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The Asian side of the world - II

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Jean-François Sabouret

Part Two. National challenges and strategies

World War I: 50,000 Vietnamese nationals in the industry that was the French war

Mireille Le Van Ho

Texte intégral

1January 2014

2World War I inaugurated the first meeting between French citizens and what were known as “colonial subjects” in France. Almost 90,000 Vietnamese nationals enrolled unwillingly in French factories and barracks. 50,000 of them were sent to work in developing industrial warfare. As Michel Goya wrote: “1916 marks a rupture, a turning point, the critical transition from classical to modern warfare.” 900,000 colonial or so-called “exotic” workers, were brought to France from Indochina, Algeria, India and China, to form part of the industrial mobilisation, which was improvised in a hurry. The recruiting of unskilled labour was the case all around the world, regardless of the borders of the colonial empires. Long confined to the colonial territory, the history of the relations between the colonised and colonisers often ignored the internal migration within the empires, imposed by the coloniser. The war provoked a decisive moment during the Vietnamese emigration, which had barely begun in 1910, forcing thousands of farmers from the north of Vietnam to work in industry.

3In the urgency to meet its needs in terms of workers and soldiers, France, in 1916, re-examined the Yellow Army project, presented by General Pennequin (1849-1916) in 1912, a senior commander of the Indochina troops at the time, who used the project as a pretext for recruiting additional manpower. From 1911, Pennequin, an officer under Jean Jaurès, was aware of the evolution of the Vietnamese society that was shaken by colonisation and the emergence of the bourgeoisie with modern aspirations, and called for a rapid decolonisation. He recommended creating a national army, with officers from the country, as the first modern structure for the colonised countries and potential motor that would drive them towards independence and constructing a nation-state. As a precursor of the imperialism that would come later, forcing France to change its colonial policy radically, the project was met with hostility and thus abandoned.

4The decision to recruit in Indochina, which was presented as a vast reservoir of manpower, was made shortly after the decree of October 1915 on the recruitment of soldiers in French West Africa, defended by General Mangin. The recruitment plan was inspired by the search for manpower developed in 1915 by Albert Thomas (1878-1932), leader of the industrial mobilisation. This provoked the immediate opposition of the C. G. T, which claimed to have international control over the flows of the workforce, but which was short-circuited by the status of the colonies, deprived of all fundamental freedom and union representatives who were able ask for equal treatment to be respected, like that shown to French workers.

5Paradoxically, Albert Thomas found an unexpected ally in the great nationalist and reformist leader, Phan Châu Trinh. Trinh promised to fight against colonialism, as for him, the recruitments represented the opportunity for modernised elites of his country to “travel to France” (Tây Du) and to be able to reach the first milestone of modernising Indochina, a prerequisite for independence, to which the French should agree after the war, in recognition of the sacrifice made by the Vietnamese who were playing a part in the industrial mobilisation.

6After the failure of the first improvised recruitment in March 1916, leadership was taken over by Albert Sarraut, who returned to the general government in 1917, gathering the needed recruits among the poor farmers in north-Annam and Tonkin, which provided more than 80% of the contingents, and between 15 to 20% of them were between the ages of 20 in 30 in certain provinces. The failure of recruitment in the south was due to a stronger resistance from the people, but also the refusal of the administration to resort to traditional clientele networks in Cambodia. The Mandarins’ influence over the people was also historically less ancient in Cochinchina. On the other hand, in the north, recruitments in villages were led by the Mandarins and local notables, to whom the reservoir of manpower, which undertook chores to maintain the roads and dikes, provided a means of finding a selection of “volunteers”. The recruitment of these poor famers almost fully relied on the collaboration with the country’s administration, illustrating the “ambiguous colonisation”, which involved the participation of the colonised themselves in a system that oppressed them. The Mandarins in France who were responsible for the postal censorship of their fellow countrymen, attested the consent of the colonised in the colonial submission pact. The study of the recruitments also highlighted that the structures existing before colonization – town and indigenous administration at local level – were largely unaffected during this period, as the French administration was relatively small, preferring to extract the modes of coercion that were used internally in Vietnam to its own benefit.

