ABSTRACT
From the 1890s to the 1920s, popular French perceptions of Indochina were characterized by conflicting ideologies: exploitative colonialism fed by rivalry with the British empire, the liberal ideology of exporting republican values for accomplishing the civilizing mission, and criticism of colonialism motivated more often by economic than ethical factors. 1 Idealized representations of the effects of colonization, namely material and moral progress, were published in both official and tourists’ accounts. Such representations tended to focus on the most visible achievements of colonization, namely the urban layout and architecture of modern colonial cities like Saigon and Hanoi. However, in the realm of the social sciences, strikingly bleak perceptions of the effects of colonization were not uncommon. Such pessimism stemmed partly from disillusionment with the civilizing mission, but was also due to the widespread fear of degeneration in European high culture. Literary obsession with degeneration peaked at the turn of the century following the sensational success of Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892), which was translated into French in 1893 (Greenslade 1994: 120). Yet, the idea of the degeneration of civilizations persisted in a wide array of discourses and was also taken up in the 1930s by those who espoused the politics of eugenics. As Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out, degeneration seemed even more threatening in the colonial setting than in the metropolitan one, the sources of degeneration more pervasive and dangerous (Stoler 1995: 102–9). Since degeneration was thought to be an integral part of the evolution of civilizations, not only the colonized but also the colonizer was thought to be vulnerable to degeneration of a different kind. Theorists argued that two different cultures coming into contact could have a mutually destructive influence. European civilization was often thought to cause the demise of indigenous culture rather than successfully create an integrated culture. Certain substances introduced by westerners, such as alcohol and morphine, were thought to cause the moral degeneration of the colonized. Even those who considered certain aspects of Annamese civilization as superior to French civilization tended to agree. The playwright Eugène Brieux argued that before the arrival of the French ‘debauchery, alcoholism and misery were unknown’ in Indochina (Brieux 1910: 132). On the other hand, the most threatening source of degeneration of the colonizers, other than tropical heat, seemed to be precisely the culture of the colonized. This essay rereads the exoticism surrounding Indochina in light of colonial urban planning, theories of degeneration and perceptions of the métis (mixed-blood), through travelogues, tourist publicity, literature, theories of criminal ethnology, and eugenics.
