Marie Joseph François Garnier (Vietnamese: Ngạc Nhi; 25 July 1839 – 21 December 1873) was a French officer, inspector of Indigenous Affairs of Cochinchina and explorer. He eventually became mission leader of the Mekong Exploration Commission in 19th century Southeast Asia.[1]
Francis Garnier was born on 25 July 1839 in Saint-Étienne, as the second son of Louis-Alexandre Garnier and Anne Marie Félicité Garnier. In 1855, at 16, he joined the Ecole Navale, much to the dismay of his family who disapproved a military career, deeming it as being dangerous.[2]
In early 1860, 20 years old Garnier, then serving as an aspirant on the Duperré during the Second Opium War, jumped into a stormy sea at night to save the life of a cavalry lieutenant who had fallen overboard. For this act of bravery, Garnier was immediately promoted to ensign and got attached to the staff of Admiral Charner.[3]
After some time spent in France, Garnier returned to the East, and in 1862, he was appointed inspector of native affairs in Cochinchina, and entrusted with the administration of Cholon, a suburb of Saigon.[1]
Francis Garnier, as an Enseigne de vaisseau in the 1860s.
Exploration of the Mekong and Yangtze rivers
Mekong Exploration Commission. Garnier at the left.
It was at his suggestion that the marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat determined to send a mission to explore the valley of the Mekong River, but as Garnier was not considered old enough to be put in command, the chief authority was entrusted to Captain Ernest Doudard de Lagrée. In the course of the expedition – to quote the words of Sir Roderick Murchison addressed to the youthful traveller when, in 1870, he was presented with the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London[5] – "from Kratié in Cambodia to Shanghai 5392 miles were traversed, and of these, 3625 miles, chiefly of country unknown to European geography, were surveyed with care, and the positions fixed by astronomical observations, nearly the whole of the observations being taken by Garnier himself".[1] A year earlier he received an award to be shared with David Livingstone at the 1869 Geographical Congress in Antwerp.[6][7]
Volunteering to lead a detachment to Dali, the capital of Sultan Suleiman, the sovereign of the Muslim rebels in Yunnan, Garnier successfully carried out the more-than-adventurous enterprise. When shortly afterwards Lagrée died, Garnier naturally assumed the command of the expedition, and he conducted it in safety to the Yangtze River, and thus to the Chinese coast. On his return to France, he was received with enthusiasm. The preparation of his narrative was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War
One day, while he was carrying a wagon full of ammunitions to the Fort of Vanves alongside 40 fellow fighters, the convoy came under a brutal rain of Prussian shells. All of the surviving men ran away forsaking their mission, except for Garnier and a man of the National Guard who held on and brought the wagon to destination, just the two of them.[8]
Returning to Cochinchina, he found the political circumstances of the country unfavourable to further exploration, so accordingly, he went to China, and in 1873 followed the upper course of the Yangtze River to the waterfalls.[1]
Intervention in Tonkin
In late summer 1873, a dispute between French trader Jean Dupuis and the Vietnamese authorities had created a diplomatic crisis in Hanoi. On the demand of the Vietnamese imperial court, Garnier was sent by Admiral Dupré to resolve the dispute and to expel Dupuis and his mercenaries from the Tonkin. Garnier's expeditionary force consisted in 180 men and two gunboats.[9]
Garnier departed from Saigon with half of the expeditionary force on 11 October 1873 and reached Hanoi on 5 November. As Garnier and his men arrived in the city, neither General Nguyễn Tri Phương, nor any of his mandarins came to meet them.[10] Dupuis, however, warmly welcomed the French. After meeting with Dupuis, Garnier attempted to negotiate with the local authorities, but since the mandarins refused to negotiate, he began considering military action.[11] On 12 November, the remainder of the expeditionary force arrived, and Garnier decided to capture the city despite having received no orders to do so.[12]
Ceremonial dress of Nguyễn Tri Phương, taken as a trophy by Garnier.
On 20 November at dawn, Garnier and his 180 men stormed the citadel of Hanoi, which was defended by 7,000 soldiers.[13] Completely dumbfounded by the French attack, the defenders performed poorly, and when General Nguyễn Tri Phương was severely injured, their morale completely collapsed. As French troops entered through the southern gates, most of the defenders ran away through the northern gate. In less than an hour, the French had captured the citadel. The only French casualty was one of Dupuis's Chinese mercenaries, who had accidentally been killed by French sailors.[14] Vietnamese casualties however were heavy, as they had lost 80 killed, 300 wounded and 2,000 captured.[15] Nguyễn Tri Phương was badly injured and died of his wounds on 20 December.
Emboldened by this crushing victory, Garnier and his men soon launched an unsanctioned military campaign that resulted in the conquest of the entire Red River Delta within two weeks. One of his subordinates, 24-year-old ensign Balny d'Avricourt, conquered the citadels of Phu Ly and Hai Duong with only 30 men.[16] On 5 December, 21-year-old aspirant Hautefeuille captured the citadel of Ninh Binh with six sailors and a Vietnamese interpreter after taking the governor hostage.[17] On 11 December, Garnier himself conquered the citadel of Nam Dinh, and the expeditionary force received its first casualties as five sailors were wounded.[18]
With the fall of Nam Dinh on 11 December, the French force was in control of the entire Red River Delta.[19]
Death in battle near Hanoi
Completely overwhelmed by the lightning French conquest, the Vietnamese authorities had sought the help of Liu Yongfu and his Black Flag Army, a group of Chinese outlaws, composed largely of veterans of the Taiping Rebellion, who had settled in Northern Vietnam.
