ABSTRACT
In November 1930, Jonkheer A.D.C. de Graeff, Governor-General of the Netherlands East Indies visited French Indochina and its Governor-General, Pierre Pasquier. During the visit, the two governors travelled together by train from Hanoi to Huế. Unexpectedly, the departure time was advanced an hour and a half, the governors boarded the train, and travelled through the night, arriving safely at Huế the next morning. From there de Graeff continued his tour, crossing into Siam the next day. At the time, de Graeff complimented Pasquier on the appearance of calm in the countryside and the fact that the French government continued to run trains at night. He had heard that the peasants were rebelling in that part of the country. The rebellion, which would come to be called the Nghệ Tĩnh movement, began in the spring of 1930, and was not completely suppressed until the autumn of 1931. De Graeff compared the situation in Indochina to disturbances the Dutch were experiencing in the Netherlands East Indies, but told Pasquier that ‘we have known more serious difficulties.’ Only later did de Graeff discover that the departure time had been advanced because the French Sûreté (secret police) had learned of threats by local rebels to stop the train and kidnap—perhaps murder—the two colonial governors. Rebels did, in fact, briefly take over a train station on the route at the time the governors’ train had been scheduled to go through it. De Graeff was furious, and complained at length to the British Consuls in Saigon and Batavia. They reported that de Graeff considered it typical of the French that they were more interested in appearances than his safety, and he wondered why—with such a serious rebellion in the country—the French had not cancelled their invitation to him. 2 De Graeff was willing to criticize Pasquier and the French government in Indochina only privately. The threat to European rule in the colonies from anti-colonial movements, especially communist ones, as colonial officials characterized Nghệ Tĩnh, was too great for them publicly to break solidarity.
