The 'pacification' of Tonkin (April 1885–April 1886)
The Sino–French War ended with the Chinese military pushed out of Tonkin, and the resulting peace treaty between France and China, signed at Tientsin on 9 June 1885, forced China to abandon its historic claim to suzerainty over Vietnam and confirmed the French protectorate over both Annam and Tonkin. In theory, the way was now clear for the French to consolidate their claim to Tonkin. In practice, this was not so easy as it might have seemed. As a British statesman remarked at the time: 'France has won her claim to Tonkin; now all she has to do is conquer it.'
Strong reinforcements were sent to Tonkin in the wake of the Retreat from Lang Son (March 1885), bringing the total number of French soldiers in Tonkin to 35,000 in the summer of 1885. In May and June 1885 thousands of fresh French troops poured into Tonkin, swamping the veterans of the two brigades that had fought the Sino–French War, and the expeditionary corps was reorganised into two two-brigade divisions. Brière de l’Isle was replaced in command of the expeditionary corps on 1 June 1885 by General Philippe-Marie-Henri Roussel de Courcy (1827–1887), but remained in Tonkin for several months as commander of the 1st Division of the expanded expeditionary corps. General François de Négrier, who had recovered from the wound he sustained at the Battle of Ky Lua (28 March 1885), was given command of the 2nd Division.
De Courcy's command was marked by growing resistance to French rule in Tonkin and by outright insurrection in Annam. It was also memorable for a cholera epidemic which swept through the expeditionary corps in the summer and autumn of 1885, exacerbated by de Courcy's neglect of quarantine precautions, in which more French soldiers died than in the entire nine months of the Sino–French War. Elements of the Tonkin expeditionary corps were attacked at Hue on 2 July 1885 in the so-called 'Hue Ambush', which initiated the Vietnamese insurrection. Forbidden by the French government to launch a full-scale invasion of Annam, de Courcy landed troops along the vulnerable coastline of central Vietnam to seize a number of strategic points and to protect Vietnamese Catholic communities in the wake of massacres of Christians by the Vietnamese insurgents at Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh.
Meanwhile, Tonkin was in a state of near-anarchy. The Chinese armies that had fought the Sino–French War dutifully withdrew from Tonkin in May and June 1885, but their ranks were by then full of Vietnamese volunteers or conscripts, and these men, unpaid for months, were simply disbanded on Tonkinese soil and left to fend for themselves. They kept their weapons and supported themselves by brigandage, in many cases sheltering behind the patriotic rhetoric of the Can Vuong insurgency against the French. For most of the summer of 1885, when European troops normally kept to their barracks anyway, French control of Tonkin was limited to a small radius around the perimeter of their military posts.
No attempt was made by de Courcy to move forward to reoccupy Lang Son, evacuated by the Chinese in May, nor to secure the forts built by the Yunnan Army along the Red River to protect its supply line during the Siege of Tuyen Quang. Bands of brigands took over these forts as soon as the Chinese evacuated them. The bandits struck far and wide beyond the limits of French control. Wherever they could, Tonkinese villagers left their homes and took shelter beneath the walls of the French forts.
Only one important French sweep was made during the summer of 1885 in Tonkin, and its effects were transitory. In July 1885 a mixed column of Algerian and Tonkinese riflemen under the command of Colonel Mourlan drove a band of insurgents from the Tam Dao massif and established a French post at Lien Son. The insurgents fled without accepting battle and regrouped in Thai Nguyen province.
The blundering response of de Courcy and his staff officers to the twin challenges in Annam and Tonkin has been memorably characterised in a recent French study of the period:
Comme dans un drame shakespearien, des grotesques s’agitent sur le devant de la scène pendant que la tragédie se poursuit dans le sang, sur toute l’étendue du Tonkin ravagé et de l’Annam qui bascule dans la guerre au cours de l’été.
(As in a Shakesperian drama, clowns gambolled at the front of the stage while the tragedy was played out in blood, not only across ravaged Tonkin but in Annam too, which during the summer slid into war.)
De Courcy bestirred himself with the arrival of the autumn campaigning season. The main French effort was made in the west, along the Red River. The Tonkin expeditionary corps undertook a large-scale campaign in October 1885 to capture the Yunnan Army's old base at Thanh May, which had been occupied by Vietnamese insurgents some months earlier. De Courcy concentrated 7,000 troops for the attack on Thanh May, almost as many men as Brière de l'Isle had commanded during the Lang Son Campaign in February 1885. An elaborate encircling movement was mishandled, and though the French duly occupied Thanh May, avenging their defeat in the Battle of Phu Lam Tao seven months earlier, most of the brigands escaped the closing pincers and regrouped further up the Red River around Thanh Quan.
In the first week of February 1886 two columns commanded by General Jamais and Lieutenant-Colonel de Maussion, under the overall direction of General Jamont, advanced up both banks of the Red River as far as Thanh Quan. The bands that had been driven from Thanh May did not stay to fight, but melted into the forests before the French advance. On 17 February the French occupied Van Ban Chau. After a pause of several weeks while the French government notified the Chinese that French troops would shortly be closing up to the Chinese frontier, de Maussion was authorised to advance to the Tonkin-Yunnan border. The French occupied Lao Cai on 29 March, and went on to establish a chain of military posts along the Red River between Lao Cai and Thanh Quan. De Maussion was appointed commandant supérieur of the Haute Fleuve Rouge region.
The French also raised their flags along the Tonkin-Guangxi border. The terms of the June 1885 peace treaty between France and China required both parties to demarcate the border between China and Tonkin. As it would have been embarrassing for the French to admit that this could not be done because the Lang Son region had been overrun by brigands since the departure of the Guangxi Army in May 1885, de Courcy was forced to send an expedition to regain control of the border region. In November 1885 chef de bataillon Servière led a column north from Chu to reoccupy Lang Son and Dong Dang. He went on install French posts at That Ke and Cao Bang. This acte de présence established the conditions necessary for an orderly demarcation of the Sino-Vietnamese border in 1887, in which a few minor revisions were made in China's favour.
Although the tricolour now flew above French customs posts along the Chinese border, there remained widespread unrest inside Tonkin itself. Significantly, General François de Négrier was forced to make a major sweep of the Bai Sai region near Hanoi in December 1885, an operation in which hundreds of French troops died of cholera and other diseases.
In April 1886 General Warnet, who had replaced de Courcy as commander of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps a few months earlier, declared that he considered Tonkin to be pacified, and proposed to the French government that the expeditionary corps should be reduced in size to a division of occupation. Conventionally, April 1886 marks the end of the Tonkin campaign. The belief that Tonkin was pacified, however, was ludicrously premature. The Pacification of Tonkin, sometimes involving fighting on a large scale, would require a further ten years.
Read more about this topic: Tonkin Campaign