Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  The revival of banditry in the countryside coincided with threats of urban violence, and several of Dê Tham ’s followers were involved in an attempt on 27 June 1908 to poison the French garrison in Hanoi. Dê Tham was expected by the plotters to attack a camp next to the Governor General’s palace in Hanoi. 31 It is not clear to what extent the revival of Dê Tham ’s activities, or those of other bandits in the Yen-Thê, was related to the nationalist movement or to the passage of Chinese deserters through the region. But these events posed a challenge to French rule, and in late 1908 and 1909 operations were mounted against ‘pirates’ and ‘bandits’, with no indication in the operation reports of any connection to China. Reports about the presence of pirates were received on 6 September and 29 September, and a number of detachments of Tirailleurs mounted reconnaissance patrols in search of them. On 4 October, they received a report that the Dê Tham were in a ravine to the west of the village of Nui-Lang. On 5 October, a reconnaissance party was able to locate the hideout of the pirates, near the village of Nui-Lang, in a mountainous area difficult to reach. After a series of unsuccessful attacks in the afternoon, the French were forced to establish positions for the night. 32 Around 5 p.m., the pirates attempted to flee, but were fired upon by the Tirailleurs. During the night, the pirates disappeared and, at 9 a.m., the column of Tirailleurs left Nui-Lang. In November, after French patrols had spent a month fruitlessly searching for the Dê Tham , local residents claimed that they had moved north, along a line of crests, in the direction of Yen-Thê. 33

  Over the next few weeks, the Tirailleurs attempted to keep track of the several pirate bands that were moving around in the northern part of Tonkin. This involved both following up (usually incorrect) tips that the pirates were in a particular village, and establishing surveillance posts along routes that the pirates were likely to follow. On 7 December, supposedly as a result of this surveillance activity as well as their ‘intolerable’ physical situation, several pirates agreed to submit to French control. 34 The Spring and Summer of 1909, however, would see renewed efforts to stamp out the Dê Tham , sparked by their kidnapping of a Frenchman, M. Voisin, near Hanoi. As a result of this, beginning in July 1909 a column of Tirailleurs and other French troops mounted a lengthy campaign to destroy Dê Tham ’s band in the province of Phuc-Yen. 35 On 22 and 23 July 1909, the French column engaged with the pirates at Xuan-Lai. The afternoon of 22 July an emissary from Dê Tham arrived at the French command post with a message in which Dê Tham indicated that he did not wish to continue the battle and asked the French to cease firing. These negotiations went on until nightfall and at dawn on 23 July the French launched an attack on the village, but found it deserted. Several other villages in the area were also reported to have bandits in them, but were deserted when the French column arrived. 36 A search of the region failed to locate them.

  Voisin was finally released on 25 July, after several pirate bands connected with Dê Tham had been destroyed by the French. The main group under Dê Tham was soon located and its position attacked, with a number of pirates killed. Once again, however, the survivors were able to escape under cover of darkness. In August, a coordinated operation of French infantry and indigenous police was able to locate them and drive them out of the region. In late August and September 1909, another coordinated effort attacked them near the Black River. While one engagement turned out to be with a local pirate band, in late September and October 1909 Colonial Infantry and Tirailleurs, along with local partisans, drove the Dê Tham , including Dê Tham himself, out of a fortified camp into a series of trenches in a narrow ravine. While the French were attempting to encircle the position, they suffered heavy casualties. During the night, under cover of rainfall and lightning, the remaining pirates escaped. Over the next few months, a number of leaders of the band either made their submission to the French or were arrested, isolating Dê Tham himself. The French placed a price on his head, which was finally collected in February 1913 when two Chinese—the only mention of Chinese in the reports—exposed his head at the market in Nha-Nam. 37 But while Dê Tham himself might be dead, some survivors of his band continued their activities. Several of these may have been connected to a plot to kill French administrators in August 1917 as the beginning of a larger insurrection in the Thai Nguyen area, where Dê Tham himself had been active a decade earlier. 38 But while the Dê Tham band seemed, to the French, to have a clear leader and organization, elsewhere in the province this was less apparent to them. The departure of the Dê Tham left the region open to other bands of pirates.

