9
CAMBODIA’S RESPONSE TO FRANCE, 1916–45

Two events of political importance stand out in the last ten years or so of Sisowath’s reign. These are the so-called 1916 Affair and the murder of a French résident, Félix Louis Bardez, in rural Kompong Chnang in 1925. The first of these revealed how little the French knew about communications and social organization in Cambodia after more than fifty years of being in control. The second, perhaps because it was the only incident of its kind in the colonial era, shocked the regime and was blown out of proportion in postcolonial times by Cambodian nationalist writers.

THE 1916 AFFAIR

To understand the 1916 Affair, we must remember that the French financed almost all of their activities in Cambodia, including public works and the salaries of French officials, by a complex and onerous network of taxes on salt, alcohol, opium, rice, and other crops, as well as on exported and imported goods, and by levying extensive fees for all government services. Of those too poor to buy their way out of corvée labor assignments the French could require ninety days of labor. The cash to pay rice taxes came only when peasant householders had sold their harvests for cash or had been able to earn enough cash to pay the taxes by hiring themselves out in the off-season. There was a certain amount of flexibility in the system because tax records were poorly kept and local leaders tended to underestimate the number of people they controlled in order to spread the tax burden more evenly through the population and to increase their own opportunities for profit.

During World War I, the French increased this burden throughout Indochina by floating war loans to which local people, especially the leisure classes (presumably Chinese merchants), were forcefully urged to subscribe; by levying additional taxes; and by recruiting volunteers for military service abroad. In late November 1915, some three hundred peasants from the area northeast of Phnom Penh arrived in the capital with a petition to Sisowath asking him to reduce the taxes that were levied by the French but collected by Cambodian officials. The king met the delegation and ordered its members to go home, promising vaguely that some adjustments would be made.¹

News of the confrontation apparently spread in the sruk to the east of Phnom Penh—long a hotbed of antidynastic sentiment—and larger and larger delegations, sometimes numbering as many as three thousand peasants, began walking into the capital and assembling outside the palace to place their grievances before the king. French résidents, reporting on these movements, registered their surprise not only at the size of the delegations but also, as one wrote, at the fact that they had “been set in motion with such disconcerting speed.” Another mentioned that no one had predicted the affair, although “the entire population was involved.” French police estimated that some forty thousand peasants passed through Phnom Penh in the early months of 1916 before being ordered back to their villages by the king. Other estimates run as high as a hundred thousand. Scattered incidents in the sruk later in the year claimed a half-dozen Cambodian lives; at the same time, Sisowath toured the eastern sruk by automobile, exhorting peasants to remain peacefully in their homes and canceling any further corvée for 1916.

In the long run, the 1916 Affair had little effect on the way the French ran Cambodia or on Cambodian responses to the French. In fact, it is unclear that the demonstrations opposed the French protectorate at all; French administrators were sidestepped by the petitioners, who sought justice directly from the king. What is extraordinary about the demonstrations is the speed and efficiency with which they were organized by provincial leaders whose identity and motives remain obscure. The incident undermined French mythology about lazy and individualistic Cambodians, who were supposedly impervious to leadership or ideology. Some French officials, panicked by the size of the delegations, blamed the affair on “German agents.” Others saw evidence of deep-seated antimonarchic feeling, citing a manifesto that had circulated earlier in 1915, stating that “the French have made us very unhappy for many years by keeping bad people as the king and as officials while treating good people as bad.”²

Interestingly, the 1916 Affair coincided with serious anti-French demonstrations in Cochin China. The possibility of links between the two was noted by some French officials, but the speed with which Cambodian disaffection died down suggests that people there had been demonstrating to relieve local wrongs.

In the nine years that passed before the assassination of résident Bardez, the French tightened and rationalized their control over Cambodia—and especially over the organization of revenue collection and day-to-day administration—so much so that some “aged” Cambodian officials complained that “too many changes” were taking place. In 1920, for example, the French arranged for rice taxes to be collected by local officials rather than by officials sent to the sruk from Phnom Penh. A year later, the French experimented with a “communal” reorganization of Cambodia along Vietnamese lines, only to drop the idea after a year or so. The French extended their supervisory role to cover local justice in 1923, expanded wat education from 1924 onward, and used corvée to build an impressive array of public works, particularly roads and a mountain resort at Bokor favored by the king, which was built by prisoners (with a tremendous loss of life) and opened in 1925. The first rice mills had opened in Cambodia in 1917—previously, unmilled rice had been shipped to Saigon—and the 1916–25 period (with the noticeable exception of 1918–19, a year of very poor harvests and, in some sruk, famine conditions) was one of increasing prosperity in Cambodia, especially for local Chinese merchants and the French.³

The gap in income between the French and the Cambodians—with the rare exceptions of a few favored officials and the royal family—was very wide. A French official could earn as much as twelve thousand piastres a year. With exemptions for a wife and two children, such an official would pay only thirty piastres in tax. Cambodian officials were paid less for similar jobs and were the first to have their wages cut during the depression of the 1930s. A Cambodian farmer, on the other hand, with no salary other than what he could earn (at thirty cents per day, or ninety piastres a year) or what he could sell his crops for (seldom more than forty piastres a year), was saddled with a range of taxes that totaled in the 1920s as much as twelve piastres per year. He was taxed individually and in cash payment in lieu of corvée, his rice was taxed at a fixed percentage, and he paid high prices for salt, opium, and alcohol and abattoir taxes when his livestock went to slaughter.

