Maurice Cognacq

Maurice Charles Cognacq (born May 2, 1870 in Cayenne , † 1949 ) was a French doctor and colonial administrator. He was governor of Cochinchina from 1921 to 1926 , with his tenure as a low point in the history of the colony.

Life

Career as a doctor

Cognacq came from a French settler family from Guyana or Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. He joined the medical service of the French Navy and studied from November 1889 at the medical school of the Navy in Bordeaux . In November 1893 he completed his doctoral thesis on the ophthalmological topic " De la sensibilite colorée ". He was then assigned to the colonial troops as a military doctor and sent to French Indochina , where he stayed (with one interruption) until 1900 and specialized in tropical diseases due to the climate .

From 1900 to 1902 he was involved in the suppression of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion . In Beijing he met the French ambassador Paul Beau ; when he was appointed governor general of Indochina shortly afterwards, Cognacq followed him back there.

In Indochina, thanks to good contacts, he achieved rapid career advancement. From October 1904 he was director of the École de Médecine de l'Indochine in Hanoi . During this time he campaigned for the expansion of the Dalat mountain station , which, in his opinion, represented the ideal garrison location due to the pleasant climatic conditions .

Promotion to governor of Cochinchina

Under the liberal Governor General Albert Sarraut (1911-1914 and 1917-1919) Cognacq was given responsibility for secondary education in Indochina. In 1920 he became head of colonial education based in Saigon . A little later, there were student protests at the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat , which he brutally suppressed.

Although he was not technically suitable, Cognacq was appointed governor of the colony of Cochinchina (the southernmost part of Indochina) as the successor to Le Gallen at the end of 1921 . He owed his appointment mainly to his friendship with the conservative politician Ernest Outrey , who represented the colony in the French National Assembly . In the election in the Colonial Council , Cognacq also received the votes of the Vietnamese constitutionalists , as they expected a former employee of Sarraut to continue his liberal policies.

After his liberal superior, Governor General Maurice Long , was replaced, terminally ill, by the conservative Martial Merlin in 1922 , Cognacq's real attitude became apparent: he began to represent ultra-conservative and racist positions, for which he received some support from the often right-wing French settlers. People with shady pasts gained great influence in his environment. The former Résident André Darles , who triggered the Thái Nguyên uprising in 1917 through his sadistic treatment of the Vietnamese population and was dismissed from the civil service for it, is considered a " gray eminence " . Cognacq made him the chief of police in Saigon; soon after, thugs from the underworld were on the payroll of the colonial administration. Another important supporter was the Métis Henry Chavigny de la Chevrotière - a former police informer and convicted blackmailer - who, in collaboration with Ernest Outrey, published the ultra-conservative populist newspaper L'Impartial . By collaborating with corrupt entrepreneurs and favoritism , the Cognacq clique soon dominated the Saigon Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture and thus dominated the entire economy of the colony. Internal critics in administration and business were sedated by a mixture of threats and the granting of advantages. Within the boundaries of the colony, Cognacq finally possessed the power of a ruler and was similarly pompous.

The Vietnamese saw Cognacq as a member of a backward race that should not receive higher education. He saw primarily communist agents in educated Vietnamese. He told the young reform activist Nguyễn An Ninh : “We do not need intellectuals in this country! The country is too primitive. If you want to become an intellectual, go to Moscow. ”Vietnamese who still wanted to go to high school or get an office had to pay bribes - often in the form of antiques that Cognacq collected.

Resistance to Cognacq

The authoritarian and corrupt rule led the left and liberal French colonial press to join forces with Vietnamese activists from all political camps. Young educated Vietnamese like Nguyễn An Ninh ( La Cloche fêlée ) and Trần Huy Liệu ( Đông Pháp thời báo ) became active as newspaper publishers; established publishers such as Nguyễn Phan Long ( L'Écho Annamite ) and Bùi Quang Chiêu ( La Tribune Indigène ) took on more radical tones. A bigger problem than the Vietnamese, who allowed themselves to be kept in check with censorship and arrests, was the local French press: the journalists André Malraux , Paul Monin and Eugène Dejean de la Bâtie , who worked together on the newspaper L'Indochine , developed become the most stubborn critics of the colonial regime. They gave Cognacq the nickname “ Monsieur Je-Menotte ” (meaning “Mr. Handcuff Investor”). Since he was only able to take limited action against French citizens, he instead intimidated the operators of the print shop. The climax of this dispute was the so-called Candelier project: the Cognacq administration attempted to lease all of the colony's port facilities to a French financial consortium for fifteen years. This would have given this consortium a de facto trade monopoly over the whole of Cochinchina. The project was initially approved in the colonial council, which was dominated by Cognacq supporters. Paul Monin - financially supported by Saigon’s Chinese entrepreneurs, who would have been worst hit by the monopoly - went to Paris and lobbyed the French parliament in March 1924 to overturn the Colonial Council’s decision.

