When the War Was Over (9 page)

He issued a proclamation claiming the French had returned to him a large measure of control over the kingdom, a vast overstatement of the truth, and then he personally set out to provinces with his own royal guard to persuade the people to drop their arms and bring an end to the rebellion. This was a case of double deception by a Khmer leader, not the first or last time it would occur and succeed in the short run. The French had deceived Norodom into believing what he wanted to believe, and he had deceived the people, promising them far more than he could deliver.

The people accepted their king's word. There were other scattered if impassioned protests against the more brutal aspects of French colonial life over the next fifty years, but no more national uprisings. The king had been bought off. In exchange for retaining the throne Norodom allowed France to rule its Cambodian protectorate more or less as it wished.

The episode was emblematic of Cambodia's affairs with the outside world in the modern era. A foreign power, France in this case, provided protection from more dangerous powers, Vietnam and Siam, and then betrayed Cambodia by demanding control over the country. The people resisted but were reined in by a leader who had given in to the foreign power. And as would happen again in the future the leader did his utmost to ensure that the Cambodians most responsible for trying to free the country from outright domination were removed from politics and from competing against him. Cambodia emerged weaker, with fewer leaders, and under firmer control of a foreign power.

The French understood the lesson of the uprising with cynical clarity. They left the king on the throne and convened a native council to hide their complete control of the country. The revolts had saved the monarchy—the French realized they could not dispense with this Oriental despot and his court. Perhaps the revolt saved the possibility that Cambodia could be constructed as a modern nation itself, for there were French in Cochin China
who were arguing that Cambodia should be annexed to Cochin China (the southern area of Vietnam; Annam was the central area, Tonkin the northern).

All real power in Cambodia passed to the French, and everything the peasants had feared came to pass. Taxes were increased and the revenues sent off to Hanoi, Saigon, and Paris, where they were used for the benefit of France and the French administration of Vietnam. Cambodia would support France and Vietnam but would receive nothing in return. More Vietnamese settlers migrated and farmed Cambodian land, fished its waters, and helped run the French administration.

The French had decided that the Vietnamese were the industrious race of the future and the Khmer a lazy doomed people grown decadent on Buddhism and the rule of their opulent monarchs. The Vietnamese accepted modernity and seemed unfettered by a demanding, all-consuming faith; Taoism seemed an atheist's philosophy compared to what the French saw as the peculiar, otherworldly Buddhism of the Cambodians. The French administrators in Cochin China never quite gave up their dream of annexing Cambodia to southern Vietnam, an ambition fed by the Vietnamese themselves.

King Norodom coped under the protectorate. Few beyond the court circles understood how complete was French control over him. But he lost much of his dignity and much of his tax revenue needed to maintain his regal lifestyle. He was flamboyant and did what was necessary to increase the royal treasury. He became ruthlessly corrupt, selling offices and privileges whenever he could. He died at the turn of the century a broken man in self-imposed exile at his palace.

Paradoxically, as his real power withered, the king's prestige among his people increased. When the evidence of their daily lives told them how their country had become a weak colony of France, they turned ever more enthusiastically to the symbolism of the king as the anchor of the nation, as produced by the French colonialists. The symbols of Cambodia became more removed from the power running the country, but the people worshiped the symbol, not the power, a habit that fed illusions and quashed rebellion. The men who followed Norodom on that throne inherited the contradictory legacies of loyalty from the masses and loathing from the cognoscenti who knew how the king had betrayed his sacred mandate and the country.

The French did provide some benefits for Cambodia. They protected the country from invasions by neighbors. Khmer peasants no longer fled to
Thailand to avoid wars, as they had done in the nineteenth century, nor were they carried off by raiding Siamese armies. They stayed on the land and reclaimed fallow fields, increasing Cambodian rice production. The population tripled under the French. There was a new political calm interrupted only rarely by outbursts against the French.

But perhaps the most profound fruit of the French presence in Cambodia was the seemingly arcane pursuit by a handful of French scholars to “recover” a history for Cambodia. The results of their scholarship were nothing less than the reinvention of Khmer pride in their country's heritage and the ideological foundation of the modern drive for an expression of an independent Khmer nation.

It is hard to imagine modern Cambodia without the magnificent towers of Angkor Wat to point to as the symbol of Khmer culture. Those spires have decorated every flag of independent Cambodia. But before the French archaeologists and historians arrived, the temples were silent ruins largely abandoned for 600 years in the jungles of northwestern Cambodia. The French overcame much of the Cambodian superstitious fear of the temples and in the nineteenth century began the monumental restoration work that went hand in hand with the task of deciphering the country's buried past. By the time their work was halted in the 1960s, the French had proved the Khmers ranked with the Romans and Greeks as unrivaled artists and innovators of the ancient world.

The work of these scholars coincided with a debate in France over the attitude French colonialists should adopt toward native cultures in their colonies. The question was whether the French should force the natives to assimilate French culture and become nationals of the great French metropolitan society, or should allow the local culture to survive alongside the French culture, which only the elite natives could assimilate anyway. The latter argument won out, for practical and political reasons.

The cost of turning natives into French-speaking and French-acting citizens of the Metropole was prohibitive; moreover, it was far more provocative to those natives fighting France precisely because colonization spelled the death of their culture and the prospects for becoming modern nations. The French scholars hoping to improve French understanding of the Oriental world were the standard-bearers for politicians who claimed to be seeking to preserve local cultures. They provided a new argument for preserving Cambodia as a separate country, helping to stop the French administrators in Saigon who continued lobbying for its inclusion in Cochin China.