What did the peasant receive in exchange? Very little, despite French rhetoric to the contrary. Monthly reports from French résidents show that widespread rural violence and disorder, which made no direct challenge to French control, seldom rose into the political portions of the reports. It is clear, however, that to most villagers the perpetual harassment of bandit gangs, especially in the dry season, was far more real than any benefits brought to them by the French.⁴

Before the 1930s the French spent almost nothing on Cambodian education. A French official in 1922 accurately characterized efforts in this field as a mere façade. Medical services were also derisory, and electricity and running water were almost unknown outside Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s money, in other words, went to finance French officials and the things they wanted to build. In exchange, Cambodia was protected from control by anyone else, as well as from the perils of independence. The French succeeded in keeping the nineteenth century from repeating itself while keeping the twentieth century at bay. The fear of modernity runs through a good deal of French writing about colonial Cambodia, even though the French in another context perceived their role as one of transmitting modernity to the Khmer. Because what they were supposed to be doing was not allowed to take place, the French took refuge in beliefs about the purportedly innate characteristics of the Cambodians, which supposedly kept them immune from modern ideas.

These beliefs were based less and less on direct experience with the Cambodians themselves. The most articulate critic of French colonialism at this time, the medical official André Pannetier, remarked that competence among Frenchmen in the Khmer language declined steadily as the twentieth century wore on.⁵ Ironically, as the adventure and romance of serving in Cambodia wore thin, the clichés with which French bureaucrats described the Cambodian people became increasingly fuzzy and romantic. The process came to a climax of sorts in 1927, when former Governor-General Paul Doumer, by then president of France, unveiled a group of statues on the staircase that links the railroad station in Marseilles with the city below. One of these, entitled “Our Possessions in Asia,” depicts a half-naked teenaged girl decked out in approximately Angkorean garb, lying on a divan and being waited on by smaller half-clad girls representing Laos and Vietnam. Considered the easiest and oldest of French protectorates in Indochina, Cambodia was rewarded by being portrayed as the oldest child and as receiving tribute of a kind from the other two. The notion that Cambodians lay around receiving tidbits, of course, may also have been at the back of the sculptor’s mind.⁶

THE ASSASSINATION OF RÉSIDENT BARDEZ

In late 1923 the acting French résident in Prey Veng, a vigorous and ambitious official named Félix Louis Bardez, reported his belief that there were three reasons why tax receipts were so low: “the complete inactivity of Cambodian officials, the lack of supervision [over the officers expected to collect the taxes], and shortcomings in collection procedures.”⁷ During the course of 1924, Bardez improved the procedures for tax collection in the sruk to the extent that all eighteen categories of tax yielded more revenues than in 1923. He showed that the system could be made more productive by working harder himself. Indeed, the two categories of tax in which revenues rose the most—rice taxes and Chinese head taxes—were precisely those that could be increased on the spot by a vigorous résident eager to expose the compromises, doctored books, and exaggerations of local officials.

Bardez’s success in Prey Veng attracted the attention of his superiors, and in late 1924 he was transferred ahead of many more senior officials to be résident in Kompong Chhnang, which had long been bedeviled by banditry and low tax revenues. Bardez’s arrival coincided roughly with the promulgation of a supplementary tax to pay for the mountain resort of Bokor, but money was hard to come by, as Bardez admitted to a friend, and receipts from Cambodian officials were slow in coming. One official trying to collect the new taxes was severely beaten by villagers in the district in early 1925.

On April 18, angered by reports that another village, Krang Laav, was delinquent in its payments, Bardez visited the village himself, accompanied by an interpreter and a Cambodian militiaman.⁸ Summoning delinquent taxpayers to the village hall, or sala, he had several of them handcuffed and he threatened to take them to prison, even though they would not be subject to fines for their delinquency for three months. His refusal to let the prisoners have lunch while he himself was eating destroyed the patience of the crowd of people looking on, who lacked food or shelter. In a confused mêlée, Bardez and his companions were set upon by twenty or thirty people. Within half an hour, Bardez, the interpreter, and the militiaman had been beaten to death with chairs, fence palings, ax handles, and the militiaman’s rifle butt. The corpses were then mutilated; according to some witnesses, the murderers danced around them. Soon afterward, incited by local leaders who were never brought to trial, seven hundred Cambodians—the crowd that had gathered to listen to Bardez—began marching on Kompong Chhnang to demand remission of their taxes. After a few hours, however, their fervor died down, and the marchers broke up or were dispersed by an armed militia before they reached their destination.

News of Bardez’s murder shocked the French community in Phnom Penh, largely because it was the first time villagers had killed a high-ranking French official on duty. Officials had been killed by bandits or by their servants, but none while collecting taxes. The precedent obviously was a dramatic one. Moving swiftly through their protégés in the royal family, the French saw to it that Sisowath sent his eldest son, Prince Monivong, to the area with a French political counselor to communicate his discontent. This took the form of a royal ordinance changing the name of the village from Krang Laav to Direchhan (“Bestiality”).⁹ The ordinance forced the villagers to conduct expiatory services for Bardez on the anniversary of his murder for the next ten years. A key feature of the ordinance was its insistence on collective guilt. This was the line pursued by the defense in the trial of the eighteen men arrested for Bardez’s murder, but it was dismissed by the prosecution, which saw danger in linking the murder with any kind of political discontent. Interestingly, one of the men arrested for the murder was still alive in 1980, when he told an interviewer that “everyone in the village” had beaten Bardez and his companions.¹⁰

