
region was added later. Plainly speaking, though the French talk of
“treaties” as if an equal sovereign people had requested them to take
over the task of governing, not only Cochinchina but all Indo-China was
stolen bit by bit as a result of the simplicity of Gia-long and the
killing of those French missionaries in 1858. Bright little pupils will
recall that the French had similar schemes afoot in Mexico at the very
time they were fighting for Saïgon, and in Asia one realizes that the
Monroe Doctrine has certainly changed the face of America from what it
might have been.
The French conquest of Indo-China, some of it by trickery and some of
it, notably the Tonkin, by real warfare, is merely a part of Western
covetousness in the Orient, not the individual sin of an individual
nation. We can condemn that Western aggression without losing the right
to give full praise to the French soldiers who did the dirty work, just
as we can condemn modern industrial exploitation without charging
present conditions in Indo-China particularly to France. Once we grant
the righteousness of “imperialism,” of the conquering “for their own
good” of colored races by the white, once we accept that trite tricky
phrase of imperialists, “the white man’s burden,” any possible charge
against the French is quashed. It is the old question: Is it good or is
it bad for white nations to take over weaker peoples who cannot govern
themselves well in our sense of the word—and who are so well worth
exploiting? Is it better to be chaotic, “backward,” but independent, or
modern and exploited? Is it better for a country even as civilized as
France to take hold of these poorly governed races, these inefficient
countries, and make them settle down to business and behave themselves,
even if the “protector” does pay himself well for the trouble? Great
minds set in cement will tell you, but I cannot; I find my judgment
depending on the color of the day, the way I have slept, my breakfast,
the mail I have received; it is a perpetual struggle between my
reflected and my indignant self. And of course each individual will
condemn or praise this modern way of acquiring colonies that are not
called colonies, of subjecting people who are not admittedly subjected,
according to his background, his environment, his wealth, and the job he
holds, perhaps also to the breakfast he has eaten.
At any rate exploitation is visibly the _raison d’être_ of the French in
Indo-China, though the Indo-Chinese are no more exploited than are the
great mass of our own people at home by those few who have the
strangle-hold in industrial matters, and by no means so much as are the
people of “independent” China by their own legal and bandit rulers. One
of the trump-cards in this modern game of colonial exploitation is a
tariff. There are swarms of customs officials whose duty it is to see
that nothing gets into or out of Indo-China—or even through it, for that
matter—without paying heavy charges, swarms of Frenchmen with native
assistants who examine every spool of thread that comes in from anywhere
except France, so that it takes all day to get a few dollars’ worth of
“foreign” goods through the customs. Things from France pay no duties,
submit to no formalities, any more than the French need passports or
lose time in landing. But all others, whether persons or things, are put
to trouble and expense. A box of cigars selling for three dollars in
China costs seven dollars in Indo-China, though its Philippine place of
origin is as near one country as the other. Every kind of French drink
is available, but no others; even British whisky can be had only if it
is smuggled in. Every box unloaded from the average ship comes from
France; everything not of local origin in the average shop is French,
even those things which France produces much more poorly and much more
expensively than other lands. A Ford coming direct to Indo-China pays 45
per cent duty—125 per cent if it comes indirectly—and sells for about
eighteen hundred piastres, or more than nine hundred dollars gold. The
little cars for which the French are noted cost from thirteen to fifteen
thousand francs, so that it depends on the exchange of the day which car
you can afford. There are not only import but export duties on
everything, even paddy, or unhulled rice, nay, a duty even on the
gunny-sacks it goes out in. More than that; everything merely passing
through Indo-China, as the shortest or most convenient route between two
parts of China, is opened, carefully examined, and assessed, though in
this case the charges are called “transit dues.” Indeed, the more
toothsome things from foreign lands are not infrequently consumed by the
examiners and the empty cans sent on to the consignees.
Does all this money, paid in the end by the inhabitants thereof, go to
the “protected” country? You have three guesses, if so many are needed.
