French missionary expansion in colonial upper tonkin

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 287-310

  Michaud, Jean ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CATHOLICISM; COLONIALISM; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; SOCIAL HISTORY;

ASIA; EURASIA; EUROPE; FRANCE; RED RIVER DELTA; SOUTHEAST ASIA; VIET NAM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 33745257239     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: 14740680     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463404000153     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, 'Introduction: Five theses on ethnography as colonial practice', History and Anthropology, 8, 1-4 (1994): 1-34;
2. see also Claude E. Stipe, 'Anthropologists versus missionaries: The influence of presuppositions', Current Anthropology, 21, 2 (1980): 165-8.
3. Peter Pels, 'Anthropology and mission: Towards a historical analysis of professional identity', in The ambiguity of rapprochement. Reflections of anthropologists on their controversial relationship with missionaries, ed. R. Bonsen et al. (Nijmegen: Focaal, 1990), p. 82.
4. The choice of 'incidental' over the more neutral equivalent 'accidental' may appear to suggest that such ethnography could be of a lesser value, but such is not the case. In this context, of course, 'incidental' in inverted commas is meant as an irony pointing at the contempt in which institutionalised anthropology has for a long time held non-professional ethnographers and their texts. Nor should the term 'obscure the degree to which many early missionaries depended on their practical ethnographic knowledge of "natives" simply to survive, let alone convert', even if only a fraction of that knowledge was actually turned into ethnographic text (Oscar Salemink, personal communication).
5. Jean Michaud, 'The montagnards in Northern Vietnam from 1802 to 1975. A historical overview from exogenous sources', Ethnohistory, 47, 2 (2000): 334.
6. See Nicole-Dominique Lê, Les Missions-Étrangères et la pénétration française au Viet-Nam (Paris: Mouton, 1975).
7. Jean Guennou, Missions Étrangères de Paris (Paris: Fayard, 1986);
8. e siècle (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1943).
9. Alain Forest, Les missionnaires français au Tonkin et au Siam (XVIIe-XVIHe siècles). Analyse comparée d'un relatif succès et d'un échec total, vol. II (Histoires du Tonkin) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 259-61. 'Kinh' is used here as a convenient shortcut to designate the lowland Vietnamese, also called 'Viet'. No further ethnic distinction amongst the lowland population will be made in this article.
10. This brief history of the establishment of vicariates in Tonkin is a synthesis of information found in various MEP archives, notably several yearly Comptes-rendus.
11. Oscar Salemink, The ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders. A historical contextualization 1850-1990 (London: RoutledgeCurzon Press, 2002);
12. Vo Duc Hanh, La place du catholicisme dans les relations entre la France et le Viêt Nam de 1851 à 1871 (Leiden: Brill, 1969).
13. Cao Huy Thuan, Les missionnaires et la politique coloniale française an Vietnam (1857-1914) (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asian Studies, 1990).
14. Louis Eugène Louvet, Vie de Mgr Pnginier, Évèqtie de Manricastre, Vicaire Apostolique du Tonkin Occidental (Hanoi: Schneider, 1894). Following a strategy made necessary after many historical setbacks throughout the world, the Office of Propagation of Faith in Rome (often called the Propaganda Office) nominated bishops abroad as Vicars Apostolic, heading new missionary territories where no formal ecclesiastical organisation had been erected before and where local authorities were reluctant to let such an installation occur. These 'floating' bishops held symbolic titles in partibus, which bore the names of ancient vicariates (such as Mauricastre) that had been abandoned and were in places that were no longer Christian. The appointment of a Vicar Apostolic in a newly evangelised territory was seen as the first step in the founding of a local Christian community and was done in the hope that future developments would eventually allow the establishment of a full-fledged vicariate headed by a proper bishop. In this text 'bishop' and 'Vicar Apostolic' are used interchangeably.
15. Jean-Marie-Antoine de Lanessan, L'Indochine française, étude politique et administrative (Paris: Alcan, 1889), p. 711;
16. all translations are mine. In 1906-7, back in Paris, Lanessan tried in vain to have anti-clerical laws applied to the colonial system; Patrick Tuck, French Catholic missionaries and the politics of imperialism in Vietnam, 1857-1914: A documentary survey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987), p. 338.
17. Cao Huy Thuan, Missionnaires et la politique coloniale, p. 282.
18. De Lanessan, Indochine française, p. 715;
19. Puginier's relocation is mentioned in Charles-Edouard Hocquart, 'Trente mois au Tonkin', Tour du Monde, 1st semester, 1890: 117.
20. The recipients included the Governor-General, the Commander-in-Chief, the Resident Superior in Tonkin, and various Ministers in France; Gustave Monteuuis, L'âme d'un missionnaire. Vie du P. Nempon, missionnaire apostolique du Tonkin Occidental (Paris: Victor Retaux et Fils, 1895), p. 232 note 2. There are around 100 such letters kept in the MEP archives in Paris (vol. 816).
