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Vietnam Colonial Administration
Not all Vietnamese resisted the French conquest, and some
even welcomed it. The monarchy, through decades of repression,
had lost the support of the people; and Tu Duc, in the eyes of
large segments of the peasantry, had lost his mandate to rule. He
had been able to protect his people neither from foreign
aggression nor from an unusually high incidence of natural
disasters such as floods, famines, locusts, droughts, and a
cholera epidemic in 1865 that killed more than 1 million people.
Tu Duc's repression of Catholics also created a large opposition
group ready to cooperate with the French, and those who did were
often rewarded with lands vacated during the French invasion.
Much of this land, however, was given to French colons
(colonial settlers), often in sizable holdings of 4,000 hectares
or more. Gradually a French-Vietnamese landholding class
developed in Cochinchina. Vietnamese, however, were appointed
only to the lower levels of the bureaucracy established to
administer the new colony. Seeking to finance the growing
bureaucracy, the early admiral-governors of Vietnam viewed the
colony as the source of the necessary revenue. Rice exports,
forbidden under the monarchy, reached 229,000 tons annually in
1870. Taxes extracted from Cochinchina increased tenfold in the
first decade of French control. State monopolies and excise taxes
on opium, salt, and alcohol eventually came to provide 70 percent
of the government's operating revenue.
In 1887 France formally established the Indochinese Union,
comprising the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of
Annam, Tonkin, and Cambodia, with Laos being added as a
protectorate in 1893. There was a rapid turnover among governorsgeneral of the Indochinese Union, and few served a full five-year
term. One who did, Paul Doumer (1897-1902), is considered to have
been the architect of a colonial system under which Vietnam was
politically dominated and economically exploited. Following the
partitioning of Vietnam into three parts, the emperor was
stripped of the last vestiges of his authority. In 1897 the
powers of the kinh luoc (emperor's viceroy) were
transferred to the Resident Superieur at Hanoi, who governed in
the name of the emperor. That same year, the Privy Council or
Co Mat Vien (see Glossary) in Annam was replaced with a
French-controlled Council of Ministers. The following
year in Annam, the
French took over tax collection and payment of officials. Most of
the Vietnamese scholar-officials had refused to cooperate with
the French, but those who did were restricted to minor or
ceremonial positions. Consequently, Frenchmen were recruited to
staff a new, continually expanding bureaucracy. By 1925 there
were 5,000 European administrators ruling an Indochinese
population of 30 million, roughly the same number used to
administer British India, which had a population more than ten
times as large. Under the French laws applicable to individuals,
Vietnamese were prohibited from traveling outside their districts
without identity papers; and they were not allowed to publish,
meet, or organize. They were subject to corvee, and they could be
imprisoned at the whim of any French magistrate. The colonial
police enforced the law through a network of French and
Vietnamese agents.
Land alienation was the cornerstone of economic exploitation
under the colonial government. By 1930 more than 80 percent of
the riceland in Cochinchina was owned by 25 percent of the
landowners, and 57 percent of the rural population were landless
peasants working on large estates. Although the situation was
somewhat better in the north, landless peasants in Annam totaled
800,000 and in Tonkin nearly 1 million. Heavy taxes and usurious
interest rates on loans were added burdens on the peasants. More
than ninety percent of rubber plantations were French owned. Twothirds of the coal mined in Vietnam (nearly two million tons in
1927) was exported. Manufacturing was limited to cement and
textiles, partly to placate French industrialists who saw
Indochina as a market for their own goods. Naval shipyards and
armament factories built under the Nguyen dynasty were dismantled
under the French. Much of the craft industry survived, however,
because it produced affordable consumer goods in contrast to
imported French goods, which only the French colons or wealthy
Vietnamese could afford.
French efforts at education in the early decades of colonial
rule were negligible. A few government quoc ngu schools
were established along with an Ecole Normale to train Vietnamese
clerks and interpreters. A few Vietnamese from wealthy families,
their numbers rising to about ninety by 1870, were sent to France
to study. Three lycees (secondary schools), located in
Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon, were opened in the early 1900s, using
French as the language of instruction. The number of quoc
ngu elementary schools was gradually increased, but even by
1925 it was estimated that no more than one school-age child in
ten was receiving schooling. As a result, Vietnam's high degree
of literacy declined precipitously during the colonial period.
The University of Hanoi, founded in 1907 to provide an
alternative for Vietnamese students beginning to flock to Japan,
was closed for a decade the following year because of fear of
student involvement in a 1908 uprising in Hanoi. In Tonkin and
Annam, traditional education based on Chinese classical
literature continued to flourish well into the twentieth century
despite French efforts to discourage it. The triennial
examinations were abolished in 1915 in Tonkin and in 1918 in
Annam. China, which had always served as a source of teaching
materials and texts, by the turn of century was beginning to be a
source of reformist literature and revolutionary ideas. Materials
filtering in from China included both Chinese texts and
translations of Western classics, which were copied and spread
from province to province.
Data as of December 1987
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