_La Métropole_, that is, France, gets real returns from its Far-Eastern
possession; it is no altruistic “white man’s burden” the French are
carrying there. Every year Indo-China sends France a check for about
twenty million piastres. That nice little filial Christmas present of
ten million dollars comes mainly from the _douane_ and _régie_, that is,
the customs and the tobacco, opium, and other government monopolies.
Besides this the “protected” people pay the cost of military occupation,
not to mention many millions more in official salaries and the like.
But what France officially gets out of Indo-China is a mere drop in the
bucket compared to what Frenchmen get by individual exploitation of a
land where they have special privilege. French commerce has a virtual
monopoly in almost anything except rice and betel-nut. There is plenty
of iron, innumerable other natural resources, but the French encourage
no modern industries in the colony, because they prefer to import from
France the products of their own factories, so that after all it is the
French capitalists and workmen at home who are “protected.” Take sugar,
for instance; they export the crude at low and import the refined at
high prices rather than help the natives to have their own refineries.
Perhaps the best example of modern industrial exploitation of a
“protected” people is the coal-mines in the northeastern corner of the
Tonkin, which we visited on the second of those never-to-be-forgotten
days in the Bay of Along.
The mines of Campha or Hongay, on the northern shore of that great
wilderness of floating rocks, are open cuts, like those of the Japanese
at Fushun near Mukden, or the iron-mines of Daiquirí in the mountains of
eastern Cuba. There is no flaunting of the dreaded earth-dragon by
digging down into the earth. Black terraces, mammoth stairways, are
piled up the reddish hillsides, great amphitheaters cut in the hills,
their walls so smooth and so sheer that one might think the coal was cut
in huge slices, as from a gigantic cake. This precious region was
discovered by a French forest-ranger wandering the woods along this
coast no longer ago than 1905 and 1907. To-day the cuts are so large
that the natives pickaxing on the slopes look like ants on gigantic
black stadiums scaling the heavens. The roads through them lead from one
grade to another, on and on, cutting through the villages, following the
edge of the bay that is sprinkled much farther than the eye can see with
those fantastic protruding rocky mountain peaks.
When we visited Campha, the black quarries swarmed with workmen, clothed
in once reddish-brown cloth, now so dirty that they blended into the
background against which they toiled. According to the mine officials
and foremen these Annamese coolies are very lazy miners; certainly they
seemed unwilling, after the manner of slaves, as if they were asking
themselves who is benefiting by all this hard labor to get out of the
hillsides the black stuff that is of no use to them. In fact the
atmosphere of Annam in general is unwillingness, when working for
Europeans, in antithesis to that of China. These beings dressed in sooty
rags, these men wielding pickaxes with thin arms, have little to gain by
their grueling labor under an imperious sun. There were women on the
slopes also, their mouths bleeding with the sustaining and comforting
betel-juice, and behind the coal-wagons _nhos_ ten years old, their worn
faces under the coal-dust seeming forty, bent double their gaunt little
bodies, half covered with black rags and tatters, their bare feet
covered with a hard sole of the dust in which they forever trot for ten
or fifteen cents a day.
We were carried in chairs and on horses up the slopes from where the
cars of coal are loaded into barges with little houses at the stem, a
kind of Paris green scattered over the top of the coal to keep the
workmen from stealing a little of it to sell. We went so high that we
could look down not only upon all the town below, but across a great
stretch of the blue rock-strewn sea. There was not a temple or pagoda in
the native town, not a flower, not a single bamboo hedge before the
native houses, no more slim straight arec-trees topped by a parasol of
leaves, no smoking incense, but belching chimneys, and pickaxes. Instead
of the pastoral quiet of other Tonkinese villages there was a great
roaring as of a waterfall, as of some great battle—the noise of the
sifters. In contrast to this super-civilization there are wild animals
in the surrounding bush; tigers come now and then to eat a coolie, when
old age makes them more cunning than swift and strong, for they do not
need much strength to carry off a mere human being.
But soon the 10.30 whistle blew, halting the work until two in the
afternoon, and we came down for the _apéritif_ in one of the houses
where the French live in the comfort they will not be denied even in the
wilderness—and where even the women could not understand why my wife and
mother, why our not yet four-year-old son for that matter, would not
join them in a cocktail.
