The Tay Son brothers had reunited Vietnam under their control, but it was still not really a nation. No one force was powerful enough to end the divisions. But the Nguyen family found an ally that made it very powerful indeed. The ally was France.
As we know, the French had long been interested in Vietnam both as a trading center and as a place for missionary work. In 1787. a new wave of French missionaries had come to Vietnam from India, and they believed that if they had more say in the government of Vietnam their religious work would become easier.
The Catholic Church was very powerful in France in those days, which were just before the French Revolution, and the missionaries were able to supply French weapons to the Nguyen faction. Then, when the revolution came in France, that nation was divided and was unable to aid the missionaries’ efforts. But by 1802, Napoleon had mastered and quieted France and the missionaries were again able to get artillery for their friends.
With this help the Nguyens defeated the Trinhs, and Gia Long became emperor of all of Vietnam. The new emperor adopted the Chinese mandarin system to govern the nation. The mandarins were local administrators. Anyone could become a mandarin by passing a test. This testing system had some funny results. It meant, first, that even the poorest of the poor could move into a position of power, wealth and influence. But the test was based on knowledge of the past, not ideas about the future, so those who best knew the past were the ones who moved up in the world. Such people were not likely to value great social change. While they themselves moved upward in society, they had no interest in making changes in the basic ways of that society. To them, the old ways were always the best ways. The mandarin system was then both very democratic and open and at the same time very rigid and conservative.
But living in the past was the one thing the Vietnamese could not afford to do at that point in their history. The world around them was changing and was closing in on them. England, Portugual, Spain and the Netherlands were opening huge colonial empires in Asia and profiting handsomely from those empires.
In order to meet this new challenge, Vietnam had to create a sense of nationhood among all its people and had to form a powerful military to Stop the French and others from trying to move in. The military situation was nearly hopeless. While Vietnam had a large population, it had no tradition of a professional military. When problems that needed military answers came up, generals would be appointed and peasants called into the ranks of the army. As soon as the crisis passed, everyone went back to whatever they had been doing beforehand. Such a system might work well enough when the only problem was a local rebellion involving people who knew as little about fighting as the national army, but it had no chance at all against the experienced forces of a nation like France.
The chief obstacle to the sense of national unity was the land system. The majority of the Vietnamese were poor peasants who worked fields owned by rich landowners for a small portion of the crop. They had no interest in the nation or its rulers. If the French came and took over, they would be working for the French not the local mandarin. Their life was their village not their nation.
Gia Long made some efforts to change this. He ordered large landholdings broken up, but these orders were often not followed by the mandarins, and the emperor had no real power to force his will upon them. Some days even emperors must find it hard to get up in the morning and go to work.
Gia Long also wanted to increase the size of Vietnam, and thus provide more land for the people. In 1803, he began a new effort to take control of Cambodia. For two hundred years the Cambodian people had fought off the Vietnamese and the Thais. This time they would lose a final battle. By 1834, most of modern Cambodia was under Vietnamese rule. The Cambodians never forgave the Vietnamese for this conquest, and their hatred of the Vietnamese was to bear bitter fruit more than a century later.
The French Catholic missionaries in Vietnam were disappointed by Gia Long. They felt that their help in setting up his regime entitled them to some support from the government. Gia Long and the emperors who followed him felt differently. To them the presence of the French missionaries was not simply a religious matter but, instead, was an attempt at French control, a control that would mean the end of Vietnamese independence.
Even if the missionaries were not trying co take control of the Vietnam government, their presence spelled danger. Europeans and Asians represent very different ways of life and values. The missionaries wanted their converts to choose values similar to their own, and there was not enough room in Vietnam for two so different cultures. Europe was increasingly industrial and democratic. Asia remained a farming society, and its leaders were chosen by the few, not the many.
In 1825, the Vietnamese began to persecute Christians in the nation. It is important to remember that the persecution was not intended to put an end to the Christian religion in Vietnam. It was directed at the French missionaries, who were seen as, and in many ways were, a part of the French government. They were close to the leaders of the French government and many of their actions were designed to increase their government’s hold on Vietnam. Church and state were not separate.
In persecuting Christians, the Vietnamese were attempting to protect their society from being drowned by European society. This persecution was not praise worthy, but the political activities of the missionaries opened the door to its use.
There followed a long time in which the missionaries and their followers were first persecuted and then left alone. The persecution was more a matter of law than of fact, but the missionaries often felt that they had to flee Vietnam for safety in other nations. Some of them were jailed, although they were quickly released.
In all of this time, the French government itself interfered little, for France was having problems of its own. The great Napoleon was defeated and sent into exile. He returned in triumph with a new army only to be defeated again at Waterloo. He was replaced by a king from the family he had helped throw out, but the king too lasted only a short time. He was followed by a new Emperor Napoleon, a relative of the first. France had little time or money for involvement in far-off Asia. These facts may have made the Vietnamese feel safe when they really were not.
