Laos and the Dalliance of France

In the opening of The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry asserts that, as Euro-Americans, we are never where we intended to be. We're always headed for somewhere further on, some Eldorado or Promised Land, and this quest, really, has become our landscape so that the real landscape we find ourselves in becomes disposable, not-it, the landscape of discontent--to the dearth, as one might imagine, of that landscape.  I'd always thought of this as a distinctly American illness, as distinctly symptomatic of Euro-American treatment of the American landscape.  Of course, some people would trace it back to Judeo-Christian heritage itself.  No, scratch that--to distinctly Christian heritage:  the Jews know where there promised land is and it's a geographical location, the cause of more local and immediate conflicts.  It's the metaphorical Promised Land, the Distant Shore, the City on a Hill that many people blame for the environmental ills of our time: if the only purpose of life is escape from a ravaged earth, then what good will it do to clean up my neighborhood?  That sort of thing. 

However, after reading a bit of Martin Stuart Fox's A History of Laos, it's clear that there's a distincly European influence in all this placelessness.  The imperialistic impulse that emerges from Europe-- which may or may not be traceable to, but is at least a severe mutation of, the evangelistic impulse, but which is definitely given steroids by Enlightenment visions and ideals--becomes the driving force of displacement in many places in the world, and Laos is one of those places. 

The French came to Laos driven by the idea of empire, after a loss on European soil and on the rebound so to speak. "In the period following the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870," writes Stuart Fox, "French imperialists sought to rebuild national prestige through the pursuit of empire."  The way in was through Vietnam, where they already had a foothold; now the idea was an Indochinese empire: expand their influence in Vietnam, spread that to Laos which looked like easy pickings, but don't start a war with Britain who was firmly planted in Siam (Thailand).

As imperialism goes, French Laos is a typical tale: use corvee (forced labor) to build infrastructure, use pre-existing ethnic hierarchy to excise taxes, export resources over the infrastructure and hierarchy to Europe, and all the while look down on the people native to the country. In the case of Laos, the French actually had plans to displace the Lao--or at least make them irrelevant--by importing a higher species, the neighboring Vietnamese.

Stuart Fox writes, "The Vietnamese were seen as an active, expansionist people whose historic destiny, now inherited by France, was to extend their control over the weaker, less 'fit' (for this was the age of Social Darwinism) neighboring peoples" (Stuart Fox 27-28)  Even more overtly, the explorer Jules Harmand had declared that

we can count on the Annamites [Vietnamese], when they will be our subjects, to colonize to our profit a large part of the valley of the great Indo-Chinese river [Mekong] where they will rapidly supplant the debris of decrepit races which inhabit it.  By ourselves, we cannot attempt any enterprise in this country, so rich but so unproductive due to the fault of its actual possessors.  It is necessary first that the Laotians be eliminated, not by violent means, but by the natural effect of competition and the supremacy of the most fit (qtd. in Stuart Fox 47).

This is rhetoric typical of the time.  During this same era, diatribes in U.S. newspapers against Native Americans called for their outright extermination on basically the same Social Darwinist grounds: "decrepit" races didn't deserve to continue; it was the "natural effect of...the supremacy of the most fit." 

Not surprisingly, the French also took care of uprisings in typical imperialist fashion.  In one instance, a distinctly messianic leader arose in Laos who convinced his followers "that they were invulnerable and that bullets would turn into frangipani flowers" (Stuart Fox 35). The result?  They were massacred, and the spiritual leader was detained and "bayoneted to death by a guard while allegedly trying to escape" (Stuart Fox 36).  The similarities between this event and the treatment of Native Americans is spooky:  the Ghost Dancer at Wounded Knee was said to protect the Lakota from bullets--they were massacred; both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were detained and killed under questionable circumstances, Crazy Horse similarly bayoneted while trying to escape.

With the "superior" Vietnamese to the East and British-controlled Siam (Thailand) to the west, Laos was a bit of an afterthought, a buffer, an expendable.  The French plan to consolidate Indochina was carried only as far west as the Mekong, which became the border between Laos and Thailand, but which divided ethnic Lao people:  the Lao lived on both sides of the Mekong but, again typical of imperialism, became divided by European politics which saw the Mekong as an obvious if arbitrary border between the interests of Britain and France.

As Berry also notes, there's always another narrative in opposition to the narrative of conquest and rootlessness--the impulse to "stay put."  However, the impulse of the French in Laos was not really to stay put; it was, I think, a more simple kind of envy.  As Virginia Thompson put it in the 1930s,

For the rare Frenchman who sees in the Lao a silly, lazy, and naive people, there are hundreds who are charmed by their gentle affability and their aesthetic appearance...For the European wearied with Western greed and strife, Laos seems to be the answer to all his problems...Laos is in itself a passive reproach to the futility of Europe's bustling activity and soul-searchings" (qtd. in Stuart Fox 41).

While the envy may be simple, however, no doubt this is also an example of "orientalism" at its most dangerous:  because the Lao were "other" enough to envy, Laos was not treated as a real place but as an exotic and unreal place--too tropical to mistake for even a secularized "promised land," too plain to outright rape, but simply an exotic dalliance that was ultimately disposable.