The consequences of this scholarship reached far beyond the immediate political debate. During nearly one century of painstaking labor, French archaeologists, historians, and linguists “resurrected” Cambodia's buried history and launched a Khmer sense of nationhood. Around Angkor the French rebuilt seventy-two stone temples, including Angkor Wat itself. This reconstruction was an essential part of the historical investigations. Also reconstructed were a set of views about Angkor's source of power, its sense of itself and its basis for legitimacy Through the reconstruction efforts the French archaeologists uncovered the old irrigation network of tanks, dams, and dikes. Much of what is known today about Cambodia's past was discovered by these French scholars, but this knowledge was passed along with the French prejudices, assumptions, and errors as unchallengable truths to the first generation of school-educated Cambodians.

Their work was presented as a tonic for the Khmers, who were told that their pride was so regularly trampled by Siam, Vietnam, and French administrators. Cambodians in the twentieth century at least had a past they could be proud of. With their historical discoveries, the French gradually revived ailing Khmer institutions as well, renovating the traditional Buddhist schools, the Buddhist religion, even the monarchy.

A few French men and women were responsible for the majority of scholarship that directly affected how modern Cambodians saw themselves. One was a remarkable woman named Suzanne Karpelès who encouraged a quiet renaissance of Buddhism that later fed Cambodia's independence movement. She was attached to the Ecole Française d'Extrème Orient in Hanoi, then the world's finest center of Orientalism. Karpelès came to Phnom Penh to build the royal library into a repository of irreplaceable Buddhist texts and relics she collected both for safekeeping and to instruct the Cambodian bonzes, or monks, in texts that had long been ignored.

Her mandate was to reeducate the Buddhist monks in what the French considered their traditional faith and erase much of the “superstitious practice” that had “corrupted” Theravada Buddhism (Buddhism of the smaller vehicle) in Indochina. The library established the Buddhist Institute in 1930. The Institute was the only center based in Cambodia that brought in students from other Indochinese colonies, largely the Cambodian minority living in Cochin China. (Vietnamese Buddhists, a minority in their country, practiced Mahayana Buddhism—Buddhism of the larger vehicle.)

These Cambodians from southern Vietnam, the Khmer Krom, became part of Karpelès's larger project to revitalize Cambodian culture, pride, and aspirations. She surveyed the Cambodian minority community in southern
Vietnam and led a crusade encouraging Cambodians to remember that the entire Mekong Delta was once their homeland. (In fact, the lower delta was Cambodian for only a short while, perhaps a century. Previously, it was home to the Chams, who were among the rivals of the Khmers.) These Kampuchea Krom immigrants became the most ardent of nationalists in subsequent years, the favorite recruits of both the American CIA and the Khmer Republic.

The Buddhist Institute quickly became the focus of a new intellectual life in this new crucial period between the world wars. The French built only a minimal, elite system of secular schools in Cambodia. Otherwise, they merely altered the curriculum taught by the monks in the country's native pagoda schools. The youth in Cambodia were largely taught by monks, who were responsible for the high literacy rate in the country, far higher than in Vietnam, and the Institute easily gained a position as the fullest expression of Buddhist education in Cambodia. It also discouraged Cambodians from traveling to Thailand for further Buddhist education; in Bangkok it was easy for Cambodians to pick up dangerous anti-French, independent ideas from Thai Buddhists.

The French aided other cultural institutions, particularly the arts. They reconstituted the royal ballet, built museums to house Khmer antiquities, and established schools where the arts could be taught to the younger generation. In 1920, Georges Groslier founded the School of Cambodian Arts to reverse the trends set off by colonial economic policies. Severe taxes on the country's harvests and importation of cheap Western goods had ruined the market for local artistic objects. Buddhist bonzes who once employed retinues of native artisans no longer could afford to finance Cambodian art and were buying paper flowers and Western bric-a-brac for pagoda altars. Groslier's school revived the artisan tradition and preserved Cambodian painting, silverwork, carving, and the other art forms.

The French administration had done little to nurture a transformation of the Khmer economy. There was nearly no attempt at modernization. The major industrial development in colonial Indochina under the French was in agriculture and mining, primarily in Vietnam. In Cambodia the French introduced plantations, mostly rubber but also for coffee and other export commodities. They indirectly promoted one sector of the economy—the Chinese moneylenders—by severely taxing the peasants' harvests. The peasants responded by showing less inclination to increase their rice production. The taxes and their debts to the moneylenders put them in a new cycle of poverty that often proved inescapable.

To French administrators this behavior sealed the stereotype of the lazy Cambodians. A visiting American historian of French Indochina, a woman named Virginia Thompson, captured the French attitude toward the Cambodians in this contemporary account written in 1937: “The contrast is striking between a glorious past, an insouciant and gay present, and a future—in all probability—disastrous. . . . Many [French] feel that it seems almost hopeless to patch up a decadent race which makes no move to help itself. They will never be able to equal their ancestors artistically, politically, or spiritually. Their economic future is more than dubious. They are doomed to disappear before the Annamite [Vietnamese] immigration. . . .”

Cambodians like Sihanouk and Pol Pot grew up with this condemnation by their foreign rulers. The French brought indentured Vietnamese laborers to work in Cambodian rubber plantations rather than trust “lazy” Cambodians. Nor was modern education encouraged. Cambodia did not have a French lycée until 1935, and then the majority of students were Vietnamese and French. Children of the Cambodian elite, like Sihanouk, grandson of King Norodom, were sent to study in Vietnam at French lycées.