The title of this book is Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen.” However, as the quotation marks indicate, the words “Bad Frenchmen” are not the words of the author himself. Rather the title comes directly from the phrase used by the French colonial office itself, “des mauvais francais.” The French colonial office used these words to describe members of their fellow countrymen who they believed were giving France a bad name and lowering French prestige, and by doing so were endangering the French mission to civilize Cambodia (mission civilisatrice).
In his introduction, author Gregor Muller explains his reasons for wanting to focus on these “bad Frenchmen.” According to Muller, we often think of colonialism as the strong oppressing the weak. In actuality, however, things were a lot more complicated. In the case of Cambodia, and in the history of colonialism generally, the actual colonizers who settled in the new territories were largely the social outcasts, business failures and riff-raff from their own country. They did not always identify with the interests of their own government, and they could at times side with the native population against their own government when it suited them.
As Muller explains on page 6:
Caramen’s story and the stories of his fellow merchants in Phnom Penh painfully illustrate that colonial rule in Cambodia was no well-oiled monolithic campaign uniting military, bureaucratic and economic aims in any preordained way. Instead, early colonization is shown to be a piecemeal affair composed of scattered and haphazard efforts, often initiated by individuals and sometimes resting on unexpected alliances across the ethnic divide. As such, these narratives are, I believe, worth telling. The goal is not to trivialize the injustice of colonial rule. But if these stories remain untold there is a risk, as Nicholas Thomas notes, that “not simply … a dimension of colonialism might be neglected but that its coherence can be radically overstated.” (p.6)
To illustrate this, Muller focuses in on the life of Thomas Caraman.
Thomas Caraman actually pops up briefly a couple times in The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia by Milton Osborne. Muller, who also read Osborne’s book, was intrigued enough by these brief references to go to the National Archives in Phnom Penh and dig out all the papers relating to Caraman, and then weave together the narrative that makes up the framework for this book.
From the brief view of Thomas Caraman we get in Milton Osborne’s book, he appears to be a successful French merchant who was influential with the Cambodian royal court, but not always on good terms with his own government.
In the much fuller picture we get from Gregor Muller, Thomas Caraman appears to be a megalomaniac who was not perhaps altogether in touch with reality.
Muller illustrates the huge gap between Caraman’s grandiose visions of himself on one hand, and his complete failure as a business man on the other hand. The gap between Caraman’s self image and reality is so great that often he does not appear to be completely sane. Muller does not attempt to diagnose him, but suggests at some points that Caraman may have been affected by a case of narcissism which affected the way he viewed the world.
Caraman had dreams of making it big in Cambodia, but has absolutely no business skills or cultural skills with which to do so. Like many of his fellow countrymen, he seems to simply have believed that he was guaranteed success in the colonies because of his white skin which he thought would open every door and smooth out every difficulty.
Instead, he spun from one magnificent failed business venture to another, but never really seemed to learn his lesson. After each failure he blamed everyone but himself, and then picked himself up and tried another business venture.
Although he developed a bad reputation with the colonial government, surprisingly enough, despite Caraman’s poor track record and complete lack of skills, his amazing confidence in himself appears to have been infectious. He apparently was a skilled enough talker that he was able to bamboozle various people into backing his ridiculous business plans every time.
(Reading this book, I was struck by how useful it is in the world to simply project a confident self-image. The lesson of Thomas Caraman’s life seems to be to project confidence, no matter what, and at least some people will eventually give in and follow.)
Gregor Muller reconstructs as much of Caraman’s life as he can through his surviving letters, and other archival documents. He then uses Caraman’s life as a frame to explore other aspects of colonial French society in Cambodia.
As a reader, it is not a framework I was entirely happy about, which brings me to the next section
Readability
So, is this a good book?
As always, that depends on what yardstick you are using to judge it.
As a work of scholarship, I think Gregor Muller has made a significant contribution to the field of history by rescuing Thomas Caraman’s story from the molding old papers in the Phnom Penh archives.
And when it comes to being informative, this book is very informative. I can’t deny I learned a lot about Cambodia and French colonial society from reading this book.
But as someone who reads history for a hobby, I primarily tend to judge these books on how enjoyable they are to read. And here I regret to say I must give this book low marks.
It’s not that Muller is a bad writer—his prose is very readable, and he displays some excellent talent for story telling in some of the narrative passages. My big problem with the book is the editing.
[I know some pedantic people are going to tell me that good editing is part of good writing, but for my purposes here I’m going to make a distinction between paragraph level prose writing and broader editing concerns.]
Take for example, the opening paragraphs to chapter 6:
William Hale held nothing against black people as long as they stayed in their place. In the course of his career he had learned to appreciate their work. For close to twenty years he relied on black slave labor to sustain his cotton-spinning mill in New Orleans. In antebellum Louisiana, where people were still bought and sold as property, William Hale thrived. Once the Civil War had formally ended slavery in the southern states, and with many former slaves gone north, Hale decided to move to a place where labor remained cheap and abundant, and where his white skin counted for something. Perhaps this was the prime reason that he wound up in Saigon soon after the French conquest of the Mekong Delta.
