On August 31, 1858, Vice Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, commander of French forces in the Far East, sailed into the Bay of Tourane with 14 ships of France’s China Seas Naval Division. Tourane (known today as Da Nang) was the principal trading port on Vietnam’s central coast. The following day, de Genouilly’s ships shelled and neutralized the gun positions that guarded the city, and on September 2, a Franco-Spanish force of 2,500 troops landed.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

What immediately prompted this French aggression against the empire of Vietnam was the execution of Monsignor José Sanjurjo Diaz, the bishop of Tonkin (northern Vietnam), on July 20, 1857. The bishop was Spanish, but France was eager for intervention and it wasn’t inclined to overlook a handy pretext. Prior to de Genouilly’s attack, the Vietnamese emperor had been presented with an ultimatum: Vietnam was to guarantee religious freedom for Christians and allow the establishment of French commercial and diplomatic representation at the Vietnamese capital, Hue. As expected, the Vietnamese rejected the French demands.

In 1858 the reigning Vietnamese emperor, Tu Duc, had been on the throne for a decade. The persecution of foreign missionaries and native Christians, on the rise since 1820, came to full flower under Tu Duc and led inevitably to clashes with the West. The emperor feared that Christians in Vietnam might act as a fifth column and deliver Vietnam to the British or the French. There was also the very real possibility that Vietnamese Christians would unite behind one of Tu Duc’s dynastic rivals. He had already been faced with one such rebellion in the north.

France had displayed an often fickle interest in Vietnam for more than two centuries, especially in the southern region of Cochinchina, which was made up of the six rich but sparsely inhabited provinces the Vietnamese had seized from the neighboring kingdom of Cambodia. The French traded with the Vietnamese (then known as Annamese), and in the last quarter of the 18th century were active in helping Tu Duc’s great-grandfather regain the throne from the rebels who had usurped it. French missionaries had also been active in Vietnam since the late 1700s.

Until the middle of the 19th century, however, France did little to advance its vague policy goals of unrestrained trade and unrestricted religious proselytization. France always seemed to have more important places in which to expend its resources.

Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, the timing of the execution of Bishop Sanjurjo in Tonkin could not have been worse.

In the late 1850s, under Na-poleon III and the Second Empire, Paris was showing renewed interest in overseas expansion. France was driven both by a self-proclaimed ‘civilizing mission’ and by a nagging fear within Parisian diplomatic and commercial circles that Britain, which already had acquired Singapore and Hong Kong, would snatch up Vietnam if the French didn’t beat them to it. In this atmosphere, Napoleon III proved a receptive audience for French missionaries who insisted that Vietnam was ripe for the taking. He ordered France’s China Seas Naval Division to seize Tourane.

It was to prove a far more difficult operation than the French anticipated. After six months of inconclusive fighting, they found themselves short of food and suffering from cholera, malaria and dysentery. In February 1859, a frustrated Admiral de Genouilly decided to leave a garrison at Tourane and sail south to seize Saigon and Cochinchina’s much-needed stores of rice.

The Saigon that de Genouilly saw on the morning of February 15 was not the teeming city that later would become familiar to millions of American television viewers and hundreds of thousands of American diplomats, journalists, businessmen and soldiers.

In the 19th century, the six provinces that made up Cochinchina were Vietnam’s ‘Wild West.’ Vast tracts of the region remained unpopulated. Parts of the Mekong Delta were still controlled by pirates, and Vietnamese administrative authority was often weak. Yet Cochinchina managed to produce a large surplus of rice that was vital to the rest of Vietnam.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to