By 1842, the French game of “king of the mountain” seemed to have ended, and they were in a colonial mood again. A French fleet was sent to Asia to look into trading opportunities with China. While there, they learned that the Vietnamese had imprisoned a French bishop. The fleet sailed for Vietnam where it met a Vietnamese fleet-which it promptly sank. The bishop was released and the fleet took control of the southern city of Saigon for a short time.
But the peace in France had ended as quickly as it had come. The Revolution of 1848 delayed any efforts to take advantage of the weakness of the Vietnamese.
Even if all had been quiet at home, the French may not have moved on Vietnam for some time. The French leaders did not agree about the wisdom of taking Asian colonies. If you have a colony, and it is a good colony, other nations might like to have it as well. After all, if you felt that Vietnam was worth taking, England might think it was worth taking from you. That means you have to be ready to fight off whatever size army England might send. To supply and defend a colony thousands of miles from home requires enormous resources that many felt would better be used in Europe. And a colony in Vietnam did not promise a quick profit. It was a farming nation and the farming methods were poor. While Vietnam could be a source of wealth, for the moment it was just a poor country.
In fact, the main reason to take control in Vietnam was to set up a trading route to China. To be successful, though, such a route needed to be on water, since products are cheaper to move on water than on land. Land travel is slow and, at that time, required food for the animals who pulled the wagons as well as good roads to move them on. River travel was faster, boats could be as large as the river could carry, and no animals had to be fed. But the French were not sure that there was a river that ran from Vietnam to China.
By 1857, the French government under Louis Napoleon was listening to the pleas of the missionaries and the business people for a Vietnamese colony. The first step was a careful one. In November, a French fleet was sent to the Vietnamese port of Tourane. The port was taken. And although the missionaries had told the French that such an action would spark a rebellion by Vietnamese Catholics, the rebellion did not take place. The French moved forward to Saigon, the principal city of the Mekong River area. Saigon fell to the French in February of 1859.
But all was not well with the French. They had the troops and they had the weapons, but they could not control the weather and the weather is a very tough opponent.
If you have ever been to the ocean in summertime, you probably have noticed that it is cooler at the beach than it is in other places. You may also have noticed that a wind blows straight in from the ocean across the beach. If you were to go to the same beach on a winter’s day you would probably find the wind blowing from the land into the sea.
These seasonal winds in Asia are known as monsoons, and they are caused by the difference between the temperature of the land and the temperature of the water. Hot air and cold air push against each other. The motion of the air causes winds. The greater the difference in temperature, the stronger the winds. Each year in the spring the monsoon begins to blow from the ocean across Southeast Asia. As it passes over the ocean it picks up water and brings it across the land. Once over the land, the water is released in the form of rain that pours from the sky for months on end.
The monsoon today makes military operations in Southeast Asia very difficult. In 1860 it made them impossible There were no ranks or other special machinery to move through the mud and water. So the French were bogged down for much of the year. And while they were bogged down, they had the opportunity to encounter tropical diseases that they had not met in France.
This combination of weather and disease badly hurt the French forces, and they could only have been saved by fresh troops from France. But no such help came because the French were involved in a war with Austria. The French commanders had no choice but to withdraw from Tourane in 1860 and move all of their troops into the Saigon area.
The next year some new French troops came, and the French expanded their area of control around Saigon. By 1862, the French had taken control of a large area in the Mekong River delta, but they were running into trouble once more.
Even with the new help the French troops were spread thin. That made them easy to attack by small groups of guerrillas (“guerrillas” are soldiers who are not in uniform and who drift back into the crowd after they fight. The Minutemen in the Revolutionary War were guerrillas.) The French were looking for a way out of their dilemma. The Vietnamese gave them one. Trouble in North Vietnam from Vietnamese who opposed the government made it necessary for the emperor to divide his already weak forces between two battle areas.
The emperor was more worried about the internal rebellions than the French. His feeling was that if the rebellions were first put down, he could turn his whole military force against the French and both problems would end. In order to do this he needed to buy time with the French, and the best way to do that, he thought, was to officially give up what he had already lost-the Saigon region.
In June of 1862, the emperor agreed to French control of that area and turned his attention to the north. If he felt that the French would be happy with what they had, though, he was quite wrong.
Over the next five years the French continued to expand their area of control in the South. By 1867, they controlled not only the entire Mekong River delta in Vietnam, but also they had managed to so threaten the Cambodians that that nation allowed France to establish a protectorate over it. In its best sense, a “protectorate” is an agreement between two free nations in which the stronger nation says that it will look out for the welfare of the weaker one. In the worst sense, it is the takeover of the weaker nation by the stronger without the need to fight for the result. France’s protectorate over Cambodia was nearer to the worst type, though the Cambodians had long lived in fear of both the Vietnamese and the Thais, and they knew that they needed all the protection that they could get.
