Building colonial whiteness on the Red River: Race, power, and urbanism in Paul Doumer's Hanoi, 1897-1902

Historical Reflections

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 277-300

  Vann, Michael G ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950123923     PISSN: 03157997     EISSN: 19392419     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (94)

1. Portions of this article have been presented at the annual meetings of the Western Society for French History, 2002, and the Society for French Historical Studies, 2005. This draft has benefited from the comments and critiques provided by the discussants at both venues
2. See Amaury Lorin, Paul Doumer, gouverneur general de l'Indochine (1897-1902) (Paris, 2004) for a detailed if somewhat hagiographic account of Doumer's tenure in Hanoi
3. I draw the term Manichean from Frantz Fanon's description of the colonial encounter in his essay "Concerning Violence" in The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963), p. 51. The term has connotations of a subjective and manufactured good-evil duality, reflecting the influence of Nietzsche on his work
4. I am referring to "race" as an intellectual construction and social practice and not to biological, physical, or genetic differences between Europeans and Asians. While race is a cultural invention, its very real impact upon individuals' lives cannot be ignored. For a discussion of the construction of race, see the introductory essay in Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), pp. 1-20
5. "Racialized" and not "racial" because the origins of the conflict were not the inherent incompatibility of the French and Vietnamese peoples. Yet as the situation progressed, it was increasingly understood as a Manichean struggle between two races
6. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 40. The italics are mine
7. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991)
8. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)
9. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York, 1997)
10. David Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, and Settler Myths (Baltimore, 2001)
11. This pan-European nature of the community and its access to white identity is captured in the official records of the colonial city. The Annuaire administratif de l'Indochine, published by the GGI, contained population statistics that grouped all Europeans, regardless of national origin or nationality, into the same category for the city of Hanoi. Annuaire administratif de l'Indochine (Hanoi, 1910-31)
12. Eugene Pujarniscle, Philoxène ou de la littérature coloniale (Paris, 1931), p. 31
13. also cited in Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002), p. 64
14. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, p. 64
15. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat, Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, 1980) develops the concept of urban apartheid as a central principle in French colonial urbanism
16. Her position is seconded by Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991)
17. Arguing for ambiguity and hybridity, recent work by Ann Laura Stoler complicates and questions the image of firm racial segregation in the daily life of colonial Southeast Asia. Ann Laura Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia" in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 55-101
18. idem, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995)
19. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, "Tensions of Empire" in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper and Stoler (Berkeley, 1997)
20. Direct and indirect taxation, including the government monopolies of salt, opium, and alcohol, filled French coffers. See Chantal Descours-Gatin, Quand l'opium finançait la colonisation en Indochine (Paris, 1992)
21. Marius Borel, Souvenirs d'un vieux colonialiste (N.p., 1963), pp. 135-36 presents a useful first hand account
22. while William S. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City (Sydney, 2000)
23. and Philippe Papin, Histoire de Hanoi (Paris, 2001) give strong narrative histories of the city's growth from the early Vietnamese pre-colonial period to the changes of the 1990s
24. Thanks to Gilles de Gantés for this analogy
25. Philippe Franchini, Saigon 1925-1945: De la "Belle Colonie" à l'éclosion révolutionnaire ou la fin des dieux blancs (Paris, 1994)
26. Charles Meyer, La Vie quotidienne des français en Indochine, 1860-1910 (Paris, 1985)
27. For a literary portrait of the differences between the two cities, see Calude Farrère's 1905 Les Civilisés (Paris, 1993)
28. and Christiane Fournier, Hanoi, escale du coeur (Hanoi, 1937)
29. Paul Bernard, Nouveaux aspects du problème économique indochinois (Paris, 1937): pp. 9-10
30. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago, 1991)
31. Wright, Politics of Design
32. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, 1988)
33. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002)
34. Joseph A Schumpeter, "Imperialism as a Social Atavism," in The "New Imperialism": Analysis of Late-Nineteenth-Century Expansion, ed. Harrison M. Wright (Lexington, 1976)
35. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1985)
36. Paul Doumer, Indochine française (souvenirs) (Paris, 1930), p. 138
37. Centre des Achives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, hereafter CAOM, Gouverneur Général d'Indochine, hereafter GGI, dossier 7751: "Démolition de la citadelle de Hanoi: Exploitation du contrat Bazin" (1894)
38. Doumer, Indochine française, p. 139
39. CAOM, GGI, dossier 7758: "Installation du Palais du Gouvernement Général à Hanoi" (1900-1907)
40. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City, p. 86
41. Papin, Histoire de Hanoi, p. 239
42. Wright, Politics of Design; Abu-Lughod Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco
43. Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley, 1997)
44. The Hanoi archives contain an almost complete record of the city's budgets for this period, see Hanoi National Archives, hereafter HNA, Maire de Hanoi, hereafter MdH, dossier 4822-4853: "Ville de Hanoi: Budget de 1889-1923." The files show that the Vietnamese paid the vast majority of the taxes, while the city spent most of its funds on improvements for the white quarter