  The French, by their own accounts, were constantly defeating banditry and other sources of disorder and opposition in Tonkin. In the late 1890s, Joseph Gallieni claimed that the Caï-Kinh, north of Hanoi, was purged of bandits, that the route from Hanoi to Langson was secure, and that Dê Tham and his bandits had been driven from the Yen-Thê. At the same time, his subordinate and disciple, Louis-Hubert Lyautey , was more cautious but nonetheless spoke about the ‘last convulsions of piracy ’ in different parts of Tonkin. The French infantry captain Mordacq, who participated in operations west of the Yen-Thê at the same time, was convinced that the pirate bands had been chased out of the region and that ‘the pacification of Tonkin is complete’ in 1896. 39 According to the Historique of the Tirailleurs Tonkinois, piracy disappeared in Tonkin in 1898, and the bands were unable to reform themselves for a long time. 40 The preface to the post-1896 volume of the Historique of the Tirailleurs Tonkinois indicated that the period from 1898 to 1908 was ‘calme et très courte’. 41 In 1902 the Governor-General, Paul Doumer , claimed that ‘Tonkin enjoys a perfect calm’ that some European countries would envy. 42

  These reports described a slow but successful penetration of the power of the colonial state into Tonkin, marginalizing its opponents as it went. But resistance and violence were clearly constant characteristics of French colonial rule in Indochina even after the initial assertion of French control and before the growth of the nationalist movement of the mid-twentieth century, from the beginnings of French rule until the period between the World Wars. 43 Violence, it seems, was the tactic of choice for all participants, and this made violence against and from those marginalized opponents central to colonial expansion and rule. But these reports also suggest the instability of the terms the French used to describe their enemies in Tonkin, not only in the 1880s but a generation later. Irregulars such as the bands led by Dê Tham might be easily designated as pirates, but this suggested that there was no connection between them and other opponents of French rule, both within Indochina and across the border in China . It implied a firm, ‘legible’ frontier, mapped in the aftermath of the Tianjin treaty that conceded French control of Tonkin. But the border remained porous. Chinese ‘deserters’ sought refuge from their commanders by crossing into Tonkin, where for the French they remained separate from Dê Tham ’s and other bandit leaders’ men: they were not called pirates, but deserters. As the French operations against them continued, Chinese authorities became involved in negotiating a resolution, while the French treated the deserters in the same way as they had treated ‘pirates’ or ‘bandits’. The French, it appears, never succeeded in closing the border: in 1919, the French were still tracking bands from China in the province of Quang Yen, who attacked a French supply convoy and inflicted severe casualties on the escort. These ‘bandits’ seemed to benefit from the complicity of local inhabitants, so much so that the French arrested a number of families and imprisoned the men. After the French caught up with them, the bandits dispersed into the forest and crossed back into China . 44

  The Language of Conquest and the Violence of Colonialism

  My focus in this chapter on the language used by the French troops to describe their opponents should not obscure the violence that these operations visited upon their opponents, that their opponents visited upon the French troops, as well as the violence experienced by those Vietnamese randomly caught in the crossfire between colonial forces and those resisting, for whatev
er reason, French colonial rule. I have not attempted a body count, but in what is a usual trope of colonial operations, these reports were, in general, quite good at providing information about French officers and subalterns who were killed or wounded, and they were relatively good at providing information about the indigenous soldiers, the Tirailleurs Tonkinois, who were casualties of these operations. 45 As for the bandits, pirates, Chinese, or rebels, the reports for the most part only provided rough numbers. Even from that information, however, it is apparent that northern Vietnam witnessed a significant amount of policing, gunfire, and death throughout the period from 1884 to 1914.

  The danger of focusing on language is that it becomes only language, losing the materiality of the situation it attempts to describe. But the language of conquest and occupation examined here shows how the French placed their opponents outside the ranks of those that the French intended their colonial rule to benefit. The interchangeability and instability of the terms used suggest that they served not to identify a specific enemy, but to make an enemy: to place some people outside the sphere within which the French ruled colonial Tonkin. This construction, which was present not only during the initial conquest but also over the next 30 years, emerged from and enabled the violence of colonial Tonkin.

  Notes

  1.Service historique de la Défense, Paris (hereafter SHD) 10 H 20 Dossier 13, Historique de la Gendarmerie de l’indochine (15 juin 1861 au 30 Avril 1930), 9. The French artificially divided the territory of Vietnam into three provinces, which they usually insisted were culturally different: Cochinchina in the south, Annam in the centre, and Tonkin in the north. This colonial division is often disputed. For a discussion of this, see David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 79–80.

  2.David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser. Exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’Etat colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005).

  3.Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 11.

  4.Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 7, 18, 19, 51.

  5.Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5–6.

  6.For similar uses of the term ‘rebellion’ by French Résidents in the delta of the Red River, see Philippe Le Failler, ‘Village Rebellions in the Tonkin Delta, 1900–1905’, in Gisele Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux (eds.), Viêt Nam Exposé: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 61–62. Peter Sahlins notes the ambiguous terminology used to describe bandits on the French-Spanish border in the Pyrenees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 104, 200.

  7.For a detailed account of these events, see Charles Fourniau, Vietnam: Domination coloniale et résistance nationale, 1858–1914 (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2002), 231–353; and Lloyd E. Eastman, Throne and Mandarins: China’s Search for a Policy during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880–1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). The border delimitation is described by a French Naval doctor who was a member of the commission in Dr. P. Neis, The Sino-Vietnamese Border Demarcation 1885–1887 (trans. by Walter E.J. Tips; Bangkok: White Lotus, 1998 [1887]).