The French referred to their conquests in the southern part of Indochina as “Cochinchina” (meaning “Southern China”). While the Vietnamese did not yet accept it, this large and fertile area was now a province of France. And it seemed for a while that the French were satisfied with what they had. Actually they were not.
While the missionaries and traders continued to push for a French takeover of all of Vietnam, the French government was not sure that it wanted to commit the forces needed to do that. It was still very uncertain that any money could be made in Vietnam, and a river route to China had not been discovered. French explorers had travelled up the Mekong River only to find that large ships could not go far up its shallow waters, and besides, it headed away from China. In the early, 1870s, though, a French adventurer named Dupuis rook a secret trip up the Red River in northern Vietnam and found the long desired trade route.
He worked out a plot with French officials in Saigon, and in 1873 seized and held part of the northern city of Hanoi. The French in Saigon then told Emperor Tu Duc that they would send troops to help rid the city of this Frenchman. These troops, led by the young Francios Garnier, went instead to help Dupuis. Within a few months Garnier’s troops had taken control of a large part of northern Vietnam. Garnier called himself the Great French Mandarin. While the title was certainly grand, it did Garnier little good, because he was killed in battle by the end of the year.
The whole effort of Dupuis and Garnier had been carried out without permission from the French government. When Paris heard what had gone on, the government became greatly concerned about having its troops tied down in Vietnam at a time when Europe was once more at war. French forces were ordered to withdraw from northern Vietnam. In exchange the emperor yielded all control over the south. France had half of Vietnam.
The war in Europe was the Franco-Prussian War. In it the French forces were easily defeated by the Prussians of Germany. It was many years before the French economy and military regained its strength. Not until the early 1880s was France prepared for foreign conquest, and by then it had very strong reasons to gain colonies.
The Industrial Revolution was sweeping through the Western world. The new machinery was capable of producing many times the amount of goods that had been made by hand only a few years before. It was wonderful, of course, to be able to produce huge amount of goods, but the production of goods is of no value unless one can sell them. There were no buyers in Europe, because everyone else was making the same goods. The answer to this problem was to seek new markets in areas not yet touched by the Industrial Revolution. Again French thoughts turned toward Vietnam.
With the blessings of the French government six hundred troops under the direction of Captain Henri Riviere moved from Saigon to Hanoi in 1882. The city was quickly taken, though Riviere died in battle. More French troops and naval forces followed. Emperor Tu Duc died in July of 1883, and in the confusion that followed his death, Vietnamese resistance, which had always been weak, collapsed entirely. On August 25, 1883, the Vietnamese government agreed to the Treaty of Protectorate giving the French control of the nation. Vietnamese independence was once more at an end.
The French moved swiftly to establish their authority over Vietnam. One of their first acts was to drop the word “Vietnam” itself. The southern area retained the name of Cochinchina and was made a colony of France. The northern portion was called Tonkin, and the French established it as a protectorate. The mountainous central region was called Annam and the new emperor was in charge there, or at least that was the idea.
The French also established strong central governments, which reduced the role and influence of the local mandarins. They ended the testing program that had been the road to success for many peasants. They even took away the common lands, which had been the peasants’ main source of income, and turned them into large plantations on which the peasants were simply hired farmers.
These changes were greater in Cochinchina because the French had been there longer and because their rule over the colony was stronger than their rule over the other parts of the nation. There were always differences between the north and the south. Under French rule they grew wider.
The people of Vietnam had not really supported the emperor against the French. They had little love for their national government. But neither did they welcome the French when they took over. The poverty, which they had previously blamed on the mandarins, they now blamed on the French. For three years they strongly opposed French rule, and in this they were aided by the Chinese, who had no desire to have a strong European power at their doorstep.
But by 1887 the French were in control. In that year they formed the Indochinese Union. An organization of the French-controlled parts of Indochina, including Cambodia. In 1893, the French took over Laos, which gave them complete control of the Mekong River. Laos too became part of the Indochinese Union.
Not all of the Vietnamese accepted French rule, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, peace and the French ruled in Southeast Asia. For the next fifty years this ancient land would be known as French Indochina, and the seeds of the next phase in Vietnamese history would be sown by young Vietnamese educated in French schools and looking forward to a free Vietnam that they had never known. How those seeds grew and the strange paths that the future leaders of Vietnam followed is a complex story. In its twists and turns are the causes of French defeat in Vietnam and the American involvement in a place that few Americans had even heard of in the early 1900s.