With the British gaining
territories worldwide and expanding their dominance to greater regions, the
French became hungry for a piece of the colonial pie. Napoleon III was ready for his piece when,
halfway through the 19th century, he sent a fleet to the Vietnamese
harbor of Da Nang at the urging of the mercantilists and missionaries. Napoleon’s goal was to eventually reach Hue,
but several factors, ranging from devastating diseases to Vietnamese
rebellions, kept this goal out of sight. (1)
Napoleon decided to hold off on the colonization of Vietnam for the
moment, but he was not willing to let it slip away so easily.
In a
speech given at Bordeaux in 1852, Napoleon III stated, “The Empire means
peace.” (2) While this may have been the
case with Algeria, whom he treated very kindly, as if it were a fellow European
nation, it was not the case with Vietnam.
While Napoleon III was against the encroachment of the African lands by
any European power and granted immense freedom to the Algerians under his rule,
(3) his position on Vietnam was just the opposite. Napoleon used strict military force against
the Vietnamese because he thought it was necessary that retaliatory measures be
taken against the country for their abuse toward French Catholic missionaries. (4)
He used Vietnam as a precedent and a trophy to display France’s authority in
foreign affairs, and his treatment of the Asian country contradicted his
declaration of peace several years before.
Admiral Rigault de Genouilly of France, under Napoleon III’s
orders, sailed to the region north of the Mekong Delta where Vietnamese
resistance was met, but this time squashed.
The area around present-day Saigon was captured; the new leadership had
paid off and the French were beginning to make an impact on the new lands. In the Treaty of Saigon of 1862, Vietnamese
Emperor Tu Doc ceded three important provinces in the southern region of the
country. Two years later and three
provinces more, France was beginning to make a name for itself in the region.
(5) The land under Napoleon III’s rule
was soon consolidated and officially named Cochinchina, yet there was still
more to be gained by France (and lost by Vietnam).
While Cochinchina was being
formed, the French were also busy in neighboring Cambodia, eventually taking it
from the Vietnamese’ hands. Their
influence spread to all of Vietnam going into the 1880s, and, in 1884, Vietnam
handed over the last remaining pieces of the empire France had yet to conquer. (6)
This colonial bond between the French
and the Vietnam lasted roughly 70 years and ended when, like the Vietnamese had
done 7 decades earlier, the French lost all power in Vietnam, but the man who
started it all, Napoleon III, would not live to see that day. (7)
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