21. Cao Huy Thuan, Missionnaires et la politique coloniale, p. 276.
22. Note, 14 Aug. 1888; Puginier's Notes, cited here as 'Note', are held in the MEP Archives.
23. Note, 26 June 1886.
24. Note, 20 Aug. 1886.
25. Note, Mar. 1887.
26. Ibid. Historians Cao Huy Thuan and Philippe Papin quote directly from this 1884 document, copies of which they found at the MEP archives or at the Vietnamese National Archives in Hanoi;
27. see Cao Huy Thuan, Missionnaires et la politique coloniale, pp. 289-90
28. and Philippe Papin, Histoire de Hanoi (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 218. Puginier judged his earlier text to be of the utmost importance, which surely explains why he was still quoting it three years later, and he sent it to various authorities.
29. Note, Mar. 1887.
30. Ibid.; emphasis in the original.
31. All quotations from ibid.
32. Ibid. It is remarkable that less than two years after Puginier spelled out this tactic, Auguste Pavie and Colonel Théophile Pennequin were coming to terms with the Tai opposition in the north-west, led by the Deo family in the Sip Song Chau Tai, taming their armed struggle against France by granting Deo Van Tri a number of honorific privileges, including the hereditary title of 'Lord of Lai Chau'.
33. In accordance with French colonial archives and publications, the French term 'montagnards' - with lower-case 'm' - is meant here to include all the highland populations in Tonkin as well as in the rest of French Indochina. In this text, I use it interchangeably with other equivalents such as 'highland populations', 'upland groups', 'mountain minorities', etc.
34. 'Nécessité d'entrer en relation avec les tribus demi-sauvages habitant les montagnes du Tonkin et de l'Annam', 11 June 1886, MEP, vol. 816, no. 58.
35. Monteuuis, Âme d'un missionnaire, p. 231.
36. Ibid., p. 233;
37. Brière's remarks are quoted in Antoine Brebion, Dictionnaire de bio-bibliographie générale, ancienne et moderne, de l'Indochine française (Paris: Société d'Éditions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1935), p. 315.
38. Cao Huy Thuan, Missionnaires et la politique coloniale, p. 302; on the cathedral,
39. see Papin, Histoire de Hanoi, p. 241.
40. Comptes-rendus, 1895, p. 185; this source mentions Theurel's request as well. Comptes-rendus are held in the MEP Archives.
41. Ramond's late death in 1944 is the reason why his personal correspondence has not yet been made available for research; the rule at the MEP archives is that a delay of at least 60 years after the death of an author is necessary before his private correspondence and diaries can be consulted. Besides reports, administrative documents such as correspondence between Bishops and the Holy See and published and unpublished manuscripts by missionaries, MEP archivists have kept the missionaries' personal letters to their families and superiors. There is also a substantial bank of original photographs and postcards. See http://archivesmep.mepasie.org, where some of the documents cited in this article are available online.
42. Eugène Teston and Maurice Percheron, L'Indochine moderne: Encyclopédie administrative, touristique, artistique et économique (Paris: Librairie de France, 1931), p. 254.
43. For Ramond's report, see 'Rapport annuel de la mission du Haut Tonkin pour l'année 1895-1896', Comptes-rendus, 1896, no. 711-15, 'Vicariat Apostolique du Haut-Tonkin'.
44. That is a very rough estimate; 40 years later, a better-informed source gives a figure of 1.3 million for the same territory; Georges Vandaële, 'Mission de Hung Hoa (Tonkin)', Les Missions Catholiques (1936): 398.
45. The borders of the vicariate are from Léon Girod, Dix ans de Haut-Tonkin (Paris: A. Marne et Fils, 1899), p. 54.
46. Later, in the administrative divisions of the early 1930s, it included seven provinces: Phù Tho, Son Táy, Hoà Bình, Son La, Yen Bái, Lào Cai, and part of Tuyên Quang; and two military territories: Lai Châu and part of Hà Giang (Vandaële, p. 398).
47. Léon Girod, Souvenirs franco-tonkinois, 1879-1886 (Paris: Desclée, de Brouwer & Cie, 1900) mentions the term 'Tonkinese Switzerland' (p. 271).
48. Adrien Launay, Atlas des missions de la Société des Missions-Étrangères (Lille: Desclée, de Brouwer & Cie, 1890).
49. On earlier, short-lived attempts to establish a so-called 'Mission des sauvages' in 1854 and 1881-83,
50. see correspondence in MEP, vol. 709 (nos. 90, 99, 100, 103, 112-14) and vol. 710 (nos. 2, 3, 4, 11, 21).
51. Girod, Dix ans. Square brackets will be used to indicate the year of the missionary's arrival in Tonkin.
52. Actually, this figure is valid for the year 1893, when the total number of native and non-native priests in the West Tonkin vicariate was 163, including these 56 Frenchmen (Comptes-rendus, 1893).