The trial of the men accused of the murders opened in Phnom Penh in December 1925 and was widely reported in the press, which fitted the case into a pattern of increasing anticolonial feeling elsewhere in Indochina. At the trial the prosecution tried to prove that the defendants were pirates from outside the village and that robbery had been their motive. In fact, although the taxes collected by Bardez disappeared in the mêlée, his own billfold was untouched. More to the point, his diary was confiscated by the prosecution and classified as confidential because of the “political” material it contained. Testimony by several of Bardez’s friends suggested that the diary may have recorded his pessimism about collecting extra taxes. To one of them he had remarked shortly before his death that there was simply not enough money in the sruk to meet the newly imposed demands. High-ranking French officials interfered with witnesses for the defense. At one point, the defense attorney’s tea was apparently poisoned by unknown hands, and a stenographer hired by the defense was forced by her former employers to return to her job in Saigon. What the French wanted to keep quiet, it seems, was the fact that emerged at the trial—on a per capita basis the Cambodian peasants paid the highest taxes in Indochina as a price for their docility.

The Bardez incident resembles the 1916 Affair and the 1942 monks demonstration, discussed below, in that nothing like it had happened previously in the colonial era. It exposed the mechanics of colonial rule and the unreality of French mythology about the Cambodian character. One aspect of the widening distance between the French and the Cambodians was the fact that Bardez, after fifteen years of conscientious service in Cambodia, was still unable to speak Khmer. Without knowing the language, how accurate could his assessments be of what ordinary people were thinking? It is as if a great deal of Cambodian life in the colonial period was carried out behind a screen, invisible and inaudible to the French. Another French résident, writing at about this time, made a perceptive comment in this regard: “It’s permissible to ask if the unvarying calm which the [Cambodian] people continue to exhibit is not merely an external appearance, covering up vague, unexpressed feelings [emphasis added] . . . whose exact nature we cannot perceive.”¹¹

Résidents might justify their conduct by saying that they were paid to administer the population, not to understand it. Every month they were required to complete mountains of paperwork, to sit for days as referees in often inconclusive legal cases, and to supervise the extensive programs of public works, primarily roads, which the French used to perpetuate corvée, to modernize Cambodia, and to justify their presence in the kingdom.

THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONALISM

The Bardez incident also offers us a glimpse of Cambodian peasants entering the historical record. Before 1927, in fact, there were no Khmer-language newspapers or journals in the kingdom, and Cambodian literature, when it was printed at all, consisted almost entirely of Buddhist texts and nineteenth-century verse epics. The first novel in Khmer, Tonle Sap, was published in 1938, two years after the appearance of the first Khmer newspaper, Nagara Vatta (“Angkor Wat”).¹² Although these facts are not especially surprising in view of French inactivity in Cambodian education, they contrast sharply with the quantity of printed material produced in the Vietnamese components of Indochina. Literacy in Cambodia had been linked since Angkorean times with the study and promulgation of religious texts. In the colonial era, literacy in Khmer was almost entirely in the hands of the Buddhist monkhood. Before 1936, in fact, the only Khmer-language periodical, Kambuja Surya (“Cambodian Sun”), had been published on a monthly basis under the auspices of the French-funded Institut Bouddhique. With rare exceptions, the journal limited itself to printing folklore, Buddhist texts, and material concerned with the royal family. Even Cambodian chronicle histories in Khmer were not yet available in print.¹³

Because of these conditions, the picture that emerges from the 1930s is a peculiarly unbalanced one. The reading of French novels, official reports, and newspapers allows us to reconstruct Cambodian history with much of the population left out or merely acted upon by events. The manuscript chronicles of King Sisowath and his son, King Sisowath Monivong (r. 1927–41), are not especially helpful, for they limit themselves to a formulaic narration of events in which the king himself was involved, although Monivong’s chronicle opens up a little to cover such events as the 1932 coup d’état in Siam, the Italo-Ethiopian war, and the French surrender to Germany in 1940. The requirements of the genre removed individual voices from the texts; even the kings are rarely quoted.¹⁴ Because archival sources from the sruk themselves for the colonial era are not available for study, it is difficult to gauge the style and extent of social change and intellectual upheaval, the extent to which they can be traced to French initiatives, and Cambodian responses to them in the period before World War II. Arguably, modernizing change in Cambodia did not filter into the villages until the 1950s; yet the face of Cambodia was already very different in the 1930s from what it had been when the French arrived or even at the beginning of the century.

Overland communications had changed dramatically. From 1900 to 1930, some nine thousand kilometers (5,400 miles) of paved and graveled roads had been built by corvée throughout the kingdom. Between 1928 and 1932, moreover, a 500-kilometer (300-mile) stretch of railroad was built between Phnom Penh and Battambang, and it was later extended to the Thai border. These changes meant that thousands of rural Cambodians were now able to move rapidly around the country by bus, and visits to Phnom Penh and district capitals became easier and more frequent. These developments also favored French penetration and Chinese exploitation of the rural economy. The commercial development of Cambodia—especially in terms of rice exports and rubber plantations—benefited the French, the Chinese entrepreneurs who monopolized the export trade, and to a lesser extent the Vietnamese laborers who worked the rubber plantations. William E. Willmott has shown that Chinese immigration into Cambodia, which remained steady at around two thousand a year until the 1920s, rose to five thousand a year during the boom years.¹⁵ The Chinese population of the kingdom rose accordingly—from perhaps one hundred seventy thousand in 1905 to three hundred thousand at the beginning of World War II. Almost invariably, these immigrants went into petty commerce, already dominated by Chinese and Sino-Cambodians. Because many Vietnamese immigrants to Cambodia, aside from those recruited for the plantations, also preferred urban employment, cities in Cambodia, as so often in colonial Southeast Asia, became enclaves dominated by foreign bureaucrats, immigrants, and entrepreneurs. This fact was not lost on the Cambodian elite, but the elite was unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