  8.Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Quin China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). More generally, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

  9.H. Méhier de Mathuisieulx, En Captivité chez les pirates tonkinois (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1895), 51; H. Méhier de Mathuisieulx, Dans la brousse: Souvenirs du Tonkin (Tours: Maison Alfred Mame et fils, 1907), 21.

  10.Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), esp. 126–131; Ella S. Laffey, ‘The Making of a Rebel: Liu Yung-fu and the formation of the Black Flag Army’, 84–96 in J. Chesneaux (ed.), Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China 1840–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Ella S. Laffey, ‘French Adventurers and Chinese Bandits in Tonkin: The Garnier Affair in Its Local Context’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 6 (1975), 38–51; Henry McAleavy, Black Flags in Vietnam: The Story of a Chinese Intervention (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 98–112; 134–136; 203–205; Théodore Cahu, L’Amiral Courbet en Extrême Orient: Notes et correspondence (Paris: Léon Chailley, 1896), 20. See also Bradley C. Davis, ‘Black Flag Rumors and the Black River Basin: Powerbrokers and the State in the Tonkin-China Borderlands’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 6, 2 (2011), 16–41; ‘Rebellion and Rule under Consular Optics: Changing Ways of Seeing the China-Vietnam Borderlands, 1874–1879’, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 11 (June 2014), 59–91; and States of Banditry: The Nguyen Government, Bandit Rule, and the Culture of Power in the Post-Taiping China-Vietnam Borderlands, Unpublished PhD diss., University of Washington, 2008. On Chinese support, see Eastman, 47–48.

  11.Fourniau, Vietnam, 465–472; 621–625. The Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi were major producers of opium in China, and smuggling from there to northern China and elsewhere often ran through Tonkin to Haiphong and from there north and east by sea. The budget of French Indochina was partially based on revenues from an opium monopoly originally used in Cochinchina after 1860, taken over by the colonial administration in 1883, and extended to Cambodia, Annam, and Tonkin in the course of the 1880s. These monopolies were ‘farmed’ until 1899 and 1900, when the state administration took over direct control. Most opium sold was not produced in Indochina. Rather, it was purchased from British India and, in the 1880s and 1890s, increasingly from Yunnan. There are indications that in the twentieth century the French withdrew some of the Indian opium they acquired for sale outside of the monopoly, and substituted Yunnan opium, which was of lesser quality than that from India. See Paul Doumer, Situation de l’Indochine française de 1897 à 1901 (Hanoi: F.H. Schneider, 1902), 9–10; Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 46, 56–60, 81–83; Chantal Descours-Gatin, Quand l’Opium Finançait la Colonisation en Indochine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), 130–137, 144–148, 152–158; Jonathan Spence, ‘Opium Smoking in Ch’ing China’, 143–173 in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Carolyn Grant (eds.), Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Hakiem Nankoe, Jean-Claude Gerlus and Martin J. Murray, ‘The Origins of the Opium Trade and the Opium Régie in Colonial Indochina’, 182–195 in John Butcher and Howard Dick (eds.), The Rise and Fall of Revenue Farming: Business Elites and the Emergence of the Modern State in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Jeffrey G. Barlow, Sun Yat-Sen and the French, 1900–1908 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1979), 85; Carl Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore 1800–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), and Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian opium trade, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999), esp. 120–125, 153.

  12.Paul Chack, Hoang-Tham Pirate (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1933), 37.

  13.SHD 10 H 15, Dossier 1a. Journal des marches et opérations de l’Etat major du corps expéditionnaire du Tonkin commandement du General Millot), 12–13 Mai 1884; 22–24 juin 1884; SHD 10 H 16 12, Le Général d
e Négrier à Hanoi, Rapport sur les opérations des troupes sous ses ordres du 3 au 6 janvier 1885, 1–2.

  14.SHD 10 H 15.

  15.SHD 10 H 15.

  16.SHD 10 H 15.

  17.SHD 10 H 15, Journal des Marches et Opérations des Troupes de l’Indo-Chine, Année 1888, 1ere Trimestre.

  18.Frey, 70–81; Le Capitaine Mordacq, Pacification du Haut Tonkin: Histoire des dernières opérations militaires: Colonnes du Nord (1893–1896) (Paris: Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot et Cie, 1901), 33.

  19.McReady, 228, indicates that Liu Yung-Fu and the Pavillons Noirs learned to construct elaborate dugout fortifications when they met up with the Yunnan army in January 1884. The Chinese had learned the techniques from miners in Yunnan during the recent rebellion in that province.

  20.Mordacq, 18; SHD 10 H 19, dossier 41, 2eme Régiment Etranger 3e Bataillon, Historique du Bataillon, 20 novembre 1884–31 décembre 1889, 150–154; see also Neis, 23–24.