ABSTRACT
To understand the 1916 Affair, people must remember that the French financed almost all of their activities in Cambodia. The 1916 Affair had little effect on the way the French ran Cambodia or on Cambodian responses to the French. The Bardez incident resembles the 1916 Affair and the 1942 monks demonstration 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. The roots of postwar Cambodian nationalism 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. 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.
