4 - the Causes and Consequences of the 1885-1886 Great Rebellion

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4 - The causes and consequences of the 1885-1886 Great rebellion

B – The beginning of the conflict between the Protectorate and the Phnom Penh court

During those first year of the Protectorate, Franceput aside the influences of Hué and Bangkok over Cambodia, thus insuring a monopoly of its sponsorship. It was not yet interfering with th

e local administration but it pushed more and more for reforms that Norodom either rejected outright or simply did not implement once he had reluctantly accepted them.

At the provincial level, the country was divided into 5 great governorships or apanage, administered in theory by heads of apanage residing in the capital. The provincial civil servants received no salary from the State. They levied a percentage of certain taxes and recruited whomever they wanted, in order to assist them. For the public works, each adult male inhabitant was requisitioned a number of days per year. There existed the head tax, a tax on the paddy, on the chamcar along the embankments. Other taxes were usually let out on lease, like those on alcohol, opium, fishing, gambling, and, at the borders, the import duties. The revenues were paid into the royal treasury or to the beneficiaries of the apanages. There was no clear distinction between public and private funds – that was very “elastic”, Tioulong pointed out.

For the police and law and order of the country, the French intervened with the Phnom Penh royal court in order to put the Khmer administration in order. Jean Moura (1827-1885), the French Résident in Phnom Penh, begged the King to listen to his advice. He was the 3rd French representative in Cambodia and stayed 11 years from 1868 to 1879. He was the author of :Le Royaume du Cambodge: chronique royale, 1883 in 2 vol., that was the first general work on Cambodia of the Protectorate. But the high dignitaries of the Court: Princes, beneficiaries of apanages were above all obsessed with the fear of losing their privileges and were impervious to any change. The King hesitated – all the more so since the royal treasury must face considerable expenditure to build the Silver Pagoda whose sanctuary (vihara) was to be paved with solid silver slabs and is short of funds.

Exasperated by this state of things, Admiral Duperré, the Governor of Cochinchina, came at the time when Sivotha was starting his new rebellion, in February 1876, and threatened Norodom to withdraw from the protectorate and therefore end French support. On 15 January 1877, the King agreed to sign some Ordinances that had been prepared by Moura long before. They included:

-abolition of apanages to be replaced by a lump sum or a life annuity for the head beneficiaries;

-the running of the Kingdom should be entrusted with a Council of Ministers without the King’s presence;

-the organization of a uniform and centralized provincial administration under the authority of the Council of Ministers;

-abolition of the leasing out of taxes, except for gambling, opium and alcohol;

-fixed and regular salaries for the civil servants;

-reduction of taxes and the possibility to buy back in kind some of the sums due by the taxpayers;

-organization of provincial courts, with an appeal court in the capital;

-abolition of slavery and the possibility of buying back debts;

-establishing a service of public works;

-establishing rules and regulations for contracts with the State and with the Palace.

All those measures constituted a veritable revolution as they affected all vested interests in the whole country. What is more, on 1st May 1877, a kret gave Asians (meaning Cochinchinese and Annamites) the same privileges as the French and Europeans as far as their legal rights were concerned. Those were defined by the 11th September 1863 Treaty of Protectorate. That was too much for the general public and a general insurrection ensued and implementing the ordinances proved impossible. So Tioulong claims.

Milton Osborne has a slightly different story. Le Myre de Vilers[1], Governor of Cochinchina has another vision and he blamed the King’s profligacy and irresponsibility for being totally unwilling to engineer any reform. This is how he described Cambodia and its Court in 1877:

-Hunting after the sale of human beings is still carried on among the Phnongs and the Stiengs;

-The officials, who are unpaid, continue their exactions and live by pillage;

-The venality of magistrates has not diminished;

-Instances of brigandage multiply;

-Public services exist only in name;

-The roads and bridges, through lack of maintenance, have become impassable;

-By contrast, the expenses of the Court increase each year; the king, through vanity, has allowed himself to join the refinements of European comfort to the luxury of Asia;

-Filipino bands and Cambodian orchestras;

-Carriages of all sorts and 250 elephants, driven and looked after by numerous slaves;

-A flotilla of steam-driven vessels and innumerable boats of all sorts;

-A Filipino bodyguard and a Cambodian bodyguard, infantry, cavalry, artillery, bodyguards, pages, etc. … in the European style;

-European servants, Chinese, Annamites, Filipinos, Cambodians, Phnongs, etc., etc.;

-Immoderate acquisition of diamonds and jewels;

-Finally, to crown everything, a harem, made of up to 400 women, which becomes larger each year through the recruitment of young girls carried on in Siam through the intermediary of an Indian Ibrahim, who is an English subject, (p. 201 & 202)

Le Myre de Vilers however, after this accusing catalogue, thought it unwise to rush into reforms as “the Cambodian is profoundly attached to the monarchic form”. This was not going to be the opinion of his successor, Governor Charles Thomson.