William Hale was the local representative of Jardine & Matheson, the largest Hong Kong Merchant house in the Far East, and he also dealt in insurance, shipping, and commodity trade. In 1874 the British Consulate listed him as representing “the leading British interests in the colony,” including the legendary Lloyd’s of London. Hale was a busy man and needed no further responsibilities, but he kept a watchful eye on developments on the local cotton market and hoped that circumstances would one day permit him to return to his former trade. With American plantations struggling in the 1870s and the demand for quality cotton high on the world market, Saigon’s traders were certain that cotton was Cochinchina’s future. Unsuccessful forays into that area in previous years had not diminished the general optimism regarding the potential of local cotton. When one day, in May 1878, Caraman walked into Hale’s office to tell him how he planned to revolutionize the Khmer cotton industry, Hale was therefore ready to listen.
(page 157)
The prose style of the above two paragraphs is well-written and quite readable. My problem, however, is that after a big introduction like this right at the beginning of a chapter, you would expect Hale to be one of the major figures in that chapter. Instead, after these 2 paragraphs, and a brief sentence on the following page [“Hale was so impressed by Caraman’s pitch that he loaned him several thousand piasters”] William Hale is never heard from again.
It may seem a small complaint, but these frequent false leads gave me a minor headache over the course of reading this book. I would often think the author was going in one direction, and then find myself suddenly following him down a different tangent instead.
My other complaint is that this book focused so much on analytical history at the expense of its story.
This is a matter of personal preference. If you like scholarly history books that are light on story but heavy on analysis, you won’t mind this. But I prefer to read books that tell history as a story, and I was frustrated because the story kept getting interrupted by long analytical sections.
Part of this is also perhaps disappointed expectations. After slogging my way through two rather dry books on French Colonial history in Indochina (The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia and the aforementioned The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia) I was hoping for more of a readable popular history, and the title of this book as well as the cover seemed to promise just that.
But this book is not primarily a biography. Caraman’s life does not make up the majority of this book, but instead Muller will use Caraman’s story as a jumping off point to go on at length about various digressions. (I suspect that in the end there just wasn’t enough surviving information on Caraman to fill up a whole book, and so Muller had to resort to various other subjects to fill out the pages. Or it could have been Muller’s plan all along to write a book that was heavy on analysis, I don’t know.)
I found the constant switching back and forth between narrative and analytical sections a bit jolting. Just when I felt like I was getting into Caraman’s story, Muller would go off on some digression for 10 pages or so. When the book finally got around to returning to Caraman’s story, I had largely forgotten what was going on with Caraman, and further more had stopped caring.
To take a typical example:
One of the more interesting events in Caraman’s life is when he was commissioned by the Cambodian king Norodom to procure certain items from France. Caraman manages to botch the job horribly, spending way more money than King Norodom was prepared to reimburse him for. When the king refused to pay for the items Caraman had delivered, an ad hoc tribunal had to be set up by the French colonial authorities to arbitrate the dispute.
It’s a fascinating story, but right at the climatic moment of the showdown, when the French tribunal is deciding its verdict, Muller takes a 23 page digression to talk about the French legal system in Cambodia. In the course of these 23 pages there are several digressions within the digression. We learn about the attitudes of the French to the Cambodian legal system, the history of French judicial control, and the question of whether Vietnamese nationals living in Cambodia should be subject to French law or Cambodian law. We even get yanked into various side stories, like a case about a Vietnamese woodcutter in French controlled Cambodia, and the question of whether Indians in Cambodia should have the same legal protections as European colonialists.
And then finally we get back to the story of Caraman and his legal dispute with King Norodom. At which point I had largely forgotten about this story, and had at any point stopped caring.
We get a few more pages about Caraman’s various misadventures in Cambodia, but then the next chapter (Chapter 5: Rules of romance and reproduction, 1877—79) takes some passing remarks Caraman makes about his Cambodian mistress as an excuse to go on a 30 page digression about every aspect of French interaction with Cambodian women.
In the course of this digression on colonial romance, Muller briefly returns to Caraman’s story to talk about a fist fight between Caraman and his Siamese Mandarin neighbor that attracted much attention, but then (without even bothering to say who won the fight) Muller goes off on more digressions.
And this is typical of the whole book. I found it very frustrating myself.
Also at the end of each chapter or section, the author has the tendency to explicitly spell out the lessons that can be learned from each subject, which unfortunately makes the book sound like a textbook.
But, as always, you should take my opinion with a grain of salt.
This book is popular among the expatriate crowd here in Cambodia, and I’ve talked to a number of other expats here who have also read this book. And so far, I’m the only one I’ve encountered who didn’t enjoy it. Everyone else seems to like this book, and even when I try to explain what I found frustrating about the book, they don’t agree with me.
So I seem to be in the minority on this one.
Interesting Points
Despite my frustrations with this book as a whole, there were several interesting tidbits to be gained along the way.
In spite of all the books flaws, there may be enough little interesting nuggets to justify reading it after all.
For example, during the Cambodian uprising against the French in 1884-87, there are some interesting (if rather horrifying) passages describing the torched earth policy the French commanders practiced against the Cambodian villagers. It's a reminder that the Americans were not the first Western power to commit atrocities in this country.
Also, among the expatriate crowd in Cambodia now, people who have read this book seem to enjoy drawing parallels between the French expatriate community described in this book, and the expatriate community in Cambodia now.
After some 40 years of civil war, Cambodia, or at least Phnom Penh, has once again become a place where large numbers of expatriates have chosen to settle.
In fact there's a new book out now, by a Frenchman, about the new expatriate community in Cambodia: Expatriates' Strange Lives in Cambodia by Frederic Amat [LINK HERE]. I've not read that book yet, but it might be the logical follow-up to this one.
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky – US treatment of Bradley Manning “obviously improper” see here and here
Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen” by Gregor Muller: Book Review (Scripted)
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