The hardest job at the mines is to get workmen, to bribe coolies to work
here in the bush, and to keep them from running away again. Everything
has been tried, and nothing works. As soon as the Tonkinese has a few
piastres in his substitute for a purse he leaves the mines and returns
to his rice-fields—and who can blame him? At the time of _Têt_, which
also is nearing the time of harvest, all wish to escape to their
ancestral villages again, and then especially they run away by the
thousands. Every ruse and stratagem is tried, for the massed overseers
and guards do not suffice. For instance, wages are paid only for the
last fortnight of the preceding month, so that the workmen must either
remain or lose many days of toil by running away. In order that they
shall not starve, however, and out of pure philanthropy as it were, the
company gives those who have worked well a piastre every ten days, which
they call “making an advance.” Another scheme to hold them is to build a
big covered market, a movie booth. Not long ago one bright administrator
discovered a still better plan. Missionaries installed at the mines
would keep there at least the Catholics, he thought. So an Annamese
father of the Spanish missions was imported and a little church
constructed for him, and the new parish already has some seven hundred
coolies whom the confessional and a fear of future damnation keep from
running away.
Sometimes, on the other hand, when floods carry away the dikes of the
Red River, devastating the rice-fields so that famine settles down upon
the delta, the _nha-qués_ flock to the coal-fields by whole villages, to
find the rice they cannot get at home, and then there are as many as
twenty thousand coolies dotting the great black stadiums, and a good
year for the mine syndicate. As each new mine opens, at every new
terrace begun, a Chinese man comes to set up his four planks and lay out
his bowls of rice and provisions, often before a single shovel-stroke
has been struck, as if he smelled profits from afar as the vulture
smells carrion. He will be rich, this fat, physically flabby fellow with
his freshly shaven head and his smooth, imperturbably smiling face, from
the profits garnered from their wages, while the new coolies are still
only poor ragged and dirty miners, longing to run away.
The coolies of Campha and Hongay are of no importance to the court at
Hué, and not only is there no mandarin to rule over them, but not even a
French functionary, except a gendarme who pompously decorates himself
with the title of commissary. The real master is the mine; the mere
people are nothing; as in all this modern world of industry property is
everything, human life a mere pawn. The syndicate owns everything for
many miles round about: the fields, the woods, the houses, the roads,
the railways that carry the coal down to their jetties, the barges, the
whole port, even the church with the sharp steeple, everything from the
bowels of the earth to the slightest sprig of grass that may force its
way through the coal-dust. If a village stands in the way of a new mine,
so much the worse for it; down it comes; and when the syndicate
constructs a new one farther on each native is made to pay part of the
cost of his new house, so that he will be bound to the soil like a serf.
The company is self-sufficient too; it produces everything it needs,
from its tools to the rice for its coolies; and it is rich enough to be
beyond the dreams of avarice, were there any such locality. The
sixty-four thousand shares of stock offered at sixteen million francs a
few years ago are to-day worth more than half a billion. The net profits
the year before my visit were more than the total capitalization, not
counting a twenty-million-piastre reserve.
One might conclude that at least this kingdom of coal brings its tribute
to Indo-China, to debt-ridden France. Not at all; it does not even
furnish the colony the coal it needs. Almost all of it goes to Japan,
which pays well. Saïgon and Hanoï demand coal in vain; such factories as
there are have to send their orders to Cardiff, and the railroads fire
with wood, devastating the forests. After the fashion of modern
industrialism, that present-day descendant of feudal tyranny, unknown
stockholders suck the marrow from the country, dividing the profits
among themselves, and leave nothing either for the colony or for France.
As in France, the rich run away with the money that should be paid in
taxes and leave “nothing but the hatred of thousands of coolies.”