And the elite itself, although relatively small, was gradually increasing in importance. An interesting coincidence occurred in 1930. As the first stretch of track on the railroad went into service, the first Cambodian students, including two princes and four men destined to be ministers in the 1940s and 1950s, graduated from a French lycée in Saigon. Cambodia had to wait until 1936 for a lycée of its own, which was named after Sisowath and occupied the site of his former palace. Primary education, for the most part, remained in the hands of the sangha, and the French sponsored, at very little cost, a network of some five thousand extant wat schools in which students learned traditional subjects in time-honored ways.¹⁶

These developments took place in the context of the economic boom that affected most of Indochina in the 1920s. In Cambodia the greatest beneficiaries were the firms engaged in the export of rice and in the newly opened rubber plantations near Kompong Cham. The plantations had little economic impact on the Cambodian countryside, but rice production rose sharply to meet international demands, and new funds generated by the widening tax base were diverted into even more extensive public works, including the beautification of Phnom Penh, the electrification of provincial towns, the road-building mentioned above, and the construction of seaside resorts and mountain hotels, which benefited the French and the embryonic tourist industry. Under such conditions the Bardez incident barely ruffled the surface of French complacency.

The world Depression of the 1930s, however, reversed or suspended many of these trends, as the local price of rice plummeted from three piastres to one piastre a picul (about 68 kilograms, or 150 pounds). The Cambodian peasants’ reaction, insofar as it can be gauged from résidents’ reports, was to reduce rice hectarage (which dropped by a third throughout the country from 1928 to 1933), to seek postponement or remission of taxes, and to find solace in some areas in millenarian religious cults, such as the recently inaugurated syncretic cult of Cao Dai in neighboring Cochin China.¹⁷

The period was marked by several uprisings against the French in the Vietnamese components of Indochina, but Cambodia remained quiet. In their reports, French résidents frequently complimented the Cambodian peasants for the “stoicism” with which they continued to react to the highest and most variegated tax burden in Indochina. One of them traced this obedience to the Cambodians’ “reverence for authority.” Nonetheless, the level of rural violence—with Khmer victimizing Khmer—appears to have risen slightly only to decline when the economic crisis faded in the mid-1930s. Tax delinquency in rural areas reached 45 percent in 1931 and more than 60 percent in the following year, when remissions were granted by the résident supérieur. As most Cambodians reverted to subsistence farming, Phnom Penh’s population, unsurprisingly, rose only slightly—from ninety-six thousand in 1931 to barely one hundred thousand in 1936. Throughout this period, and indeed until the 1970s, the capital was informally divided into three residential zones, with Vietnamese and Cham to the north, Chinese and French in the commercial center, and Cambodians to the south and west of the royal palace, which faced the Mekong River.

In an effort to increase tax revenue, in 1931 the French encouraged King Monivong, who had succeeded his father five years earlier, to tour the sruk, where he admonished audiences supplied by local officials on the virtues of frugality and hard work. The king himself continued to live well, and his grandson, Norodom Sihanouk, later recalled that Monivong spent very little of his time attending to official business, preferring the company of his numerous wives and concubines.¹⁸ One of his favorites was an elder sister of Saloth Sar, the man who was to emerge in the 1970s as Pol Pot, the secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party. In the midst of the Depression, the French built several new palace buildings for Monivong. In 1932 he entertained the French minister of colonies, Paul Reynaud, who had come to Indochina to investigate the effects of the Vietnamese uprisings of the previous year. In Cambodia the visit was entirely ceremonial and stage-managed by the powerful Cambodian official Thiounn, who by now held the portfolios of finance, palace affairs, and fine arts. He had more or less governed the country under the French since the beginning of Sisowath’s reign. Ironically, three of his highly educated grandsons were to become prominent members of the Cambodian Communist Party.

When the economy of Indochina recovered slowly in the mid-1930s, rice exports, particularly from Battambang, reached one hundred thousand metric tons a year, and new crops—especially maize—were grown in large quantities for export. Administratively, the last part of the decade saw increased Cambodian participation in administration, especially in the sruk, where many who became officials of independent Cambodia—including Nhek Tioulong, Lon Nol, and Sisowath Sirik Matak—were beginning their careers. In political terms the French were pleased to notice that disturbances in Cochin China, arising in part from conflicts between Trotskyite and Communist supporters of the Popular Front government in France, aroused no echoes in Cambodia, where a late but well-mannered “awakening” was the subject of a tendentious French brochure published on the occasion of a governor-general’s visit in 1935.¹⁹ By the word awakening the French meant economic advances and administrative participation by the Khmer rather than any increased autonomy or a sharpened awareness of the colonial situation. The roots of postwar Cambodian nationalism, nonetheless, can be found in the 1930s, at first in a cooperative and well-mannered guise, while the French were looking in vain for the sorts of revolutionary politics and violence that they were encountering at the time in Vietnam. Confidential French political reports throughout the decade registered “none” under the obligatory rubric of revolutionary activities, and latter-day Cambodian historians looking for the roots of the Cambodian Communist movement cannot find them in this period.²⁰

And yet, an awakening of a sort was taking place, primarily among the Cambodian elite in Phnom Penh and especially among those educated at the kingdom’s first high school, the Collège (and, after 1936, the Lycée) Sisowath, where the curriculum was entirely in French. Earlier in the decade, students at the collège had appealed to the king against the favoritism allegedly shown to students of Vietnamese heritage. By 1937 an association of graduates had more than five hundred members.