45. HNA, MdH, dossier 35: "Rapport sur le fonctionnement de la Municipalité de Hanoi" (1891)
46. CAOM, GGI, dossier 6365: "Programmes des travaux à réaliser sur les fonds de l'emprunt de 1.500.000 F. 5 plans joints" (1897)
47. Neil Sheehan, After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon (New York, 1991), p. 29
48. "Le développement de la Ville de Hanoi (janvier 1897-janvier 1901)," La Revue Indo-Chinoise, no. 126 (1901): p. 227
49. L. Fayet, Avant projet sur les égouts de Hanoi (Hanoi, 1939)
50. For a more detailed discussion of the sewers and some of the unforeseen problems they caused, see Michael G. Vann, "Of Rats, Rice, and Race: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre, an Episode in French Colonial History," French Colonial History 4 (2004): pp. 191-204
51. Claude Bourrin, Le vieux Tonkin: 1884-1889 (Saigon, 1935), pp. 36, 105, 110, and 132
52. CAOM, GGI, dossier 6329: "Primes pour les construction de maisons en briques" (1901)
53. HNA, MdH, dossier 38: "Note sur le développement de la Ville de Hanoi du ler janvier 1902 au 30 juin 1907" (1907)
54. Robert Dubois, Le Tonkin en 1900 (Paris, n.d.), pp. 218-315
55. Alfred Meynard, "La Vie européenne au Tonkin," Bulletin de la Société de Géographie et d'Études Coloniales de Marseille (1908): pp. 60-74
56. CAOM, AF 111, dossier 1: (1907)
57. Annuaire administratif de l'Indochine (Hanoi, 1931)
58. Gilles de Gantès, La Population française au Tonkin entre 1931 et 1938 (Mémoire de Maitrise, Université de Provence Centre d'Aix, Institut d'Histoire des Pays d'Outre-Mer, 1981)
59. H. Brenier, Essai d'atlas statistique de l'Indochine française (Hanoi, 1912)
60. Chabert-L Gallois, Allas général de l'Indochine française (Hanoi, 1909)
61. G. Grandidier, Atlas des colonies françaises: Protectorats et territoires sous mandat de la France (Paris, 1934)
62. Commandant P. Pollachi, Atlas colonial français: Colonies, protectorats, et pays sous mandat (Paris, 1929)
63. Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Durham, 1987)
64. Christiane Fournier, Le Mirage tonkinois (Saigon, 1931), pp. 129-33
65. idem, Hanoi, escale du coeur
66. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London, 1976)
67. idem, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (New York, 1990)
68. Philippe Papin, "Densité du bâti urbain et modes de construction à Hanoi, 1889-1940," Habitat et Développement No. 10 (1995): pp. 66-80. While I appreciate M. Papin's painstaking research, I disagree with his conclusion that Hanoi had a rural feel to it. Empty space in the colonial city is not a pocket of rural life but rather an expression of power
69. Fournier, Le Mirage tonkinois, p. 60
70. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 38-39
71. These sales at one point made up 5% of the municipality's budget. Papin, Histoire de Hanoi, p. 247
72. Milton Osborne speaks of a "background anxiety" in the colonial encounter. See From Conviction to Anxiety: Reassessing the French Self-image in Viet-Nam (Flinders University Asian Studies lecture 7, 1976)
73. and Fear and Fascination in the Tropics: A Reader's Guide to French Fiction on Indochina (Madison, 1986)
74. See also "Of le Cafard and Other Tropical Diseases: Perceived Threats to White Colonial Culture in Indochina" France and 'Indochina:' Cultural Representations ed. Kathryn Robinson and Jennifer Yee (New York, 2005)
75. See Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 40
76. HNA, VdH, Cadastre et domaine dossier 20: "Commission des habitations à bon marche projet de cession de terrains communaux destinés à la construction de logements à loyer modérés" (1929-1930)
77. Ernest Hébrard, "L'Urbanisme en Indo-Chine: Généralités sur les centres urbains de l'Indochine. Dalat, future capitale administrative" in Urbansime: Revue mensuelle de l'urbanisme Français, no. 1 (1932): pp. lxxi-lxxvii
78. Eugène Brieux, Voyage aux Indes et en Indo-Chine: Simples notes d'un touriste (Paris, 1910), pp. 38-39
79. Descours-Gatin, Quand l'opium finançait la colonisation en Indochine, pp. 141-52, 181-238
80. David Del Testa, "Paint the Trains Red: Labor, Nationalism, and the Railroads in French Colonial Vietnam" (Ph-D. diss., University of California at Davis, 2000)
81. Maurice Hepp, L'Immense Indochine: Une Vue cavalière de l'Indochine (Paris, 1928), p. 51
82. M. le professeur Lemierre, "Le voyage en Extrême-Orient," Pallas (15 July 1939): p. 5
83. Brieux, Voyage aux Indes et en Indo-Chine, p. 37
84. CAOM, RST, dossier 34485: "Municipalité de Hanoi. Avantages consentis à la ville de Hanoi par le Gouvernement Général et le Protectorat du Tonkin pour l'aider à effectuer certains travaux notamment ceux relatifs à la construction du théâtre municipal" (1904)
85. A. Cezard, 1909 Album (Hanoi, 1909)
86. See Del Testa, "Paint the Trains Red."
87. See Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart's translations of Vietnamese perspectives on this process in their anthology The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics (Kuala Lumpur, 1996)
88. CAOM, GGI, dossier 64170: "Tonkin" (1897)
89. "44. TONKIN- Hanoi- Les bordes du Fleuve Rouge et le Pont Doumer," (Hanoi, n.d.)
90. CAOM, RST, 34580: "Santé Publique. Mesures à prendre contre la peste et le choléra" (1903) identifies "la proximité du village de banc de sable" and "la grande quantité de paillottes qui s'étalent dans les quartiers périphériques" as threats to the health of Hanoi's white population, and Bulletin Economique d'Indochine, (Saigon, 1901): p. 1108, declared the suburban zone of Hanoi infected with an unknown fever
91. The similarity with the poor Spaniards, Maltese, Corsicans, and Italians who became the "French" Pieds Noirs of Algeria should be noted. See David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 135-79
92. CAOM, RST, dossier 34501: "Rapatriement des indigents étrangers" (1904)
93. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1992)
94. and David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley, 1981)