Cambodia & the History of France: The Role of the Kingdom during the Great War

While Cambodia inaugurated the Phnom Penh War Memorial in 2023, in 1914 the first dispatches arriving in Phnom Penh from France requested that 4,500 Cambodians join the French war effort.

Indochinese riflemen. Photo cc

“This number was immediately reduced to 3,500; however, it is still impossible to determine exactly how many Cambodians went to Europe,” explains Henri Eckert, assistant professor of Indochinese history at the University of the Antilles in Martinique.

The small contingent of Cambodian volunteers helped defend their colonial rulers under the broader banner of the Indochinese army, which also included Vietnamese and Laotians.

According to the historian, this was a political project aimed at unifying French Indochina and spreading the idea that French control was natural and not the result of chaos and conquest. The colonial authorities argued that it was legitimate for “Asia to set aside its differences and fight alongside the French as an Indochinese people.”

“Many volunteers were intellectuals,” Mr. Eckert adds:

“They believed that if Indochina supported France, it would more easily gain its independence.”

At the time, Cambodians were required to carry a passport if they traveled more than 19 km from their home. Traveling to Europe was therefore a significant act in itself. French postal agents intercepted letters (now preserved in the French National Archives) describing the joy of Cambodian soldiers at seeing a Frenchman polishing shoes or recounting romantic adventures with European women.

“There are very vivid letters; people describe the first time they see airplanes or describe tanks and submarines in a very naïve way,” says Mr. Eckert.

A First World War document dating from 1916 and preserved in the National Archives of Cambodia describes the benefits for soldiers:“Volunteers who enlist will receive a bonus of 80 dollars (in piastres, the currency of the colonial period), including 20 dollars paid upon enlistment, 60 two days before embarkation, and a daily pay of 24 cents starting from the day of incorporation.

Meanwhile, workers received an enlistment bonus of 10 dollars, a daily wage of 30 cents, and a bonus ranging from 10 to 30 cents for each working day.”

Mr. Eckert specifies that only about 1,000 Cambodians took part in combat, while 2,500 volunteers ended up as laborers, and their financial situation was in some respects better.

The historian also notes that most Cambodian casualties of the First World War were found in armament factories. The number of Cambodian workers was far greater than that of soldiers, and factory workers did not receive the same medical care as soldiers fighting on the front lines.

After 1918, around 5,000 Indochinese remained in Europe, while those who returned saw their situation change. Conditions in Cambodia after the war were not as catastrophic as in Vietnam, because there was much vacant land in Cambodia, and the French had decided that each veteran was entitled to several hectares of land and would receive 50 dollars to begin cultivating it.

By contrast, Mr. Eckert explains that Vietnamese soldiers had very little to return to. There was little land and few jobs in the civil service.

“In the end, this is what fueled the revolution. The French wanted to unify Indochina and, to some extent, it worked. When Ho Chi Minh founded his communist party, it was called the Indochinese Communist Party,” he says.

A missed opportunity

For the first time, soldiers from the colonial empire were deployed on European soil, which provoked German outrage. Henri Eckert rightly highlights the paradigm shift caused by the use of Indochinese soldiers outside their colony:“The French recruited only 15,000 troops in Indochina before the First World War; from 1915 onward, they sent more than 40,000 soldiers from the colony to the European fronts.”

However, he subtly shows that motivations varied and that some enlisted in order to discover a “West symbolizing modernity.” For all new recruits, this meant discovering new eating habits and a different type of climate. While there were ethnic tensions among Senegalese riflemen, sources also reveal clashes between Cambodians and Vietnamese in camps in the Southeast.

Stereotypes about colonial troops remained widespread, but as the author notes, the Indochinese soldier seemed less unpopular. However, this point would need further nuance, as Senegalese soldiers were often appreciated for their strength in agricultural labor, and mistrust toward troops from the Maghreb was more related to fears of their politicization.

Despite Indochina’s involvement in the war, it was a “missed opportunity,” as it did not give rise to a large Indochinese army as General Mangin had hoped.

Source: Husain Haider — The Post & Nonfiction.fr (cc)