This association was the first of its kind in Cambodia, where voluntary associations along professional lines had always been slow to develop and had been discouraged by the French. For years the French had lamented the Cambodian aversion to solidarity while opposing any Cambodian attempts—by veterans of World War I, for example, or by adherents of the Cao Dai—to form associations. The fear of solidarity, in fact, appears to have dominated the French reaction to the Bardez affair, as we have seen. For administrative purposes the French preferred to deal with a society that was, theoretically at least, arranged vertically rather than horizontally. A similarly bureaucratic turn of mind, perhaps, made many French officials suspicious of new developments in the countryside—whether they were sponsored by Protestant missionaries, the Cao Dai, or any other external agent—while doing little themselves to change the status quo, characterized by widespread poverty, poor health, and no modern education.

The three key channels for Cambodian self-awareness in the 1930s, in fact, were the Lycée Sisowath, the Institut Bouddhique, and the newspaper Nagara Vatta, founded in 1936 by Pach Chhoeun and Sim Var. Both men, in their thirties, were soon joined by a young Cambodian judge, born in Vietnam and educated in France, named Son Ngoc Thanh.²¹ The three, in turn, were closely associated with the Institut Bouddhique, to which Son Ngoc Thanh was later assigned as a librarian. This brought them into contact with the leaders of the Cambodian sangha, with Cambodian intellectuals, and also with a small group of French scholars and officials led by the imaginative and energetic secretary of the institute, Suzanne Karpelès, who were eager to help with Cambodia’s intellectual renaissance.

The editorial stand of Nagara Vatta was pro-Cambodian without being anti-French. It objected to Vietnamese domination of the Cambodian civil service, Chinese domination of commerce, and the shortage of suitable employment for educated Khmer. Editorials also condemned the usury of Chinese rural merchants, French delays in modernizing the educational system, the shortage of credit for Cambodian farmers, and the low pay of Cambodian civil servants. The paper also sought to increase the distance between Cambodian history and aspirations on the one hand and those of the Vietnamese on the other. One editorial even went so far as to compare Hitler’s territorial aggrandizement in Europe to that of Vietnam in nineteenth-century Cambodia. A thread of anti-Vietnamese feeling gradually emerged in the paper, a feeling that was to run through the ideology of every Cambodian government after independence until the Vietnamese invasion of 1978–79.

But in terms of its own historical context, what was important about Nagara Vatta was that for the first time since 1863 a conversation had opened up between the French and their allegedly dormant clientele, as well as among the Cambodian elite. The paper’s circulation as early as 1937 rose to more than five thousand copies. Readership was undoubtedly far higher.

Who were its readers? Who were the new elite? Primarily, they seem to have been young Cambodian men in the lower ranks of the civil service, educated at least partially in the French educational system. Undoubtedly, they were concentrated in Phnom Penh. In his memoirs of this period, Bunchhan Muul, by the 1970s a high official in the ill-fated Khmer Republic, wrote that the paper saw as its mission the awakening of the Cambodian people—an image that persisted into the 1950s, when Son Ngoc Thanh returned from exile and founded another nationalist paper entitled Khmer Krok (“Cambodians Awake”). The Nagara Vatta was important because it gave thousands of Cambodians a chance for the first time to read about events in the outside world in their own language.

Nevertheless, the emerging Cambodian elite defined in terms of educational qualifications was very small. By 1939 the number of bacheliers graduated from the Lycée Sisowath was barely half a dozen, and perhaps a dozen Cambodians had been trained in tertiary institutions abroad. The gap between political awareness and technical proficiency, which persisted into the postcolonial period, can be blamed initially on French inertia in the field of indigenous education, itself traceable to French unwillingness to pay the bills.

Before the fall of France in June 1940, none of the officials in Indochina had openly voiced doubts about the permanence of the French presence in Asia. There were no moves in Cambodia, for example, to widen the electorate, to introduce representative government on anything other than a consultative basis, or to train Cambodians in a systematic way to replace Frenchmen in the administration. In the sruk, however, some devolution took place in the 1930s whereby experienced and senior local officials, rather than Frenchmen, were allowed to prepare local budgets and write periodic reports.²² The sense of irony among French officials, it seems, was not highly developed. In 1939, elaborate ceremonies were sponsored in Phnom Penh to honor the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution, and the venue was the Place de la République.²³

THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II

World War II—more precisely the period between June 1940 and October 1945—must be seen as a watershed in the history of Indochina. This is particularly true of Vietnam, but French policies in Cambodia, springing from weakness, and Cambodian responses to them differed sharply from what had gone before. By the end of 1945, Cambodian independence, impracticable and almost inconceivable in 1939, had become primarily a matter of time.

Much the same state of affairs applied throughout Southeast Asia and particularly in Burma and the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). The development of nationalism in Indochina differed in that France was the only colonial power in the region to retain day-to-day control of its possessions for the greater part of World War II. The French managed to do so by making substantial concessions to the Japanese. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese jailed colonial officials and ruled through local leaders, usually recruited from the ranks of opponents of colonial rule. In Indochina, on the other hand, the French sought to defuse nationalist thinking and activity by maintaining secret police surveillance, by opening up their administration to local people, and by liberalizing some of their policies. In the Cambodian case it can be argued that this liberalization, and several events associated with it, gave birth to elite Cambodian nationalism in the form it assumed until the 1970s.²⁴

Phnom Penh, aerial view, 1970. Courtesy of Khmer Republic Ministry of Information.