53. Comptes-rendus, 1895.
54. Swift to stamp a visible Catholic presence on the Sino-Tonkinese border, he had a church erected within a few months. It comes as an amusing quirk of fate that the stones used to build that first church came from a former foe's stronghold, the Black Flag leader Liu Yongfu's recently dismantled citadel located nearby on the right bank of the Red River. On the Black Flags in Lào Cai see Henry McAleavy, Black flags in Vietnam. The story of a Chinese intervention (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968).
55. Comptes-rendus, 1901. Regarding ethnonyms, a number of imprecise and erroneous assumptions were routinely made in naming highland groups in Indochina during colonial times, a problem further complicated by the fact that unanimity has yet to be reached on this issue today - if, indeed, it is even possible. There is also the added difficulty of some names having since been reallocated to different groups - such as Tho (Thố), which the French used to refer to the group now known as Tày but which now refers to a completely different ethnic group. The current official list of ethnonyms in Vietnam comprises 54 entries;
56. see cross D sign ǎng Nghiěm Van et al. Ethnic minorities in Vietnam (Hanoi: Thế Giói, 2000).
57. Comptes-rendus, 1901.
58. Vandaële, 'Mission de Hung Hoa', p. 403; the quotation on deathbed baptisms is from Comptes-rendus, 1902.
59. Anonymous, 'Mission du Haut-Tonkin. Aperçu historique', Bulletin de la Société des Missions Étrangè res, (1922): 551.
60. The figures for 1912 are from Adrien Launay, Mémorial de la Société des Missions Etrangères (Paris: MEP, 1916).
61. Citing the MEP Comptes-rendus, Tuck gives for that same year the figures of 24,160 Catholics, 27 French priests, 20 native priests and 97 native catechists; Tuck, French Catholic missionaries, pp. 316-21.
62. See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
63. Salemink shows that by contrast, during the 1930s and 1940s missionaries in the Central Highlands were actively supported by the colonial State as part of a divide-and-rule strategy aimed at separating the highland population from the lowland Kinh; Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders.
64. Vandaële, 'Mission de Hung Hoa', p. 410,
65. citing the Annuaire officiel for 1932;
66. the quotation is from p. 407. The figures are as follows: So-n Tây, 256,000; Phù Tho, 303,000; Yên Bái, 62,000; Lào Cai, 38,000; Hoà Bình, 53,000; Tuyên Quang, 40,000; Son La, 86,000; and the military territories of Hà Giang (70,000) and Lai Châu (60,000).
67. Ibid., p. 408.
68. See Michaud, 'Montagnards in Northern Vietnam'. In the west only one mission had been established - in the provincial capital of Son La in 1938. The quotation is from Comptes-rendus, 1940, p. 83. The ethnic groups known to the French as 'Tai' are today called 'Thái' in Vietnamese.
69. Vandaële, 'Mission de Hung Hoa', p. 409.
70. Comptes-rendus, 1941-7, p. 67.
71. Monteuuis, Âme d'un missionnaire, p. 232,
72. note 2, quoting an article entitled 'Les missionnaires de M. de Lanessan' from the newspaper L'Indépendance Tonkinoise.
73. In addition to individuals such as Léon Girod, Pierre d'Abrigeon, Théodule Brisson, Antoine Bourlet, and François-Marie Savina in Upper Tonkin, the names of Paul Vial, Aloys Schotter, Jean-Marie Martin, and Alfred Liétard also spring to mind when including the Mainland Southeast Asian Massif around Tonkin, where related montagnard groups also lived. In addition to the usual missionary and religious outlets such as Annales de la Propagation de la Foi and Les Missions Catholiques to which these men contributed on a regular basis, several of them published in the journals Anthropos and Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient. Some produced heftier monographs or dictionaries, the most prolific being Savina with close to 5,000 pages of published material. In fact, Vial's Les Lolos. Histoire, religion, mœurs, langue, écriture (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1898) and Savina's Histoire des Miao (Hong Kong: Imprimerie de la Société des Missions-Etrangères, 1924) are now well-known studies regularly cited by scholars in various disciplines.
74. Patrick Menget, 'Histoire de l'anthropologie', in Dictionnaire de l'ethnologie et de l'anthropologie, ed. Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), p. 331.
75. For a contemporary missionary account, see Girod, Souvenirs franco-tonkinois.
76. Frank A. Salamone, 'Anthropologists and missionaries: Competition or reciprocity?', Human Organisation, 36, 4 (1977): 407-12;
77. Claude E. Stipe, 'Anthropologists versus missionaries'; and Bonsen et al. ed., Ambiguity of rapprochement.
78. Peter Forster, 'Politics, ethnography, and the "invention of tradition": The case of T. Cullen Young of Livingstonia Mission, Malawi', History and Anthropology, 8, 1-4 (1994): 299-320;
79. Colonial situations. Essays on the conceptualisation of ethnographic knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991);
80. and Colonial subjects: Essays on the practical history of anthropology, ed. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
81. Mary T. Huber, The Bishops' progress, A historical ethnography of Catholic missionary experience on the Sepik frontier (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988);
82. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South-Africa, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).