Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald, Excerpt
Once they had conquered Vietnam, the French looked to their new colony to become a source or raw materials for their burgeoning industrial plant and a buyer for their manufactured goods. But in the mid-nineteenth century Vietnam was only a potential source. To achieve the common aim of all colonialist countries, France first had to transform what was essentially a subsistence economy serving the Vietnamese peasants and landlords into an economy that produced surpluses for the international market. Given the particular geography of the country, the French enterprise consisted of the creation of large plantations and the development of mines to extract the rich deposits of coal, zinc, and tin. The restriction of Vietnamese trade to French markets came as a corollary. To encourage and support the establishment of French colonists and entrepreneurs, the French administration built roads, canals, railroads, and market cities linking the Vietnamese interior with the shipping routes. These public works benefited the French almost exclusively at the time, but the French officials financed them largely by an increase of taxes on the Vietnamese peasantry. Following metropolitan practice, they levied taxes in money instead of kind, and upon trade in commodities more than upon property values and capital. They also established a government monopoly on salt, alcohol, and opium, and raised the prices on these goods to six times what they had been before the occupation. The result was a sudden growth in the number of landless and impoverished people - people ready to accept employment in the French plantation and mines under the most exploitative of terms. The French, however, took this new work force for granted, understanding it to be the normal complement of poor people that existed in this "backward" country.
Last Phoenix by Carl Douglas, 1997
French Colonialism
Trade flourished throughout a colonial era that extended from the 1400s to the early nineteenth century and included increasing contact with
As many of the colonialists had done, the French had used as their entering wedge the Christian missionaries. The Vietnamese recognized the threat these foreigners posed – they would change the people’s philosophy to that of an alien set of beliefs, and they would usher in an unstoppable progress of foreign methods, peoples, attitudes, and controls. The nationalists threatened and at times harmed the priests and their followers. They drove them out and banned their practices.
When the French perceived a threat to their religious people, they used that threat as a pretext to begin conquest. The date of the modern era was September 1857 when the French navy laid siege to Danang. They conquered that first city in 1858, then took
They did away with the name of
Many of the young people began to lose their Vietnamese ways in French schools. The most ambitious and affluent of them were educated in
Because of the anti-western feeling and the great desire on the part of a wide majority of Vietnamese to shake off the yoke of the foreigners, secret societies of nationalists of all sorts of persuasions were begun in the late 1920s and early 1930s, much like the radicals and anarchists of
To counteract the support being given the west, the Japanese granted independence to
