Remembering "other" losses: The temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne

History and Memory

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 5-48

  Jennings, Eric T ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84900254726     PISSN: 0935560X     EISSN: 15271994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ham.2003.0002     Document Type: Review

References (120)

1. There have been persistent rumors that arson was responsible. See "Discours du Général de Division Guy Simon pour l'inauguration du monument à la mémoire des Vietnamiens morts pour la France," Bulletin de l'ANAI, April-June 1992, 3.
2. Robert Aldrich, who has examined the Jardin colonial as a whole, seems to favor the idea of an accidental fire. Robert Aldrich, "Vestiges of the Colonial Empire: The Jardin Colonial in Paris," in idem and Martyn Lyons, eds., The Sphinx in the Tuileries and Other Essays in Modern French History (Sydney, 1999), 202.
3. The many misnomers used to describe the house are listed by Isabelle Aragon in her paper, "Le Temple du Souvenir Indochinois de Nogent-sur-Marne" (M.A. thesis, Université de Paris III, 1983), 10-12.
4. Known as the Hôpital bénévole du Jardin colonial, this hospital was "reserved" to colonial troops. On the successor to this hospital, known as the Hôpital francomusulman of Bobigny, and its use as a tool of surveillance and segregation in the interwar years, see Clifford Rosenberg, "Republican Surveillance: Immigration, Citizenship and the Police in Interwar Paris" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000), 227-85.
5. Aldrich, "Vestiges of the Colonial Empire," 203.
6. Jean-François Pernin, Maire du XIIème arrondissement, letter to the then Mayor of Paris Jean Tibéri. Cited in Marie-Anne Gairaud, "Menace sur le Jardin tropical," Le Parisien en Ligne, 6 June 2000.
7. The grounds of the Jardin tropical were at the time being defended against the incursions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Quai d'Orsay), which wanted to erect a building to store some of its archival overflow on the site. These struggles over the space of the Jardin also constitute a historical continuity. Already at the turn of the 20th century, the Museum d'histoire naturelle had resisted the idea of a Jardin colonial, preferring instead to utilize the site as a "colony of the Museum's ménagerie." Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington, 1994), 52.
8. "Françoise de Panafieu: Je veux le sauver," Le Figaro, 11-12 Sept. 1999, "La vie à Paris
9. The one exception to this rule is the contribution on the 1931 Colonial Exhibition: Charles-Robert Ageron, "L'Exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?" in Pierre Nora, ed. Les Lieux de mémoire. Vol. 1, La République (Paris, 1984), 561-91.
10. See Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999), 80.
11. "Algérie-France: L'effet Bouteflika," Le Monde, 17 June 2000, 1, describes President Bouteflika's trip to Verdun, where he "paid homage to the memory of Muslims who died for France in the First World War
12. On French "collective memory" and Algeria, see the special issue of Historical Reflections 28, no. 2 (2002)
13. coedited by William B. Cohen and James Le Sueur, entitled France and Algeria: From Colonial Conflict to Postcolonial Memories
14. as well as David Schalk, "Has France's Marrying Her Century Cured the Algerian Syndrome?" Historical Reflections 25, no. 1 (1999): 149-64;
15. Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l'oubli: La Mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris, 1991).
16. Daniel Sherman's book, The Construction of Memory, sheds light on the political dimension of a monument to black soldiers in Reims, and on the commemoration of North African soldiers at Verdun, for example. Even more recently, William Kidd has posed some important questions about colonial war memorials in former French colonies, although he provides few specifics. See William Kidd, "Representation or Recuperation? The French Colonies and 1914-1918 War Memorials," in Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (London, 2002), 184-94.
17. Mémoires d'outre-mer: Les Colonies et la Première Guerre mondiale. Exposition du 3 juin au 20 octobre 1996 (Péronne, 1996).
18. Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996).
19. See Lim Pui Huen and Diana Wong, eds., War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore, 2000), which is entirely dedicated to the memory of the Second World War.
20. On aphasia and remembrance, see Ann Stoler, "Colonial Aphasia and the Place of Race in France: On the Politics of Incommensurability," paper delivered at a conference in honor of George Balandier, New York, 27-28 April 2001.
