Tonkin
Promoted brigadier (général de brigade) in 1881, Brière de l'Isle was given command of the 1st Brigade of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps in February 1884, during the French expedition to Tonkin (now northern Vietnam). In March 1884 he drove the Chinese from the Trung Son heights and routed the right wing of the Guangxi Army in the Bac Ninh campaign. In recognition of his services at Bac Ninh, he was appointed a Grand Officier de la Légion d'honneur in April. In April 1884 he outflanked the defences of Hung Hoa with the 1st Brigade while General François de Négrier's 2nd Brigade fixed them frontally, forcing Liu Yongfu to withdraw the Black Flag Army from the town before his men were cut off. Brière de l'Isle's flank march at Hung Hoa enabled the French to occupy the most heavily fortified Black Flag stronghold in Tonkin without losing a man.
In September 1884, shortly after the outbreak of the Sino-French War (August 1884 to April 1885), he replaced General Charles-Théodore Millot as general-in-chief of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps. In October 1884 he defeated a major Chinese invasion of the Tonkin Delta in the Kep Campaign. In January 1885 he was promoted divisional general (général de division). In February 1885 he commanded both brigades of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps in the Lang Son Campaign, defeating China's Guangxi Army and capturing the strategically important border town of Lang Son. This campaign, which required months of patient preparation, was perhaps the greatest military achievement of his career. Immediately after the capture of Lang Son he returned to Hanoi with Lieutenant-Colonel Laurent Giovanninelli's 1st Brigade to relieve the Siege of Tuyen Quang, leaving General François de Négrier's 2nd Brigade at Lang Son. After defeating Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army at the Battle of Hoa Moc (2 March 1885), Brière de l'Isle entered the beleaguered French post in triumph on 3 March. These battlefield successes underscored the failure of concurrent diplomatic attempts to resolve the conflict between France and China, and evoked a heartfelt tribute from the French premier Jules Ferry: 'It seems that the only negotiator China will respect is General Brière de l'Isle.'
Brière de l'Isle's record of substantial military achievement was marred at the end of March 1885 by the controversial Retreat from Lang Son. The retreat, which threw away the gains of the February Lang Son Campaign, was ordered by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Gustave Herbinger, the acting commander of the 2nd Brigade, and came less than a week after General de Négrier's defeat at the Battle of Bang Bo (24 March 1885). Brière de l'Isle was in Hanoi at the time, and was planning to shift his headquarters to Hung Hoa, to supervise a planned offensive against the Yunnan Army around Tuyen Quang. Without waiting to sift the misleading information contained in Herbinger's alarmist cables from Lang Son, Brière de l'Isle fired off a pessimistic telegram on the evening of 28 March to the French government, warning that the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps faced disaster unless it was immediately reinforced. This cable, immediately dubbed the 'Lang Son telegram', brought down Jules Ferry's government on 30 March 1885, ruined Ferry's political career, and dealt a severe blow to domestic support for French colonial expansion (see Tonkin Affair). It also cast a shadow over Brière de l'Isle's professional reputation. Although he was to obtain further professional advancement before his retirement, he knew that he would in future be remembered not as the French commander who had captured Lang Son and relieved Tuyen Quang but as the man who had lost his head and sent the notorious telegram that had brought down Ferry's administration.
In May 1885, in consequence of its expansion into a two-division army corps, Brière de l'Isle was replaced in command of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps by General Henri Roussel de Courcy. He was offered command of the 1st Division of the expanded expeditionary corps, and accepted only on condition that General François de Négrier was given command of the 2nd Division. The army ministry granted this request, and Brière de l'Isle served under de Courcy's command for several months. De Courcy was an arrogant and obtuse commander, unwilling to listen to advice from his more experienced juniors, and relations between the two men soon plummeted. Brière de l'Isle disagreed with de Courcy's unimaginative pacification strategy in Tonkin and his failure to take effective quarantine measures to deal with a cholera outbreak in August 1885. In October 1885, with Annam and Tonkin in open insurrection against French rule and the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps decimated by cholera, he decided that he had had enough. Unable to stomach working for de Courcy any longer, he left Tonkin and returned to France.
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