French Conquest of Vietnam (1858-1885): Birth of French Indochina

The French conquest of Vietnam was a series of campaigns and treaties between 1858 and 1885 through which France brought the Nguyen dynasty’s empire under its control. It began with a Franco-Spanish attack on Da Nang in September 1858, continued with the annexation of the south around Saigon, and ended with protectorates over central and northern Vietnam after a war with China. The conquest created the core of French Indochina, a colonial empire that lasted until 1954.

Background: the Nguyen empire and the missionaries

The Nguyen dynasty unified Vietnam in 1802 under Emperor Gia Long, who had received some help from French volunteers recruited by the missionary bishop Pigneau de Behaine. His successors, especially Minh Mang, Thieu Tri and Tu Duc, saw Catholicism as a threat to Confucian order and to their authority. Missionaries and Vietnamese Christians were periodically persecuted, and several European priests were executed.

In France, Catholic opinion and the navy pressed for intervention. Emperor Napoleon III wanted prestige, naval bases in East Asia and a foothold for French trade at a time when Britain was expanding its power in China. The execution of the Spanish bishop José María Díaz Sanjurjo in 1857 gave France and Spain a shared pretext.

Da Nang and Saigon, 1858-1862

On 1 September 1858 a Franco-Spanish squadron under Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly attacked Da Nang (then called Tourane by Europeans), hoping to march on the capital Hue. The expected Christian uprising did not occur, Vietnamese forces contained the landing, and disease ravaged the troops.

Rigault de Genouilly turned south. On 17-18 February 1859 his forces captured the citadel of Saigon, gateway to the rich rice lands of the Mekong Delta. The small garrison was then besieged for almost two years while France fought the Second Opium War in China. In February 1861 Admiral Léonard Charner returned with reinforcements and broke the siege at the Battle of Ky Hoa.

Facing southern losses and a rebellion in the north, Tu Duc agreed to the Treaty of Saigon on 5 June 1862. Vietnam ceded the three eastern provinces of Cochinchina (Bien Hoa, Gia Dinh and Dinh Tuong) and the island of Poulo Condore, opened ports to trade, allowed Catholic missionaries to preach and promised a large indemnity.

Cochinchina and Cambodia, 1863-1867

From Saigon the French extended their reach. In 1863 King Norodom of Cambodia, under pressure from both Siam and Vietnam, accepted a French protectorate. In June 1867 Admiral Pierre-Paul de La Grandière seized the three western provinces of Cochinchina (Vinh Long, An Giang and Ha Tien) without authorisation from Hue. The senior Vietnamese official there, Phan Thanh Gian, who had negotiated the 1862 treaty, took his own life.

All of Cochinchina was now a French colony, ruled first by naval officers, the so-called admirals’ regime. Meanwhile the Mekong Expedition of 1866-1868, led by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier, showed that the Mekong could not serve as a trade route to China. French attention turned to the Red River in the north.

Tonkin and the protectorates, 1873-1885

In November 1873 Francis Garnier, sent to settle a dispute involving a French arms trader, seized the citadel of Hanoi with a small force. He was killed in an ambush on 21 December 1873 by the Black Flags, a Chinese irregular army led by Liu Yongfu that served the Vietnamese court. A treaty of 1874 returned Tonkin to Vietnamese control but opened the Red River and recognised French sovereignty over Cochinchina.

A second intervention followed in the early 1880s, pursued most vigorously by the expansionist government of Jules Ferry from 1883. Commander Henri Rivière took the Hanoi citadel in April 1882 and was killed by the Black Flags on 19 May 1883. Tu Duc died in July 1883 amid a succession crisis. In August French ships bombarded the forts guarding Hue, and the court signed the Harmand Treaty, accepting a protectorate. The Patenôtre Treaty of 6 June 1884 confirmed French protectorates over Annam (central Vietnam) and Tonkin (northern Vietnam).

China, which regarded Vietnam as a tributary state, sent troops into Tonkin. The resulting Sino-French War of 1884-1885 ended with the Treaty of Tianjin on 9 June 1885, in which China recognised the French protectorate.

Resistance

Vietnamese resistance was persistent. In the south, local leaders such as Truong Dinh fought the French in the 1860s. In July 1885 the regent Ton That Thuyet, after a failed attack on French troops in Hue, fled with the boy emperor Ham Nghi and issued the Can Vuong (“Aid the King”) edict, calling on scholar-gentry to resist. The movement drew wide support in central and northern Vietnam. Ham Nghi was betrayed and captured in 1888 and exiled to French Algeria, but guerrilla resistance led by figures such as Phan Dinh Phung continued into the 1890s.

Consequences: building French Indochina

In October 1887 France grouped Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia into the Indochinese Union under a Governor-General, at first based in Saigon and from 1902 in Hanoi. Laos was added after the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893, and the Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan was leased in 1898. The arrangement left a Vietnamese emperor on the throne at Hue, but real power lay with French officials, and Vietnam itself was divided into three separately governed parts.

The colonial economy rested on rice exports from the Mekong Delta, rubber plantations, mines and state monopolies on salt, alcohol and opium, which supplied much of the government’s revenue. Large estates passed to French settlers and Vietnamese landlords, while many peasants fell into tenancy and debt. Under Governor-General Paul Doumer (1897-1902) the administration was centralised and financed railways, ports and public buildings, paid for largely by heavy taxation of the Vietnamese population.

French rule also transformed education and culture. A romanised script for Vietnamese, quoc ngu, developed by missionaries in the seventeenth century, spread through French-sponsored schools and the press, and in time displaced classical Chinese characters. Ironically, it later became a powerful tool for Vietnamese nationalists.

Key people

• Napoleon III: French emperor whose government launched the intervention in 1858.
• Charles Rigault de Genouilly: admiral who attacked Da Nang and captured Saigon.
• Tu Duc: Nguyen emperor from 1847 to 1883, who lost the south while trying to preserve the dynasty.
• Francis Garnier: explorer and naval officer killed in Tonkin in 1873.
• Liu Yongfu: leader of the Black Flags, who opposed French expansion in the north.
• Jules Ferry: French prime minister who championed the Tonkin campaign; its setbacks brought down his government in 1885.

Timeline

• 1858, 1 September: A Franco-Spanish force attacks Da Nang.
• 1859, 17-18 February: The French capture Saigon.
• 1861, February: The Battle of Ky Hoa breaks the siege of Saigon.
• 1862, 5 June: The Treaty of Saigon cedes three eastern provinces of Cochinchina.
• 1863: Cambodia becomes a French protectorate.
• 1867, June: France seizes the western provinces of Cochinchina.
• 1873, December: Francis Garnier is killed near Hanoi.
• 1884, 6 June: The Patenôtre Treaty establishes protectorates over Annam and Tonkin.
• 1885, 9 June: The Treaty of Tianjin ends the Sino-French War.
• 1887, October: The Indochinese Union is created.

Why it matters

The conquest ended Vietnam’s independence for some seventy years and made it the centrepiece of France’s Asian empire. French rule built plantations, railways and a colonial economy while denying Vietnamese political rights, and it bred the nationalist and communist movements that fought France after 1945. That struggle ended at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, almost a century after the guns at Da Nang.