As in these coal-fields, so it is with most rich enterprises in
Indo-China; many a scandalous fortune has been created there since 1914,
yet the public treasury takes no account of them. Not only is there no
tax on war profits but not even an income tax. For the laws of France do
not apply, and the law of the colony is to exploit it and the people
thereof, not the Frenchmen who make their fortunes there. Nowhere in the
world perhaps are war-profiteers more favored than in this rich French
protectorate, for they can keep everything for themselves, down to the
last piastre. “They are as miserly with their gold as they were with
their blood when the war was on,” a French traveler bitterly puts it,
adding that all those enthusiastic young men who conquered Tonkin gained
for their country were the swollen profits accruing to the holders of
stock in such things as the mines of Hongay. It is a misfortune that the
people liberated by France from the tyranny of their mandarins, he goes
on, fall now into the power of these new tyrants; bad, because little
grains of misery make a mighty ocean of revolt, and just over the
frontier of China there are something like half a billion yellow men who
are gradually waking up. “For the true mandarins of to-day are no longer
those lordlings in yellow robes and silk tunics, so proud of their long
overdue finger-nails, whom we saw bumping their heads on the palace
pavements at Hué, but negotiators and financiers, adventurers who now
carry no rifles on their shoulders but operate far from the jungle, by
thrusts of the stock exchange.”
As we have already descended to statistics, let me go on to say that
Indo-China is now credited with about 20,000,000 inhabitants, of whom
two thirds are Annamese, 1,300,000 Cambodians, more than 1,000,000
Laosians, and half a million aborigines of various races. To be still
more statistical, the latest census, now some years old, gave the total
population as 18,983,203, of whom 16,256 were French and 1191
“foreigners.” Most of the French and nearly all the “foreigners”—that
is, non-French Caucasians—are in Cochinchina and Tonkin, more
specifically in Saïgon and Hanoï. To-day there are some 30,000 Chinese
and other alien Asiatics not included in the round figures above; and
for the 18,000 Europeans, more than 90 per cent of them French, there
are fully 40,000 Eurasians!
Many French colonials think it would be better to abolish the pretense
of “protectorates” and really rule the whole country in name as well as
in fact, make it all a colony, like Cochinchina, in order to do away
with the sleek practices of the native mandarins and other
functionaries, particularly in Annam. Either, they say, let us have a
direct and undisguised French administration or return to a real
protectorate, with kings and emperors who would not feel themselves
annihilated, who would have the impression of being guided, counseled,
even directed, but never dominated. On the other hand the French way of
ruling through native chiefs pushed along by Europeans is a good system,
and it is hard to see how native go-betweens of some sort could be done
away with entirely.
For the French officials, particularly those higher up, being French as
well as officials, rarely know any other language than their own; and
therein lies perhaps their gravest fault. For they and those they rule
over are at the mercy of any scamp who poses as an interpreter. Some
French functionaries get official credit for knowing one of the native
languages, but they seldom speak enough of it to get along in court, for
example, without calling in the _interprète_. Just as there is a
pidgin-English along the China coast, there is in Indo-China a
pidgin-French, using only the infinitive of verbs and always the _toi_
form, so that “Toi connaître?” takes the place of “Savez-vous?” and so
on, irrespective of tense or gender. It is an amusing tongue, which
“boys” probably find as queer and as hard to learn as we do their
quarrelsome Annamese. As in the case of foreigners who become so fluent
in the bastard English of Chinese treaty-ports, it would require little
more effort to acquire a speaking knowledge of the native tongue.
Individually the French officials of Indo-China are agreeable gentlemen,
at least on a par with their counterparts in other white man’s colonies.
But the government atmosphere is much like that of old Spain: no one
seems to come out for his health or primarily for the benefit of the
natives. While there is not the “squeeze” of China or the graft of
Tammany, still there are ways of turning a politician’s honest penny. It
is less dishonesty, however, that constitutes the official flaw than
lack of ardent personal interest in the task in hand. “The soul of the
missionary and the educator is what the ‘protectors’ of such a people
should bring to their task,” a French _publiciste_ asserts. “But few
officials will accept the sacrifice of wasting any more time and energy
than necessary in a place reputed inadequate to their merits. The only
thought of the average French colonial official seems to be to ‘make a
hit’ with his superiors, for his own benefit and advancement, and get
back to the fleshpots of Paris as soon as possible. He has no ardor, no
initiative; the ethnic and social milieu being closed to him, his
business becomes mere routine; he does everything with only one thought
in mind—his career.”