Five of these events are worth examining in detail: the Franco-Siamese war of 1940–41; the coronation of Monivong’s grandson, Norodom Sihanouk, in 1941; the so-called monks demonstration of July 1942; the Romanization crisis of the following year; and finally, the Japanese coup de force of March 9, 1945, that dismantled French control throughout Indochina.

These events were played out against the background of Vichy rule in Indochina, from July 1940 to March 1945, in the hands of Vice-Admiral Jean Decoux.²⁵ Vichy rule in some ways was more flexible, in others more repressive and certainly more ideological than the governments provided by the Third Republic had ever been. This was partly because officials, to appease the Japanese and following ideological preferences of their own, tended to follow a pro-Axis, anti-British line and partly because, perceiving their vulnerability in Southeast Asia, they sought to retain control while using very little of their depleted military forces.

Examples of their flexibility in Cambodia included raising the salaries and widening the responsibilities of indigenous officials; encouraging an enhanced sense of national identity linked to an idealization of the Angkorean era and of Jayavarman VII in particular; and organizing paramilitary youth groups along Vichy lines. These groups gave thousands of young Cambodians their first taste, outside the sangha, of membership in an extrafamilial group.

The regime was repressive as well. In late 1940 elected bodies (of some importance in southern Vietnam especially) were abolished throughout Indochina. After the monks’ demonstration, Nagara Vatta ceased publication in 1942, and more than thirty Cambodians were imprisoned for long terms following that demonstration. These moves had their greatest impact on the people who were to lead Cambodia’s nationalist movement in the 1940s and 1950s. They had little effect in the countryside as far as we can tell.

What the French were trying to do in France and in Indochina in these years was to endure the war. They hoped to reemerge even after an Axis victory with some identity and much of the French empire intact. In Cambodia and Vietnam, part of the process involved harking back to better days and to warlike heroes and heroines like Joan of Arc, the Trung sisters, and Jayavarman VII. In Cambodia the French chose to work through the institutions of the monarchy, whereas those who opposed them became in the course of the war increasingly antimonarchic, setting the stage for factions that have endured in Cambodian politics ever since.

The Franco-Thai war broke out in late 1940 because the pro-Japanese Thai government of Phibul Songgram, aware of French military weakness, seized the opportunity to seek to regain territories in Cambodia and Laos that the Thai had ceded earlier in the century to the French. These actions fit their irredentist nationalism of the period. On land, poorly equipped French forces suffered a series of defeats. At sea, however, French aircraft and warships scored a major victory over the Thai fleet in January 1941.²⁶ Frightened by the possibility of further embarrassments to the Thai, the Japanese forced the French to negotiate in Tokyo. The upshot of these negotiations was that Battambang, most of Siem Reap, and parts of Laos—a total of slightly more than sixty-five thousand square kilometers (twenty-five thousand square miles)—were ceded to the Thai for the derisory sum of six million piastres.²⁷ The French managed to retain Angkor for their Cambodian protégés, but the humiliating loss of territory so embittered King Monivong that for the remaining months of his life (he died in April 1941) he refused to meet with French officials or to converse with anyone in French.

Monivong’s death posed a problem for French officials concerned with the possibility, however faint, of dynastic squabbling so soon after their military defeat.²⁸ Throughout the 1930s, Monivong’s son, Prince Monireth (1909–75), had been favored for the throne although French officials had also proposed the candidacy of Prince Norodom Suramarit, a grandson of Norodom’s who was married to Monivong’s daughter. Rivalry between Norodom and Sisowath’s descendants had surfaced occasionally in the colonial era, largely because many members of the royal family had little to do besides quarrel with each other. In the aftermath of the war with Thailand, the French governor-general, Jean Decoux, favored the selection of Suramarit’s son, Norodom Sihanouk (b. 1922), then a student at a French lycée in Saigon. His ostensible rationale for preferring Sihanouk to Monireth was the need to heal the rift between the Norodom and Sisowath branches of the family. It is also likely that, of the two candidates, Sihanouk seemed more malleable and less independent.

The shy young man who came to the throne in April 1941 and was crowned in October seemed an unlikely candidate to dominate Cambodian politics for over sixty years. He was an only child whose parents were estranged; in his memoirs he has recalled his lonely, introverted childhood.²⁹ Although an excellent student and a good musician, he had received no training for the throne, and for the first few years of his reign he worked closely with his French advisers.

When he started out, Sihanouk made modest efforts at reform to bolster his image with the Cambodian people and to compensate for the reclusiveness of his grandfather’s last months. The annual gift of opium from the French to the king was canceled, Palace Minister Thiounn was encouraged to retire, and the prince became active in Vichy-oriented youth groups.³⁰ His freedom of action was limited not only by French advisers but also by the fact that by August 1941 eight thousand Japanese troops had been posted to Cambodia. No one knew what the Japanese intended.

French military weakness and Japanese sympathy for certain anticolonial movements evident throughout Southeast Asia by 1942 had not passed unnoticed among the intellectuals—many of the members of the sangha—who were associated with Nagara Vatta and the Institut Bouddhique. Between 1940 and 1942, the paper took an increasingly pro-Japanese, anticolonial line. During these years, at least thirty-two issues of the paper were censored by the French, and in ten issues the lead editorial was suppressed. Perhaps in some cases the censorship involved overreaction on the part of the French. Nothing has yet been published about Japanese financial support for the Cambodian nationalists at this early stage, but some collaboration can be assumed and was actively sought by Son Ngoc Thanh and his associates. The climax of the confrontation between this group of Cambodians and the French occurred in July 1942 in the monks demonstration.³¹

Throughout the twentieth century the French had looked somewhat warily at the Buddhist sangha in both Cambodia and Laos, noticing that it offered the Lao and Khmer an alternative value system to the colonial one. In Cambodia as in Thailand, the sangha was made up of two sects, the larger known as the Mahanikay and the smaller, which enjoyed royal patronage, as the Thammayut. Jurisdictional quarrels between the two, which differed on no doctrinal matters but on several procedural ones, were frequent, and because of the Thammayut’s palace and elite connections, monks with antimonarchic ideas tended to gravitate to the Mahanikay.