7In France, serving in war factories, the Vietnamese gathered all the constraints of uprooting with those of Taylorism. The testing discovery of the industrial world was increased by the alienating effects of forced acculturation. The creation of the “General Control”, monitoring Indo-Chinese workers and infantrymen, a specific postal censor committee and a network of homes and associations, structuring everyday life, orchestrated by colonial interests, made the Vietnamese the most watched of all the colonies. The militarisation of the colonial workers wished to officially confer them with the same status as the French workers. It was a way in which Taylorism could be reintroduced, after it was abandoned in 1913, following a strong resistance from the automobile industry. In favour of state intervention in the economy of war, Albert Thomas became a provider of docile and underpaid manpower of workers, drained worldwide. The Vietnamese, mainly posted in the weaponry factories in Ripault, Bourges or Toulouse, representing 50% of the workforce in 1917, were used to develop methods of control and domination of the immigrant workers, which was crucial to the economy of the Western countries. The economic exploitation of the colonised, who were unskilled and assigned to the most testing posts, and who were furthermore forced to increase their performance through the bonuses paid to the production line, characterised the division of labour and racial hierarchy of skills, introduced by the collusion of interests between France and the employers who were in favour of war. These systems continued throughout the 20th century with the manpower of immigrant workers, inheriting this first colonial manpower. The use of the colonised workers played a decisive role in their rejection by the French workers. The two opposing currents, the majority and minority, of the C. G. T differed on the control of the flow of “exotic” workers, but they nevertheless came together in practice to not educate those who formed the “unorganised and unorganisable” manpower.

8In this context, each Vietnamese individual experienced the physical, mental and cultural trauma differently, but the lack of varied reactions, mainly individual and pathologic reactions, opposing Taylorised work, proved the depth of the shock. A high rate of morbidity, rapid wear-out, and susceptibility to accidents were the effects of working conditions, characterising their adaption to industrial work, where the forms of resistance rarely included the collective agreement to strike or to slow down. Their performance was the subject of conflicting assessments: although the employers and the supervisors considered them flexible and disciplined, they also racially prejudiced the Vietnamese and compared them to an almost ‘women-like’ workforce, and hesitated in extending their employment at the end of the war. Anxious to save its base, the C. G. T did not consider the colonised as actual workers. As a variable adjustment in the manpower, they were, even more so than women, rejected from the workers movement by union bodies, defending their principle of nation defence, and also by French workers who wished to protect the country’s work. The rejection of the colonial workers, subjects and non citizens of the empire by the vast majority of the French society, from workers to the people of the barrack towns, showed how ignorant French people were of colonialism, and moreover, revealed how racist people were, which manifested violently in 1917. This rejection would later provoke the anti-colonialist fight towards Communism and nationalist claims.

9The supervisory strategies of everyday life intensified the alienation of life in the factories. Literacy programmes and organised leisure activities were developed by the Alliance française and assisting committees, which refined their paternalistic approach to “the child-like population”. Attempts to transform the camps of closed worlds aimed at avoiding “perversions of contact” (women, games, alcohol), which were major concerns in official reports. However, the effects of this radical acculturation disappeared in the daily contact with French female workers in the factories. Their learning of the new mode of industrial organisation jointly brought these colonial workers together, well beyond the walls of the factory. The discovery of a white society much more diverse than in the colony that saw multiple lovers and liaisons, and the birth of mixed race children (Vietnamese and French), enabled colonial workers to denounce the social relations between the coloniser and colonised, which did not tolerate the sexual relations between a white man and a Vietnamese women. The reversal of Western sexual monopoly, unachievable in Indochina, more so than the discovery of the world of labour, led to the colonial system being politically contested. This was conveyed in the letters written by workers, and more so in those written by interpreters and junior officers, in which the French society was sharply criticised. These letters also recounted the exploitation to which they were subjected.

10After the war, the refusal of colonial control provoked the sociological destabilisation of villages where those returning from France contested the authority of the Vietnamese administration that was under colonial power, and led to them participating in the farmers revolt in the 1930s. This was more radically expressed in the fight against colonialism, led in France by approximately a hundred men who had obtained the right to stay in the country and who became active militants. France, which had deliberately rejected reformism, incarnated by Phan Châu Trinh, remained repressive with the changing of control structures in political police services, branched out to Indochina. The country only consented to the reforms to the education system or the association of the Vietnamese in the direction of their country, provoking an accelerated proletarianisation of the Vietnamese farmer movement and preventing the emergence of an elite formed by Western practices, and a bourgeoisie class likely to modernise the country. In this regard, the First World War was a missed opportunity for Vietnam to decolonise itself peacefully.

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