The French have of course done much good for Indo-China. They have
improved the cities, planted parks, opened ports, built roads such as
the Far East had never seen before; and some one would certainly exploit
the people if the French did not; their position is decidedly preferable
to the anarchy over the Chinese border. But the guardians pay themselves
well for their services. The government departments are greatly
over-staffed; even the hurried traveler gets the impression that the
colony is a refuge for deserving wards of the government who cannot be
accommodated at home. The Council meets once a year in Hanoï and once in
Saïgon, which among other things gives a change of scene, a “winter” and
a “summer” capital, with lots of travel pay for mileage between them.
The higher officials in particular are shifted often from one division
of the country to another, whereas there should be two quite distinct
sets of rulers, dividing the colony on ethnographic lines; for Cambodia
is as different from Tonkin as Morocco is from Réunion.
The majority of the French officials in Indo-China are from the Midi,
like most of her colonials. The speech of many of them sounds almost
Italian, to say nothing of that of the Corsican river-captains and the
like, who speak with a genuine foreign accent. This is natural, the Midi
being nearer the sea and having few industries to absorb its ambitious
sons. Yet they do not love the tropics. Most of them are frankly bored
with life in this distant possession and, outside their routine tasks,
are interested mainly in café pleasures and the joys of feminine
society. There are some exceptions, of course, some who do their
gymnastics every morning and some who become mighty hunters before the
Moï. Now and then a scholarly fellow takes advantage of his ethnographic
opportunities. But on the whole there is little unnecessary mingling
with the natives, little outdoor life, except under café awnings, few
excursions, fewer _piqueniques_ than one would expect in a land of good
roads to delightful places and automobiles in which to reach them. Lest
I be accused of pessimism, let us listen to a critic of their own
nationality:
The Frenchman imports into the Orient the immortal principles of
absinthe and café gatherings, as the German does his beer and the
Englishman his sports. Individualists, rarely knowing any modern
language except our own, we have therefore a national selfsufficiency
and a suggestion of provincialism, which betray themselves the moment
we escape from the superficial cosmopolitanism of Paris—of a part of
Paris and a certain stratum of Paris at that. Café habits and the
customs of the politician, narrow-mindedness and prejudice,
disparagement, the faults of individualism, give our colonial
officials an incapacity for agreement and of organized collaboration,
a tendency to ignore realities, and to pay themselves with words. All
the colonial official’s thoughts seem to be turned toward his past,
toward the _Métropole_; the society he has left behind still obsesses
him. He learns nothing, and he can teach nothing. The discouraging
reality that surrounds him quenches his eagerness to know. How often
that has been impressed upon me when I wished to document myself on
Indo-Chinese conditions! To most Frenchmen the delightful landscapes
of Annam, the artistic tombs of Hué, the noble adaptation of a temple
to its site, all that remains dead-letter. Most of them are as
disdainful of the ancient people they have come to rule over as was
the famous governor, Maurice Long, who did not know a word of the
language, of the history of the country he ruled, and forged for
himself the most erroneous, even the most pernicious impressions of
its future destiny.
An old British captain, sailing the Far East for the past forty years,
and familiar with most British colonies, insisted that, unlike his own
people, the French do not coddle the natives of their possessions.
England, he asserted, caters to the natives, gives them education and
too much self-rule, and is all the more despised for it. Asiatics do not
understand kindness and sympathy; therefore the French are respected.
You must not mix sentiment with the ruling of inferior races, or for
that matter of any other subject races, he went on; “for instance, you
do not seem to be having an entirely happy time in the Philippines.” The
French themselves assert that there is more liberty under their form of
colonial rule than under that of the British. I rather doubt it. Though
the outward French attitude of equality irrespective of race or color
may sometimes give that impression, in the end liberty in French and
British colonies probably sums up to about the same total.