21. See Mark McKinney, "Tout cela, je ne voulais pas le laisser perdre: Colonial lieux de mémoire in the comic books of Jacques Ferrandez," Modern and Contemporary France 9, no. 1 (2001): 43.
22. Hee Jung Ko's Ph.D. dissertation in progress at the University of California, Berkeley promises further to investigate such nostalgia. In an inverted mirror image of this trajectory, the main character of Albert Camus' Le Premier Homme (Paris, 1994) leaves his native Algeria for northern France to find the grave of his father who perished in battle in the First World War (32-33).
23. Agathe Larcher "La Légitimation française en Indochine 1905-1945" (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris VII, 2000), 484-96.
24. Robert Aldrich, Colonial Monuments, Colonial Memories: Vestiges of the Overseas Empire in France. Manuscript kindly made available to me by its author.
25. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), xii;
26. Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 14.
27. Catherine Hodeir, "Decentering the Gaze at French Colonial Exhibitions," in Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, eds., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley, 2002), 241.
28. See Duong Van Giao, "L'Indochine pendant la Guerre de 1914-1918" (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris, 1925), 39.
29. On the experience of Indochinese soldiers in the First World War, see also Henri Eckert, "Les Militaires Indochinois au service de la France, 1859-1939" (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris IV, 1998).
30. Most Indochinese recruits were assigned to "bataillons d'étape" where they built and maintained military infrustructures (ibid, 35). On racism behind the lines in the First World War, see Tyler Stovall, "The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War," American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 737-69.
31. On Indochinese laborers and soldiers in the Great War, see Mireille Le Van Ho, "L'Indochine," in Mémoires d'outre-mer, 80-90 (statistics drawn from ibid., 107).
32. In 1925, Duong Van Giao gave slightly different figures. Although he shared the total of 48,922 recruited between 1914 and the Armistice, he had 43,430 Indochinese coming to Europe, and 1,123 dying. "L'Indochine pendant la Guerre," 38.
33. On Rombaux-Roland, see Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 171, 177. Sherman's example of a menhir monument comes from La Trinité-sur-Mer in Britanny (245-47). I have stumbled across another one in a completely different part of France, at Cadouin in Dordogne. Rather than merely incorporating a menhir in a larger monument, the Cadouin monument aux morts features two simple plaques (one for each world war) on either side of a stand-alone menhir.
34. Of course, the exhibition's vision of indigenous architectures carried a valence of its own. On "hybrid" associationist architecture and French colonialism, see Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991);
35. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago, 1995).
36. On the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, see Ageron, "L'Exposition coloniale";
37. Frances Gouda, Colonial Practices in the Netherland Indies, 1900-1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), 194-236;
38. Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, MA, 2000);
39. Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 14-33;
40. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945. (Ithaca, 1992), 51-97;
41. Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L'Exposition coloniale, 1931 (Brussels, 1991);
42. Catherine Hodeir, Michel Pierre and Sylviane Leprun, "Les Expositions coloniales: Discours et images," in Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Laurent Gervereau eds., Images et Colonies (Paris, 1993), 129-39;
43. Catherine Hodeir, "Être indigène aux expositions, Paris 1931, Paris 1937," in Pascal Blanchard et al., eds, L'Autre et nous: Scènes et types (Paris, 1995), 157-62.
44. Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 20.
45. On the Jardin colonial, and some of its ancien régime antecedents, see Aldrich, "Vestiges of the Colonial Empire," 196-98.
46. Jean Dybowski, "Le Jardin colonial: pourquoi il fut créé," Le Messager de la banlieue est, 29 Dec. 1921, 1.
47. On jardins d'acclimation and French colonialism, see Osborne, Nature, the Exotic.
48. Dybowski was the son of a Polish exile from 1831. He had led a botanical and geological mission to Southern Algeria in 1889. In 1891, he had a hand in the repression that followed the failure of the Crampel mission in the Chari basin. On Dybowski, see C. Vidal, "Une exposition au Jardin colonial de Nogent-sur-Marne," Bulletin de la société historique et archéologique de Nogent-sur-Marne, no. 7 (1953): 98.
49. On "explorers" of Southern Algeria at this time, see Ben Brower's forthcoming dissertation, Cornell University, History Department. On the Dybowski-run Jardin colonial's rivalry with the Museum d'Histoire naturelle, see Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, 52.
50. Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives d'Outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence (French Colonial Archives, hereafter CAOM), Gouvernement général de l'Indochine, Ancien Fonds, (hereafter GGI), 16054.
51. Vidal, "Une exposition au Jardin colonial
52. Aragon, "Le Temple du Souvenir Indochinois," 30.
53. On the 1907 Nogent exhibit, see Vidal, "Une exposition au Jardin colonial
54. On the projected "return" to Phu-Cuong, see Aragon, "Le Temple du Souvenir Indochinois," 28. The verb "return" is used here in relation to the dinh's place of construction, rather than its place of use, for between its 1905 construction and its 1906 showing in Marseille not enough time had passed for it to have ever served as a genuine dinh.
55. Aragon, "Le Temple du Souvenir Indochinois," 16.
56. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley, 2001), 87.
57. Aragon, "Le Temple du Souvenir Indochinois," 30, describes the dinh's designation as the "Palais du thé" at the 1907 Nogent exhibit, and as "la Maison des Mandarins" at the Marseille exhibit.
58. On the dên's subsequent reinvention in Communist Vietnam, see Christoph Giebel, "Museum-Shrine: Revolution and Its Tutelary Spirit in the Village of My Hoa Hung," in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley, 2001), 85.
59. "Le Souvenir Indochinois," Bulletin de l'ANAI, Jan.-March 1991, 4.
60. CAOM, GGI, 33413.
61. Leopold Cadière, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Vietnamiens (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient, reprinted 1992), 1:36-39.
62. Shawn Kingsley Malarney, Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam (New York, 2002), p. 110;
63. idem, "The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice," in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, The Country of Memory, 46-76.
64. Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 122-25.
65. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, 52.
66. CAOM, GGI, 33413. The Jardin colonial/tropical's liminal status continues to stir controversy to this day, most recently over whether the city of Paris, the national authorities, or the tropical institute should cover the costs of renovation and reparation after the December 1999 storm that devastated the Bois de Vincennes.
67. CAOM, GGI, 33413.
68. On the disappearance of furnishings between 1907 and 1918, see Aragon, "Le Temple du Souvenir Indochinois," 41.
69. CAOM, GGI, 33413.
70. For Gourdon, see Le Souvenir Indochinois.
71. CAOM, GGI, 33413, Sarraut to Paris, no. 1278, 21 June 1918.
72. CAOM, GGI, 33416.
73. Erica Peters, "Negotiating Power through Everyday Practices in French Vietnam, 1880-1924" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000), 313.
74. On Vietnamese giving to colonial causes in general, see ibid, chap. 6. In some instances, colonies were urged to "adopt" martyred metropolitan towns, a clear inversion of paternalism and protection. See Eric Jennings, "Monuments to Frenchness? The Memory of the Great War and the Politics of Guadeloupe's Identity, 1914-1945," French Historical Studies 21, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 561-92.
75. All of the above figures are drawn from CAOM, GGI, 33415.
76. On Freemasonry in French colonial Indochina, see Jacques Dalloz, "Les Vietnamiens dans la franc-maçonnerie coloniale" Revue française d'histoire d'outremer 85 (1998): 103-18
77. CAOM, GGI, 33415, "Liste des souscripteurs français et indigènes ayant souscrit une somme égale ou supérieure à 200 Fr à l'Oeuvre du Souvenir Indochinois"; and "Conseil d'Administration du Souvenir Indochinois
78. "Le culte des morts de la Grande Guerre" L'Echo Annamite, 10 Jan. 1920, 2.
79. CAOM, GGI, 33415, Hanoi Mai 22, 1920, Résident Supérieur of Tonkin to Governor General.
80. Zinoman, "The Colonial Bastille," 125, 223-26.
81. Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 276.
82. Ho Chi Minh, Oeuvres choisies (Paris, 1967), 52-53.
83. "Un projet de monument aux morts pour l'Indochine; Pièce en un tableau par Do-Biet," L'Echo Annamite, 23 March 1923.
84. Other articles on local war memorials include "Inauguration à Pnom-Penh du Monument aux morts du Cambodge," Extrême Asie, March 1925, 36-38
85. "Le monument aux morts," L'Echo Annamite 11 March 1920, 2.