Such at least was the view of King Norodom I as seen by French administrators. We have a different picture in Julio Jeldres’s The Royal House of Cambodia, Monument Books, Phnom Penh, 2003. The author, after serving as Senior private Secretary to His Majesty Norodom Sihanouk between 1982 and 1991,was given the rank of Ambassador by His Majesty in June 1991 and appointed His Majesty’s Official Biographer in September 1993.

Jeldres wrote: “ For a great majority of Cambodians, the king remains the “Great king” or “Preah Karuna Preah Sovannakot”, because of his intelligence, his ample culture, his dignity and, above all, his resistance to the powerful and dreaded French.

Many Cambodians, who have been denied natural justice, often go to pray in front of the statue of King Norodom, that faces the Silver Pagoda, within the Royal Palace complex, because they sincerely believe that the late King will bring them he justice denied to them by their contemporaries.” (24)

Jeldres depicts Norodom I as “a reform-minded sovereign”. He details that Norodom was responsible for a host of reforms among which: the reduction of the number of provinces to save costs, the abolition of Court mandarins, abolition of the civil List for some members of the Royal Family to allow the construction of roads, the abolition of slavery, etc. …

I deliberately use the word ‘colonization’ and no longer ‘protectorate’, although, officially, Cambodia still remained a ‘Protectorate’ throughout the decades of French control. It is true however that the way the French started to run internal affairs, from the Charles Thomson’s coup de force, differed somewhat from the very heavily felt French presence in neighboring Cochinchina. In particular, the French by then had not yet intervened at the village or, later, khum level as they had in the Vietnamese society. They had not been concerned either with improving agricultural production.

1 –Charles Thomson’s coup de force

France further extended its protectorate over Annam on 25th August 1883, and Tongking (Tonkin) on 6th June 1884. In spite of threats on the part of the French Government, Norodom I refused to accept a customs union between all the ‘protected’ countries and Cochinchina. That refusal marked the beginning of the showdown (confrontation) between France and Cambodia that led to the complete seizure of the country’s administration by French authorities.

Milton Osborne wrote that “since Norodom persisted in his refusal to accept the proposed customs convention, Charles Thomson, the Governor of Cochinchina would now impose a much more stringent convention that would revolutionize the administration of the kingdom”. On 11th June, he arrived in Phnom Penh and informed the King that he would come and see him at 5 pm. Norodom, through the voice of his interpreter-secretary, Kol de Monteiro, replied that the King was too sick to receive Thomson. On the next day, the King being still unwell he again refused to see Thomson. He then called for troop reinforcement from Saigon on 13th June. He got 2 more gunboats, along his corvette l’Alouette, and 339 marines. He also wrote a letter of ultimatum to Norodom and set the time of his coming on the next day, 14th, at noon. The King excused himself claiming he was still too sick. He could receive the Governor only on the 17th.

By that time the infuriated (enraged) Frenchman, who would have had to wait for another 4 days to be received by the King, set the time of the audience (interview) at 6 am in the morning. He did not want to take the King’s health into account, as he was convinced the King’s sickness was purely diplomatic. Tully wrote that, at 4.45 am, French troops surrounded the Royal Palace. At 5.30, Thomson broke into the Palace with a detachment of 12 marines, pushed aside courtiers and attendants and marched into the King’s chamber, in a crime of lèse-majesté. He then read the new Convention that was translated by Kol de Monteiro and blackmailed the monarch into signing it on the spot or else he be taken a prisoner on to L’Alouette and forced to abdicate in favour of his younger brother.

The first article of the Convention said: “His Majesty, the King of Cambodia accepts all the administrative, judicial, financial and commercial reforms which, in the future, the Government of the Republic will judge it useful to introduce in order to facilitate the accomplishment of the Protectorate”. (Osborne, 211).

After translating this article Kol de Monteiro is reported to have said: “Majesty, this is a veritable (true) abdication”, when the King was raising questions to his interpreter about the true meaning of the convention. That infuriated Thomson who had Kol de Monteiro carried away by guards. Seeing Charles Thomson’s determination, Norodom realized it was useless to resist and he signed.

These dramatic events have become a myth in Cambodian history. Nhiek Tioulong wrote that at the time the Norodom Court were convinced the French had laid siege to the Palace, “Baraing lom Véang !”. Everyone was convinced the King had been arrested and moans were heard from everywhere, mingling with the croaking of toads and frogs (crapauds-buffles) that swarmed in the ditches that surrounded the forbidden city of the Palace and the Silver Pagoda.

Later, the episode (incident) was narrated in the school-books of primary school students. In the years to come, the minds of the Cambodian elite recognized the spirit of the freely accepted 11th August 1863 Treaty of Protectorate, while the 17th June 1884 Convention was regarded as a deliberate insult (affront) to Cambodian sovereignty. Cambodia had become a de facto colony and the absolutism of the Khmer monarchy was abolished – for good ? The will of the Monarch was to become subservient to the dual authority of the Résident Supérieur and the Council of Ministers. In the heydays of the colonial era, these two authorities were very much one as the French made sure most members of the Council of Ministers agreed to the way they wished to run the country.