It is true that the color-line is less tangible in Indo-China than in
American or British colonies. French boys are deferential and even
obedient to half-breeds, even to well dressed natives, such as an
American or English boy brought up in a colony would scorn to glance at.
Native and Eurasian boys of Indo-China act toward white boys as if they
quite expected to be accepted as their equals, though that attitude does
not exactly hold among adults. This freedom of intercourse has its good
points—and certainly its bad. Yet the Frenchman is at heart no democrat;
the line of cleavage is social rather than racial. There is every
stratum of French society in Hanoï, from the haughty governor-general to
the conscripts from manure-heap villages in rural France, and the common
soldier is closer to the native rank and file than he is to the high
officials of his own race, the governor-general socially more allied to
high-class natives than to his own clerks and troopers. Yet on the whole
it is better to be white. At the _guignol_ near the tiger-cage in the
big park about the palaces of the governor-general the Annamese
policeman raps on the head native children who do not behave, but is
very deferential to the white children who sit elbow to elbow with them.
On the other hand the sweat-dripping French soldiers who come out of
their cloth-inclosed cages between the acts of these popular outdoor
Punch-and-Judy shows and smoke a cigarette before going back to their
stifling duties as showmen again are regarded by the upper-class
Annamese more as servants than as lords. There are not only French
children with their amas in the front seats, and half-breed ones already
posing as French, as they will through life, but purely native children
as well; and not far away the adults sit or saunter and listen to the
good band concert, or cluster before the monkey-house and other cages,
without any outward evidence of that racial dissonance emphasized in our
own or British colonies. The best hotels in the colony make no
distinction between French and Annamese, or any combination of the two
races; the Annamese wife of a Frenchman “will be admitted to any circle
in France to which the social position of her husband corresponds.” Yet
Indo-China is almost the only place left where one still sees white men,
and women, slap and otherwise manhandle their servants, and some
Frenchmen speak to native railway men and the like in a way that in any
other country would bring them the quite proper request to betake
themselves forthwith to where it is reputed to be warmer than in the
earthly tropics.
A French novelist whose background is Indo-China rates its “scourges”
(_fléaux_) as—in the order of their appearance to the newly arrived
colonial perhaps—sun, “boy,” _congaïe_, alcohol, gambling, opium, and
madness. Most of these are self-explanatory. The “boy” alone is
sometimes enough to drive the exile to drink, if not to madness, and it
is not infrequently he who more or less surreptitiously brings in the
_congaïe_, perhaps his own sister, sometimes even his own wife. The
_congaïe_—normally a perfectly respectable Annamese word for girl—is in
colonial vernacular what in France is known as _petite femme_, and by
many other names, some of them far less complimentary, in every land. As
our own pretty but stupid girls go into the movies or the “Follies,”
those of Annam become the temporary wives of the French. There is a lot
of romance about the _congaïe_, from those of the “Madame Butterfly”
temperament, until one finds that she is sometimes hired by the week,
like a _bonne à tout faire_, and is often passed on to a successor with
the furniture. Nor is she the Oriental doll she is painted by romantic
Latin novelists, though during her first few terms of service she may
have youthful charm and perhaps be pretty. Many Annamese mothers do not
blacken the teeth of their daughters because they wish them to live with
Frenchmen, especially if they are the daughters of other Frenchmen,
which is said to make an ardent combination much sought after among
colonial Lotharios. But the _congaïe_ must love her François indeed if
she eschews betel-nut for his sake; she is more likely to teach him the
habit. There is little visible public opinion against these temporary
matings, though it is said that the best class of Annamese look down
upon the practice at least as much as do the most nearly prudish of the
French. As in France, marriage is very difficult and its unofficial
rival very easy; one may even take the _congaïe_ back to France as a
servant.