86. For an interesting recent discussion of Phnom Penh's war memorial, see Penny Edwards, "Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945" (Ph.D. diss., Monash University, Australia, 1999), 92.
87. On Hanoi's war memorial, see Arnauld le Brusq, Vietnam à travers l'architecture coloniale (Paris, 1999), 153.
88. Peters, "Negotiating Power," 312.
89. CAOM, GGI, 33414.
90. CAOM, GGI, 33415.
91. CAOM, GGI, 33414, Gourdon to Governor of Indochina, 11 January 1919.
92. L'Oeuvre du Souvenir Indochinois (Paris, 1942), 2.
93. "La Prochaine Inauguration du Temple du Souvenir à Nogent-sur-Marne," L'Echo annamite, 13 Aug. 1920, 1.
94. On these issues of territoriality and national construction, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 131-32;
95. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, 1887-1954 (Copenhagen, 1995);
96. David Henley, "Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina," Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (April 1995): 286-324.
97. CAOM, GGI, 33414.
98. CAOM, GGI, 33414, "Notice explicative des objets demandés par le Souvenir Indochinois pour le Temple commémoratif des Annamites à Nogentsur- Marne
99. CAOM, GGI, 33414, Gourdon to Governor General of Indochina, 11 Jan. 1919.
100. CAOM, GGI, 33414, Saigon 10 May 1919, Governor of Cochin-China to Résident Supérieur Hanoi, N 753.
101. Indeed, as Benoit de Tréglodé demonstrates, the dragon held an important place in Vietnam, given the popular belief that the Vietnamese people were descendants from the dragon Lac Long Quân - a belief that foreshadowed the notion of a Vietnamese national essence or tinh than dan toc. Benoit de Tréglodé, Héros et révolution au Viêt Nam (Paris, 2001), 47.
102. CAOM, GGI, 33414.
103. Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 261-91.
104. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Thái-Tuòng-Long, Dong-Phu (Cantho), Lê Lac Thành Hoài Nam Nghia Sì Miêu tai Nogent-sur-Marne (France) (Saigon, 1921), 15.
105. The University of Indochina in Hanoi was a later invention, established according to David Marr at least in part as a reaction against this trend, in a bid to keep "unruly" Vietnamese University students out of France. David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley, 1981), 40.
106. "Hommage aux soldats coloniaux," L'Echo annamite, 20 July 1920.
107. "A la mémoire des Asiatiques morts pour la France," Le Gaulois, 10 June 1920.
108. "In Memoriam: La consécration du temple aux mânes des Indo-Chinois morts pour la France," Le Petit Parisien, 10 June 1920.
109. "A la mémoire des héros indochinois," L'Echo de Paris, 10 June 1920.
110. "A la mémoire de nos petits frères d'Asie," Le Figaro, 10 June 1920.
111. "Les Indochinois ont répondu présent," Le Monde colonial illustré (Dec. 1939).
112. Bibliothèque historique du CIRAD, Souvenir Indochinois: Procès-Verbaux des réunions du Conseil d'Administration depuis le 23 mai 1941, 4
113. It is not altogether clear whether or not this fell in line with prevailing Vichy policies, which did tend to seek purely nominal and traditional elite indigenous representation throughout the colonies, placing emphasis on symbolic, even organic modes of representation such as a ceremony during which soil samples from the colonies were entombed at Gergovie. See Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, 2001).
114. Bibliothèque historique du CIRAD, Souvenir Indochinois, 26-27.
115. On this issue of preservation and authenticity, see Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley, 1999).
116. Bibliothèque historique du CIRAD, Souvenir Indochinois: Procès-Verbaux des Assemblées générales ordinaires depuis le 12 octobre 1965, 12.
117. Bibliothèque historique du CIRAD, Souvenir Indochinois: Procès-Verbaux des Assemblées générales ordinaires depuis le 12 octobre 1965, 12.
118. See their trimestrial newsletter, Bulletin de l'ANAI.
119. "Discours du Général de Division Guy Simon pour l'inauguration du monument à la mémoire des Vietnamiens morts pour la France," Bulletin de l'ANAI, April-June 1992, 3.
120. See John Gillis, "Memory and Identity," in idem, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994), 9.