2 – The Great rebellion

Charles Thomson, the Governor of Cochinchina, compelled the King to sign one more Convention, on 27th June 1884, in order to establish the right to real property. This meant that land was no longer theoretically the exclusive property of the crown, but could be “alienated”, that is sold to private individuals and in particular to foreigners. At the time, there was a confusion between land owned and exploited for the King’s benefit and land in the public domain. For instance, Tully explains (123) that at the time Phnom Penh consisted essentially of “one main street, two kilometres long, with 100 one-story houses, built of bad bricks and of the same mediocre design; the King is the owner, and he rents them to Chinese traders.” With this new Convention, the Protectorate Administration would be in a position to grant unlimited concessions in the capital and in the provinces to Europeans and those assimilated to them, that is essentially Chinese and Annamites.

That was at the origin of the so-called Catholic village in north Phnom Penh for the Catholic Mission peopled exclusively with Annamites who had taken refuge in Cambodia from persecutions in their own country on the part of Emperors Minh Manh (1820-1840) and Tu Duc (1847-1883). Further Vietnamese Catholic missions would later stretch along the Tonle Mekong up to Kratie and Stung Treng, up the Tonle Sap to the great Lake and Battambang. As to Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese population of Cochinchinese, Annamites ant Tonkinese grew to be about one third of the population of the capital, while the second third was made up of Chinese and the last Khmers. Only the Khmer Rouge revolution and the forced evacuation of the city put an end to this strange situation in which nationals of a country were a minority in their own capital.

On 27th October 1884, the Governor of Cochinchina signed a series of texts instituting a general reorganization of the Administration and the Justice system in the Kingdom. On the 28th, two decrees were signed, one abolishing slavery and the other defining private property. By and large, those texts repeated the Ordinances of Moura from 15th January 1877 that remained a dead letter after the insurrection that ensued. That time again the reaction was immediate. A general rebellion broke out in the entire territory. The French authorities were convinced the King was behind the insurgency. The people believed in the King’s resistance against the Protectorate. (see Osborne 218-222)

The rising was to last for more than two years, from November 1884 to January 1887. French troops stalked the whole country to chase the rebels – to little effect as they used guerrilla tactics for which they were not in the least prepared. When the French attacked, they vanished into the bush. After they had gone, they regrouped. It was an endless process. French soldiers got killed in battle, but more by disease. Read all the details in Tully from p 83 to 95. Those who were witnesses to the fighting remember that bullets hissed past their ears everywhere. In the daytime, old and young people were hidden in the bamboo groves, while the fighter lay low in the forest. They returned to their villages only at night. Sivotha, who had returned from Thailand, played a leading role.

Tully and Osborne (213-218) rightly insist that the rebellion was serious and caused massive devastation throughout the country due in part to the cruelty of the French troops. We can just quote as a striking instance of this: it was estimated that some 40,000 inhabitants from Pursat province fled from Cambodia to take refuge into Siamese-controlled Battambang in order to escape the clashes between the insurgents and French-led forces. This represented a significant loss of population in a country where the total population was perhaps around one million. This was what was going to happen again on a massive scale from 1975 to 1989 during the years revolutions in Kampuchea.

Eric Gojosso, in his excellent article on “the Cambodian insurrection from 1885-1886 & its consequences on the local administration of the kingdom”, details the slow down of reforms that has to become piecemeal, but has only one paragraph on the first item of his paper. His main source is Auguste Pavie’s and Adhémard Leclerc’s testimonies. Those pioneers draw a very dark picture of the French violence in their retaliation and repression of the uprising. He also points out to the inadequacy of French response to the guerrilla tactics of the rebels. Worse, he writes: “In front of an enemy mostly un , neither the systematic destruction of villages in rebel provinces, not the summary executions seem to him Auguste Pavie[2] an appropriate response (Siksackr, p. 65).

The French authorities in the Protectorate gradually had to bow to the fact that a purely repressive policy led them nowhere. They backed down to save their face, and worked out some compromise with Norodom. They agreed to a modus vivendi (a practical compromise) by which they decided to delay the implementation of the reforms. The King summoned the heads of the rebellion and convened (assembled) them at Kompong Tuol (Tioulong) to inform them of the new state of affairs. Peace and order were soon re-established. Only Sivotha in the Northeast continued his rebellion. He demanded for his own benefit a large apanage, which the authorities refused to grant him. Obbarach Sisowath continued to fight him and was required to capture him, which he failed to. In front of the pressure of both royal and French troops, Sivotha took refuge in Kompong Sralao on the Laotian border, near the Khone waterfalls. He died there a few years later, in 1891, in dire poverty, surrounded by a few faithful supporters.