Further protests broke out in 1925 after Phan Bội Chau , one of the founders of the Vietnamese national movement, was abducted from China by French agents and sentenced to life imprisonment for hard labor. The protests escalated further in 1926 when Phan Châu Trinh , the other great mastermind of Vietnamese nationalism, died in Saigon and the colonial authorities tried to ban public memorial services. There were now mass protests by urban youth, organized as the Jeune Annam movement .

The new liberal Governor General Alexandre Varenne , who had replaced Merlin at the end of 1925, tried to calm the situation. He had Cognacq discontinued in 1926 for misconduct and sent back to France. After an interim phase under Le Fol , Paul Blanchard de la Brosse became the new governor in Saigon at the end of December 1926 . Cognacq's opponent Malraux was also urgently advised to return to the motherland, so he also left the colony. Phan Bội Châu's sentence was commuted to house arrest. Those involved in the youth protests were excluded from their schools, and a few leaders were arrested. Through extensive promotion of the Vietnamese health and education system and minor political reforms, Varenne finally tried to restore the reputation of the colonial leadership, which earned him the enmity of the French settlers.

Later life and death

In France, given its ruined reputation, Cognacq no longer achieved important positions. He died in 1949 and was buried in the Saint-Ouen cemetery near Paris . His grave, which he shares with the composer Léo Pouget , is in the third section of the old part of the cemetery.

Awards

As an aspiring doctor and colonial administrator, Maurice Cognacq had received numerous awards. He was a Knight of the Legion of Honor , Officier de l'Instruction publique and holder of the Ordre du Mérite agricole .

Ornithologists Delacour and Jabouille named a subspecies of the green-footed partridge Arborophila chloropus cognacqi in his honor in 1924 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the literature, both Cayenne in French Guiana (according to his dissertation) and Guadeloupe (according to Peycam) can be found as indications of origin. The completely different statement " Réunion " in Justin Corfield is very likely a mix-up.
2. ↑ Clinical monthly sheets for ophthalmology , Volume 33, Verlag Ferdinand Enke, 1895, p. 418 ( Cognacq, Maurice-Charles. (Cayenne.) De la sensibilite colorée. These de Bordeaux. 1893 )
3. ↑ Patrice Morlat: Indochine années vingt: Le rendez-vous manqué (1918-1928): La politique indigène des grands commis au service de la mise en valeur , Les Indes savantes, 2006, p. 72
4. ^ ^{A b} Who’s who in the Far East 1906–7 (reprint of the Chinese Materials Center, San Francisco 1979), p. 288 (entry COGNACQ, Dr. Maurice ). The digitized version can be viewed in the WBIS South-East Asian Biographical Archive (Fiche No. 81,19).
5. ↑ Eric T. Jennings: Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina , University of California Press, Berkeley 2012, p. 52
6. ↑ ^{a b c} Hue-Tam Ho Tai: Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution , Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1996, pp. 117-119
7. ^ ^{A b} Justin Corfield: Historical Dictionary of Ho Chi Minh City , Anthem Press, London 2014, p. 67 (entry COGNACQ, MAURICE (1870–1949) )
8. ↑ ^{a b} Philippe MF Peycam: The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon, 1916-1930 , Columbia University Press, New York 2012, pp 115-121
9. ↑ Peter Zinoman : Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung , University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 89 ( "In this country, we don't need any intellectuals! The country is too simple. If you want to intellectualize, go to Moscow. " ; French: " Si vous voulez faire des intellectuels, allez-vous-en à Moscou. " )
10. ↑ Sébastien Cauquil, Université Montpellier III: Malraux face au colonialisme: aspects du désenchantement en Indochine , Société internationale d'étude des littératures de l'ère coloniale (SIELEC) (accessed in September 2017)
11. ↑ ^{a b} K. W. Taylor : A History of the Vietnamese , Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 500–503
12. ↑ Justin Corfield: Historical Dictionary of Ho Chi Minh City , Anthem Press, London 2014, p. 318 (entry VARENNE, ALEXANDRE (1870–1947) )
13. ↑ SAINT-OUEN (93): cimetière parisien (partie ancienne) (accessed in September 2017)
14. ↑ Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Birds , Christopher Helm Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2014, entry Cognacq