French Indochina

Indochinese Union
1887–1954
Flag
Capital	Saigon
History
• Established	1887
• Dissolution	1954
Population
• 1937 estimate	23,300,000

French Indochina was a colonial merge of territories in Southeast Asia ruled by France from 1887 to 1954. It comprised the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, all which are present-day Vietnam, the Kingdom of Cambodia, and Laos along with the leased Guangzhouwan in southern China. It was the final result of a century of French imperialism and its de-colonization came only after three decades of revolutionary war.

History

French colonization of the region began in the 1850s, driven by the Second Empire's finance capital for new markets, raw materials, and strategic bases on the route to China. The occupation of southern Vietnam occurred in 1867, central Vietnam and northern Vietnam were occupied in the 1880s following the Sino-French War. Cambodia became occupied in 1863 and Laos was carved out of Thai-controlled territory in 1893. The union was formalized as the Indochinese Union in 1887, with a governor-general at its head, and was consolidated as French Indochina in 1907.

French Indochina‏‎ was an instrument of French banks and monopolies, primarily the Bank of Indochina, which controlled currency issue and credit. The economy was reorganized around the extraction of rice, rubber, coal, tin, and other raw materials, worked by a brutally exploited peasantry and an emerging proletariat. The rubber plantations of Cochinchina and Annam and the coal mines of Tonkin were notorious for slavery and high mortality. The Vietnamese peasantry was subjected to colonial taxation, monopolies on salt and alcohol, and the retention of landlords.

Colonial rule was always challenged. Armed resistance to the French occupation persisted into the early twentieth century, and a modern nationalist and revolutionary movement emerged after the First World War, empowered by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Nguyen Ai Quoc, later Ho Chi Minh, was among the founders of the French Communist Party and of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), formed in 1930.

The Japanese occupation of Indochina in 1941 overthrew the French colonial regime, The ICP, under Ho Chi Minh, began to organize armed resistance under the Viet Minh banner, with Vo Nguyen Giap as its military commander. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Viet Minh forces marched into Hanoi and declared independence. But, in November 1946, French gunboats shelled Haiphong, killing 6,000 people in a single day, and full-scale war broke out the next month. The Viet Minh waged guerrilla war from the countryside for nearly eight years.

The Viet Minh defeated the French at the siege of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954, forcing the surrender of the garrison on May 7th and forcing the French government to leave Indochina. At the Geneva Conference in 1954, the country was split in half, with the Viet Minh in power in the north and a US-backed puppet regime under Ngo Dinh Diem installed in the south. The split in 1954 was the precursor to the Vietnam War, in which the United States replaced France as the imperialist power in the region.

The United States deployed more than half a million troops and murdered an estimated two to three million Vietnamese.