Modern Vietnamese Flag
The five points of the star stand for the farmers,
workers, intellectuals, youth and soldiers.
Adopted 1955
How Did the French
Become the Colonial
Masters of Vietnam?
French Indochina War 1882-1883
In 1881, China declared sovereignty over Annam or
Vietnam, sending troops down the Red River to occupy
its northern region, Tonkin.
France, under the pretext of protecting their Catholic
missionaries from Vietnamese cruelty, renewed its
colonial expansionism in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia), which China opposed.
French captain Henri Laurent Riviere (1827-83) was
sent with a small force to Tonkin's administrative
center, Hanoi, to evict the Chinese and to subdue the
rebel "Black Flag Pirates."
French Indochina War 1882-1883
He captured the Hanoi fortress, Nam Dinh's coast, and
the Hon Gay coal mine. During a Vietnamese
counterattack, Riviere was killed.
French reinforcements were sent to the area, and
France obtained a Vietnamese agreement on a treaty
ceding Tonkin (1882). When China renounced the
agreement, the French seized Haiphong and Hanoi and
bombarded the Vietnamese capital of Hue (1883).
French Indochina War 1882-1883
During the fighting, both sides negotiated and finally
signed a treaty (August 25, 1883) that recognized French
protectorates over northern Vietnam (Tonkin) (dong kinh
= eastern capital) and central Vietnam (Annam) (an nam
= peace of the south) ; southern Vietnam (Cochin China)
was already under French control.
Ten years later Siam relinquished to the French its
claims to Laos, which was incorporated into a federation
known as French Indochina.
The French instituted one of the most severe of
colonial regimes, with the peasantry ground into
the dirt with draconian taxes (for example, alcohol
was heavily taxed but each village was forced to
buy a certain quota of government-produced
alcohol yearly!).
Any sign of rebellion was savagely crushed, and
the fearsome Sureté (secret police) was apt to drag
off nationalist sympathizers at the slightest
provocation. The island of Poulo Condore (Can
Dao) became the largest prison in Asia.
Children
working in a
paper mill in
Tonkin
Palais du Gouverneur, Saigon – Cochinchine, 1904
Une Carte Postale
Pagoda in Hanoi, Tonkin
1930
A Yunnam woman,
1928
See her shoes!
But while Indochina may have seemed a paradise to the Europeans
(providing French colonists with rich pickings from trade in rubber,
rice, tea, coffee and coal), it was very much a hell for many of the
natives.
Some of the native educated class (most of which worked for the
French) became active in anti-colonial work, which usually resulted
in swift imprisonment or execution, but some of these men did
establish some nationalist organizations in the country - particularly
the mountainous districts. But many were forced to flee abroad to
preach their beliefs and build up support.
With the fall of France in 1940, Indochina was
internationally isolated, and largely left to her own
devices by the Petain regime. The Japanese, realising
the weakness of the French colony, kept the French
administration in place as a "puppet" regime, and the
French Sureté in particular clamped down even harder
on any sign of rebellion/dissent in the native
population. But eventually, in 1945, the Japanese took
total control over Indochina.
When the Chinese invaded Tonkin, and the British took
Annam and Cochinchine, the Allies decided to give
Indochina back to the French. The main problem was what
to do with the various nationalist/communist groups which
had fought against the Japanese, and now wanted their
independence...
The main anti-Japanese organization
was the nationalist/communist group
controlled by Ho Chi Minh. This
organization was founded in 1941, but
Ho Chi Minh had been active in
nationalist and socialist politics well
before that. He was the Comintern
representative in Vietnam in 1930, and
founded the Communist Party of
Indochina in 1930.
After the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Ho
pushed for total independence for Vietnam, and the
French held that it was a colony.
Despite fruitless meetings between representatives of
the British occupiers and the Viet Minh, tension
escalated until things came to a head in November
1946.
Fighting then broke out between the two sides in
Haiphong, and a truce was called. However, General Giap
then launched a surprise attack on Hanoi in December
and called for a popular rising against the French. Ho
Chi Minh made a similar broadcast two days later, and
fighting erupted throughout Tonkin. The Indochina War
had started...
Who was Ho Chi
Minh?
Ho Chi Minh was the figurehead, the emotional
leader, the “hero” of Vietnam.
(Note: General Giap was the man who developed
the strategy, planned the battles, and ultimately
defeated everyone who chose to fight against
Vietnam.)
The youngest of three children, Ho was born Nguyen
Sinh Cung in 1890 in a village in central Vietnam. The
area was indirectly ruled by the French through a
puppet emperor. Its impoverished peasants, traditional
dissidents, opposed France's presence; and Ho's
father, a functionary at the imperial court, manifested
his sympathy for them by quitting his position and
becoming an itinerant teacher .
Ho was familiar with the lofty French
principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité
and yearned to see them in practice
in France. In 1911 he sailed for
Marseilles as a galley boy aboard a
passenger liner.
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to
sign the treaty ending World War I, and Ho,
supposing that the President's doctrine of selfdetermination applied to Asia, donned a
cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a
lengthy list of French abuses in Vietnam.
Rebuffed, Ho joined the newly created French
Communist Party. "It was patriotism, not
communism, that inspired me," he later
explained.
Soon Ho was roaming the earth as a covert agent for Moscow.
Disguised as a Chinese journalist or a Buddhist monk, he would
surface in Canton, Rangoon or Calcutta--then vanish. Again and
again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a new place.
In 1929 he assembled a few militants in Hong Kong and formed the
Indochinese Communist Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate,
a pose calculated to epitomize his moral fiber, but he had at least
two wives or perhaps concubines. One was a Chinese woman; the
other was Giap's sister-in-law, who was guillotined by the French.
Slipping across the Chinese frontier into Vietnam--his first return
home in three decades--he urged his disciples to fight both the
Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp, he founded the
Viet Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League, from
which he derived his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh--roughly "Bringer
of Light."
There was no flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will.
Even as the war increasingly destroyed the country, he remained
committed to Vietnam's independence. And millions of
Vietnamese fought and died to attain the same goal.
Ho died on Sept. 2, 1969, at the age of 79, some six years before his
battalions surged into Saigon. Aspiring to bask in the reflected glory of
his posthumous triumph, his heirs put his embalmed body on display in
a hideous granite mausoleum copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow.
They violated his final wishes. In his will he specified that his ashes be
buried in urns on three hilltops in Vietnam, saying, "Not only is
cremation good from the point of view of hygiene, but it also saves
farmland!"
Ho Chi Minh visits a textile factory, 1965
http://members.lycos.co.uk/Indochine/index.html#top
http://www.teacheroz.com/fire.htm
"We Didn't Start The Fire" by Billy Joel
Now you are ready
to watch the movie
INDOCHINE