One of these monks, Hem Chieu (1898–1943), a teacher at the advanced Pali school in Phnom Penh, was implicated in an anti-French plot when he proposed to several members of the Cambodian militia vague plans for a coup. A pro-French militiaman apparently informed on him, and he was arrested with a fellow monk on July 17, 1942. Hem Chieu was an important member of the sangha, and the manner of his arrest—by civil authorities who failed to allow him the ritual of leaving the monastic order—affronted his religious colleagues while handing nationalists of the Nagara Vatta clique a cause célèbre. Over the next three days, the nationalists engaged in secret conversations with the Japanese, seeking their cooperation in sponsoring an anti-French demonstration in support of the arrested monks. According to Son Ngoc Thanh, Japanese authorities in Saigon (who had jurisdiction over their colleagues in Phnom Penh) agreed in some fashion to sponsor the Cambodian rally planned for July 20.³²

On that morning more than a thousand people, perhaps half of them monks, marched along Phnom Penh’s principal boulevard to the office of the French résident supérieur, Jean de Lens, demanding Hem Chieu’s release. The demonstrators were trailed by French, Cambodian, and Vietnamese police agents who took photographs of them. The editor of Nagara Vatta, Pach Chhoeun, enthusiastically led the march and was arrested as he presented a petition to a French official inside the résidence. Along with other civilian demonstrators rounded up over the next few days, Chhoeun was quickly tried. The sentence of death imposed on him was commuted to life imprisonment by the Vichy government—the same sentence meted out to the murderers of Bardez seventeen years before. Son Ngoc Thanh, who later admitted his involvement in planning the demonstration, apparently hid in Phnom Penh for several days before escaping to the Thai-controlled city of Battambang. By early 1943 he had been offered asylum in Tokyo, where he remained for the next two years, writing forlorn, infrequent letters to nationalist colleagues in Battambang, pleading that they keep the nationalist flame alive and assuring them of continued discreet Japanese cooperation.

The collapse of the demonstration suggests that Thanh and his colleagues overestimated Japanese support and underestimated French severity. The French, in any case, were eager to demonstrate that they remained in charge. The march and Hem Chieu’s name, like the 1916 Affair and the Bardez incident, passed into Cambodian anticolonial folklore, resurfacing in 1945 during the anti-French resistance and again, among different groups, following the anti-Sihanouk coup of 1970. In 1979 after the Vietnamese invasion, a boulevard in Phnom Penh, formerly named after King Monivong, was renamed in Hem Chieu’s honor. The earlier name was restored in 1992. The ex-monk had died of illness on the French penal island of Poulo Condore in 1943.³³ In the short term the demonstration accomplished nothing, and Sihanouk in his memoirs dismissed it as “tragicomic.” At the time, he apparently accepted the view of his French advisers that it was foolish and unjustified.

THE GROWTH OF NATIONALISM AND THE RETURN OF THE FRENCH

The remaining three years of World War II are important for Cambodian history, but they are difficult to study. French archives for the period remain closed for the most part, and the French-controlled press for the period, like Sihanouk’s unpublished chronicle, is largely ceremonial and bureaucratic in emphasis. Nationalists fell silent, fled to Battambang, or spent the years in prison. For these reasons the so-called romanization crisis of 1943 is difficult to assess.

In 1943 the new French résident, Georges Gautier, announced his intention to replace Cambodia’s forty-seven-letter alphabet, derived from medieval Indian models, with the roman one. The transliteration was worked out by the renowned philologist George Coedes; available samples show that the system retained the phonetics of spoken Khmer quite well. Gautier and his colleagues viewed the reform as a step toward modernization, which in turn was seen unequivocally as a good thing. In a pamphlet devoted to explaining the reform, Gautier attacked the “Cambodian attitude to the world” as “out of date” (démodée) and compared the Cambodian language to a “badly tailored suit.”³⁴ The addition of a supposedly more rational French vocabulary to romanized Khmer, Gautier thought, would somehow improve Cambodian thought processes. Citing the example of romanization in Turkey, while remaining diplomatically silent about the romanization of Vietnamese, Gautier seems to have believed that the virtues of the reform were as self-evident as what he thought of as the primitiveness of the Cambodian mind.

Many Cambodians, however, and especially those in the sangha, saw the reform as an attack on traditional learning and on the high status enjoyed by traditional educators in Cambodian society. Cambodians in civil life were less affronted by the reform, although Sihanouk has claimed that he was on the point of abdicating over the issue. Despite these objections, the reform was pushed vigorously by the French in 1944–45, especially in government publications and in schools; the romanization decree did not apply to religious texts. Nonetheless, when the French were pushed aside by the Japanese in March 1945, one of the first actions of the newly independent Cambodian government was to rescind romanization; since then, no attempt has been made by any Cambodian government to romanize the language.³⁵ Once again, as was so often true in Cambodian history, what the French saw as a self-evident improvement in the status quo was seen by the Cambodians as an attack on the essential character of their civilization, defined in part as what Cambodians believed had been passed down from Angkorean times. Indeed, the decree abrogating the reform mentioned that for Cambodia to adopt the roman alphabet would mean the society would become “a society without history, without value, without mores, and without traditions.”³⁶

On March 9, 1945, romanization became, literally, a dead letter when the Japanese throughout Indochina disarmed French forces and removed French officials from their posts. The move was intended to forestall French armed resistance; it also fit into Japanese plans to equip local forces throughout Southeast Asia to resist the Allied landings that were expected later in the year. On March 13, in response to a formal Japanese request, King Sihanouk declared that Cambodia was independent and changed its name in French from Cambodge to Kampuchea, the Khmer pronunciation of the word.³⁷ Sihanouk’s decree invalidated Franco-Cambodian agreements, declared Cambodia’s independence, and pledged Cambodia’s cooperation with the Japanese.