One sees half-breed children now and then even in thatched hamlets far
from the centers, while there are plenty of both children and adults of
mixed blood in any city. Wherever there is a Catholic community cynical
French males suspect any one in the slightest degree off color as having
French blood contributed by the “missionaries.” The opposite
combination, with the male Annamese the “protector,” may sometimes be
seen—a Frenchwoman in Annamese trousers in some wayside village or
peering forth from some native den in the cities. There were several
instances in Hanoï of Frenchwomen legally married to Annamese, most of
them imported after the war. The wife of a furrier who won a gold medal
and his French bride at the Marseilles exposition of a decade ago never
went out, but stood looking through her _grille_ like a captive animal.
The Parisian wife of a barber in Haïphong lived in the not too large
room of the barber-shop, with a bed off in one corner behind a bamboo
screen that did not even conceal from observant clients that she was
soon to contribute to the Eurasian population. The government is now
refusing licenses for such marriages, but that naturally does not do
away with similar unions as long as Frenchwomen are ignorant of the
color-line or indifferent to it.
The French think that they cannot live in the tropics without a pith
helmet, a cholera belt, wine, and a woman. One might add ice in the
place of song. They have a curious belief amounting almost to a
superstition that to take off _la casque_ in the sun, even the reflected
sun, be it only for the instant needed to mop the brow and sweat-band,
will almost surely be fatal, so that every little while the thoughtless
“foreigner” is startled by raucous shouts of warning, and assailed with
screams of dismay if he so much as thrusts his head out a window without
his helmet on. Yet they constantly see the natives bareheaded, and
either I must conclude that this, like the cholera belts with which even
the women seem to torture themselves, is an unnecessary burden or that
my own head is more _dure_ than those of the notoriously hardheaded
French.
Of the eighteen to twenty million inhabitants of French Indo-China only
the males over twenty years of age among the perhaps seventeen thousand
French residents can vote—for the deputy from Cochinchina to the French
Chamber of Deputies and for a delegate without a vote from the
“protectorates.” Naturally those elected are Frenchmen. The number of
French in Indo-China might have greatly increased of late, contends one
party among this slight electorate, were it not for more or less
official opposition. “For many of the rulers, the free Frenchman, the
Frenchman who is not a member of the administration, is regarded as a
troublesome intruder, an unknown incumbrance, a suspected person, a
constant addition to the problem. This anti-French politics arose from
the spirit of autocracy of those Cæsars with clay feet, Long and
Baudoin, with their avowed hatred of every French civilian in the
posture of a man.” This party insists that there should be a “white
proletariat,” that many a young Frenchman, released from the army there,
for instance, could live well in some part of the colony with his
“companion,” and even contribute a large progeny, to the advantage not
only of himself but of France and Indo-China. If only the government
would find some means of helping him to raise and educate his children,
they insist, he would be far happier than at home and gradually help to
bridge over that gulf between the French and the natives. The point of
view of this group is that of Brazil: that there is nothing wrong in
mixing racial strains, legitimately or otherwise, that on the contrary
this mixture of races should help to cement together more closely the
different elements and perhaps breed a stock that would better endure
the climate than does the pure white. In other words, they would emulate
in human form the success of breeding hardy, tick-impervious, but runty
tropical cattle with India bulls.
Offhand the impartial observer would say that there should be a “white
proletariat,” that not merely French capitalists and officials should
have the advantages France’s “protection” of this part of the world
offers. But the governing class insists that there shall be none, or no
more of one than is unavoidable, and for that reason does not now allow
conscripts to be discharged in the colony when their time is up, even
though, unlike those of higher social standing, they may be willing to
marry their _congaïe_, produce legitimate offspring, and agree to remain
in the colony for life. Nor do those in power encourage the coming of
colonists from France. Yet, contend the self-appointed spokesmen of the
“white proletariat” who are so bitter against what they call the
“anti-French” policy of the officials, it was precisely because of the
sacrifice of these “_petits blancs_” that France lost many of her other
colonies.
Some of the complaints of the Annamese against the French are so well
put in one of the novels of my companion from Hué to Hanoï that I cannot
do better than to quote him:
You have seized Annamese in the streets of the large cities, with all
possible vexations, for the sum of two piastres owing to the
government, yet you subsidize each year a theater troupe at the cost
of 80,000 francs [written when exchange was much higher than now]
merely to amuse a handful of French during the three winter months.
