New York University

Graduate Student, Institute of French Studies

Doctoral candidate

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: Class and the Colonial State: Unionization and Indigenization in French Indochina, 1886-1940

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Dissertation Abstract

Class and the Colonial State: Unionization and Indigenization in French Indochina, 1886-1940

Recent colonial studies have emphasized the need to uncover the complex social makeup of colonial societies in order to supersede a lingering but outdated impression that colonialism was shaped strictly around categories of race. Responding to that call, this dissertation offers a history of labor relations between the French colonial state and both French and Vietnamese government employees in Indochina from the 1880s to 1940. It argues that in addition to the overwhelming importance of racism and racial categorizations, categories of social class also played a pivotal role in the colonial state’s effort to create a sense of its legitimacy. The dissertation further argues that class antagonism among agents of the colonial state was an important factor in the failure of that state’s legitimation project. Class played these roles at one of the key intersections of colonial state and society: government employment.

Beginning in the 1890s, policymakers identified a problem of class in the middle strata between state authorities and the colonized population. The problem lay in the existence of two troubled social categories, both labeled “proletariats” in the folk sociology of the era: a “white administrative proletariat” composed of lower-level French state employees and a “native intellectual proletariat” made up of those Vietnamese educated enough to potentially compete with Frenchmen for government jobs. Colonial strategists found both groups inimical to the maintenance of French rule. The embarrassingly high budgetary expense of the French “administrative proletariat” prevented state management from raising its income, and therefore quality and status, to one deemed adequate for French “prestige.” In parallel, authorities considered educated but unemployed and “déclassé” natives as potential rebels whose existence exposed as hollow the French mission to civilize natives through education. A simple solution was proposed for this twofold problem: indigenization. The offending French employees could be replaced with the unemployed natives, eliminating both “proletariats” in the process. Natives’ lower salaries would alleviate criticism of state finances as well as freeing up funds for social investment. Meanwhile, employing them would ingratiate and incorporate an influential section of Vietnamese society. A political problem and a financial (though also highly politicized) problem would thus be solved in a single reform. Following this logic, colonial statesmen sought to indigenize the administration starting at the turn of the century and continuing throughout the period until a penultimate indigenization was achieved with the transfer of sovereignty to the new state of Viet Nam in 1949.

Class dynamics also determined the wage levels of state employees, decisive for Indochina’s budget and the object of much scrutiny from the Parisian parliament to the streets of Saigon and Hanoi. This class factor operated through a panoply of state employee trade unions exerting pressure on authorities to maintain and raise the standard of living of the “administrative proletariat” as well as of higher-status employees. Such union organizations, mirroring the mushrooming public-sector labor movement in France, rapidly spread throughout the colonial administration from their beginnings in 1896. Defending and raising their members’ wages was the essential focus of these unions, which emerged separately but in parallel among both French and Vietnamese. Far from labor history in a heroic key, the dissertation adds class as an integral part of colonial exploitation and oppression. French employees wielded greater leverage, absorbing the majority of the taxes that they and their Vietnamese counterparts extracted from subsistence peasants. French employees also formed a powerful lobby against indigenization by the Vietnamese underlings they often abused. Their Vietnamese counterparts and subordinates were weaker, but also able to exert some influence. Yet by end of the period, the two sides of the colonial divide were joining together in a single union organization.

This history has been “lost” because it has not fit into three dominant misunderstandings: a definition of colonial society as a racial or national dichotomy, a misperception of class as only salient in civil society separate from the state, and a conception of the state as relatively monolithic. While “Indianization” in British India has long received attention due to its connection to the rise of Indian nationalism, the analogous process in Indochina was effaced when its connected Vietnamese political currents lost out to Leninists.

Triangulating between French colonial state archives, the popular press, and a large corpus of French and Vietnamese union publications, the dissertation explores the forgotten world of these colonial class relationships. In doing so it does more than highlight class subdivisions within colonizing and colonized populations. It reveals both how social struggles shaped by class compromised the state and how the struggle to reshape the class structure remained a central goal of a state whose failure to achieve it was an important cause of its downfall.

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