Two weeks after this declaration, Vietnamese residents of the city rioted against the French, on the basis of a rumor that the French intended to kill, or at least imprison, all Vietnamese residents in France. Disturbed by the violence of these demonstrations, the Japanese intervened on the side of the French, whom they herded into protective custody for the remainder of the war. In early April, speaking to the newly reinforced Cambodian militia, Sihanouk condemned French forces, which had been unwilling to help Japan defend Cambodia against an unspecified enemy. He urged Cambodians to “awaken.” It is likely that the speech reflected the views of a Japanese political adviser, Lieutenant Tadakame, who was assigned to the palace at about this time.³⁸

Other steps toward independence taken in this period included reinstituting the Buddhist lunar calendar at the expense of the Gregorian one and using Khmer instead of French to identify government ministries. Independence, of course, was relative; the Japanese remained in Cambodia in force. At the same time, the summer of 1945—like the months of March 1970 and April 1975 in certain ways—allowed a clique of Cambodian intellectuals to interpose themselves between the monarchy and the colonial or neocolonial power.

The period represented the first time that Cambodian patriotic ideas could receive an open airing as well as the first time Cambodians were encouraged to form politically oriented groups. On July 20 Sihanouk presided over a rally commemorating the monks demonstration of 1942. He was joined on this occasion by Pach Chhoeun, just released from jail, and Son Ngoc Thanh, who had returned to Cambodia from Tokyo in April.³⁹ A speaker at the rally, not the king, regaled the crowd with a litany of Cambodian patriotism, citing antimonarchic rebellions in the 1860s, the 1884–86 revolt, the 1916 Affair, the Bardez incident, and the 1942 monks demonstration. The speaker failed to mention that on only one of these occasions, in 1884–86, had the Cambodian monarch chosen the “right side.” But the message was not lost upon Sihanouk, and these examples of nationalism, suppressed for the rest of his reign, in the late 1940s and 1950s passed into the folklore of the Cambodian Communists and the antimonarchic wing of the Democratic Party.

Another strand of postwar Cambodian nationalism consisted of officially sponsored antipathy to the Vietnamese, and clashes took place in this stirring, disorderly summer between Khmer and Vietnamese inhabitants of southern Vietnam. At the same time, Sihanouk took few steps, other than that of forming a paper alliance with the Vietnamese regime in Saigon, to formulate a joint strategy to resist the French when they returned. Sihanouk’s mind at this time is difficult to read. It is likely, however, that the obscure antiroyalist coup of August 9–10, 1945, sponsored by some hotheaded members of Cambodian youth groups, deepened the king’s hostility toward such figures as Pach Chhoeun and Son Ngoc Thanh.

Of seven participants later arrested by the French, five became active in the anti-French guerrilla movement, and three of these joined the forerunner of the Cambodian Communist Party. At the end of August, after the Japanese surrender, Sihanouk’s chronicle reports that a nationalist demonstration attracted thirty thousand people, including armed members of the militia and members of various youth groups. Four days later, a referendum engineered by Son Ngoc Thanh allegedly drew 541,470 votes in favor of independence, with only two opposed. There is no evidence that a full-scale referendum had taken place, although a proposal for one apparently circulated as a memorandum to officials for their approval. The figures represent an attempt by Son Ngoc Thanh to bolster his bargaining position vis-à-vis the French, who had begun to filter back into southern Indochina under British auspices at first. Throughout September, Thanh urged his colleagues to join him in an alliance with the Vietnamese to resist the French. Many of these men disagreed with Thanh and sought to gain Cambodia’s independence separate from Vietnam’s. Some even preferred the return of the French to Thanh’s continuing in power. For these reasons, when French officials arrested Thanh on October 12, 1945, in Phnom Penh, no one objected. Thanh himself seems to have been taken completely by surprise. That very morning he had presided, as the prime minister of Kampuchea, at the reopening of the Lycée Sisowath. He had lunch in the Saigon central prison.⁴⁰

With Thanh removed from the scene (he was to spend most of the next six years in comparatively comfortable exile in France), King Sihanouk opened negotiations with the French, who appeared to many to have been ready to reimpose their control as in 1940–41. The modus vivendi signed by French and Cambodian delegates in early 1946, however, was a vaguely promising document, diluting French control and offering Cambodia membership in two nonexistent confederations. One of these, the Indochinese Federation, seems to have been little more than Indochina with somewhat increased indigenous participation at the top. The other, the French Union, was a diffuse and ambiguous brotherhood of peoples who had been colonized by France, based on the shared experience of French civilization. The agreement promised Cambodia a constitution and the right to form political parties, but French control remained in such fields as finance, defense, and foreign affairs. In other words, the French of early 1946 had replaced the Japanese of the summer of 1945. They had not, however, reconstituted the previous status quo.