You have inaugurated the régime of the _corvée_ for the building of
roads, or of buying out of it at a high price, promising the
population that for this it would be exempt from payment in kind, yet
by roundabout means you continue to requisition the inhabitants of the
villages for nothing more than that you may be able comfortably to
roll along in your automobiles.
In other words road-building in Indo-China is quite as it was under us
in Haiti, by _corvée_, or payment of road taxes in labor. For three
piastres a man could buy off from the ten days a year required of him,
but the _coolies voluntaires_, who had even to bring their own food,
were often taken far from home and sometimes kept for months. When food
gave out they renounced their nominal wages, glad to get home at so
slight a sacrifice. As in Haiti, the explanation of the officials is
that subordinates in the field did things contrary to the orders of
those higher up, but this must be entered in the column of dubious
excuses.
But to go on with the plaints of the Annamese against their
“protectors,” as interpreted by one whose history and temperament have
made him as nearly sympathetic as the average Frenchman ever becomes:
The money you so cruelly cause to be sucked from the population you
spend almost entirely on your own luxuries and pleasures, your own
well-being; you spend next to nothing for the good of the natives, to
help them to profit by the procedures which modern science puts within
the reach of industrious, laborious people. The poor people everywhere
say that the government deceives them by using tortuous schemes to
increase imposts that are already heavy. They say that your protection
is not what it seems to be on the surface, that while a European can
go anywhere, except sometimes among the wildest tribes of the far
mountains, there is still almost as much robbing, kidnapping, virtual
banditry as ever among the natives when no Frenchman is looking on.
You let the people be ruled by native mandarins, pure bandits whose
immorality is no longer doubted by anyone—former “boys,” liberated
criminals, head gardeners who have known how to please by combining
pretty parterres and by offering flowers to the women of your
officials, intriguers and unscrupulous adventurers, beardless youths
who have won the favor of your ladies, sons of mandarins with the most
corrupted habits—whereas under the old régime this important mission
as father and mother of the people was confided only to men of forty
or more whose worth was proved. The greater part of the mandarins to
whom you have accorded your confidence are rascals who exploit the
people in the most shameless manner. We call them patented pirates,
differing from real pirates only by the brevet given them by the
administration, with the aid of which they can legally pillage more
easily and with less loss of honor than real pirates and smugglers.
You do next to nothing for the higher education of the Annamese, for
fear, you say, of making outcasts [_déclassés_] of them, as if
advanced instruction could make a degenerate of a man. It is said
everywhere that you wish to keep the native at an intellectual level
low enough to be able more easily to make him your slave. Thus you are
false to the mission you gave yourselves to civilize the people. You
cannot understand what attachments you would create between yourselves
and the Annamese if you set yourselves resolutely to teaching them
everything you know, without _arrière-pensée_. You have an example in
the Chinese, who, though they treated us more severely, had nothing to
regret for having inculcated in us all their civilization, all their
knowledge, to such an extent that Annam became a China in miniature.
You have too much pride; you disdain the natives too much; you believe
yourself to be of a divine essence compared to us whom you keep at a
distance, as if it were a question of a vile, abject race, worthy at
most of being your servant. You are jealous of our slightest
qualities; you cry out against our slightest faults, which for the
most part you have noticed among the scum of our race that surrounds
you, and which you attribute to all of us in general, without knowing
that the true honest Annamese takes care not to approach you, not
being able to support your arrogance, your conceit, your insults.
Yet though the Annamese, particularly of the Tonkin, fought long and
valiantly to keep from being “protected” by the French, and there have
been some revolts since what is considered the final conquest of all the
Indo-Chinese empire, notably that abortive scheme to poison all
Caucasians one evening in 1916, on the whole they now seem contented, or
at least reconciled, and fairly friendly. Do they perhaps see the
advantages of French rule, and recognize that some one would exploit
them if these aliens from the West did not; or is it merely the fatalism
and the infinite patience of the East that gives them the outward
appearance of comparative contentment?