On 21 December 1873 Liu Yongfu and around 600 Black Flags (French: pavillons noirs, drapeaux noirs), marching beneath an enormous black banner, approached the west gate of Hanoi. A large Vietnamese army followed in their wake. Garnier began shelling the Black Flags with a field piece mounted above the gate, and when they began to fall back he led a party of 18 French marines and sailors out of the city to pursue them, hoping to inflict some decisive blow. The counter-attack failed. Garnier, leading three men uphill in a bayonet attack on a party of Black Flags, was stabbed and hacked to death by several Black Flag soldiers after stumbling in a watercourse. The youthful enseigne de vaisseau Adrien Balny d'Avricourt led an equally small column out of the citadel to support Garnier, but was also killed at the head of his men. Three French sailors were also killed in these sorties, and the others fled back to the citadel after their officers fell.[20][21]
Colonel Thomazi, the historian of French Indochina, gave the following detailed description of Garnier's last moments:
At midday on 21 December he was in conference with the ambassadors when an interpreter ran up, announcing that bands of Black Flags were attacking the town by the western gate. He immediately hurried to the spot, but some of his men had got there before him, and their fire had sufficed to force the bandits to retreat behind the bamboo hedges. A 40-millimetre gun arrived at this moment. Garnier rallied a dozen men, three of whom dragged this small cannon, and left the town at a run to pursue the enemy. As the gun could not move quickly enough across the fields, he left it behind with its gunners. He then divided the nine men who remained with him into three groups. The first two groups moved off to the left and the right, to rejoin one another further on, while he marched in the middle, followed only by two men. One and a half kilometres from the town he found himself in front of a dyke, and slipped and fell while trying to cross it. Some Black Flags hidden behind the dyke ran out, while others opened fire. At this moment the two men who were accompanying Garnier were 100 metres behind him. One of them was killed by a bullet and the other wounded. Garnier cried, 'To me, brave boys, and we'll give them a thrashing!' He then fired the six rounds from his revolver in an attempt to rescue himself, but the bandits surrounded him, pierced him with thrusts of sabres and lances, cut off his head, odiously mutilated his corpse, and ran away. The two other groups, rushing up to the sound of the shooting, were only able to recover his bloodied corpse and bring it back to Hanoi.[22]
Despite having killed the leader of the French force, the Black Flags and Vietnamese retreated without having retaken Hanoi. Though the death of Garnier was a severe blow to the expeditionary force, his men nevertheless remained in control of the entire region.[23] However, the conquest had not been allowed by the French authorities, and another lieutenant named Paul-Louis-Félix Philastre had been sent to terminate the campaign as soon as the news of Garnier's attack on Hanoi reached Saigon. Philastre arrived a few days after Garnier's death and immediately ordered the evacuation of the conquered cities in early 1874.[24]
The heads of Garnier, Balny d'Avricourt and the other three French sailors killed in the 21 December attack were returned to the French on 6 January.[25]
On 15 March 1874, the Treaty of Saigon was then signed between France and Vietnam. In exchange for France having given back the conquered cities, Vietnam formally recognized French sovereignty over Cochinchina, opened the Red River to French trade and allowed the establishment of small French garrisons in Hanoi and Haiphong.[1]
Achievement
Garnier's chief fame rests on the fact that he both conceived the idea of exploring the Mekong and carried out the larger portion of the work.[1] During the French colonial period he was also honoured for his feats of arms in Tonkin, which paved the way for the eventual French conquest of Tonkin in the 1880s.
In 1883, nine years after Francis Garnier's death, the French naval officer Henri Rivière was also killed by the Black Flags in Tonkin, in remarkably similar circumstances.
Garnier and Rivière were honoured during the French colonial period as the two pre-eminent French martyrs of the conquest of Tonkin. In 1884, during the Sino-French War, two gunboats of the Tonkin Flotilla were named after the two men.
During the siege of Tuyên Quang (November 1884–March 1885), Liu Yung-fu's Black Flags, who formed part of the besieging Chinese army, taunted the men of the French garrison by chanting the names of their two most famous victims: 'Garnier! Rivière! Garnier! Rivière!'[26]
In 1911, the town Beni Haoua in French Algeria was renamed 'Francis Garnier', and retained this name until the independence in 1962.
The Sino-French War, also known as the Tonkin War, was a limited conflict fought from August 1884 to April 1885 between the French Third Republic and Qing China for influence in Vietnam. There was no declaration of war.
Liu Yongfu was a Chinese warlord, second president of the Republic of Formosa and commander of the celebrated Black Flag Army. Liu won fame as a Chinese patriot fighting against the French Empire in northern Vietnam (Tonkin) in the 1870s and early 1880s. During the Sino-French War, he established a close friendship with the Chinese statesman and general Tang Jingsong, and in 1895, he helped Tang organise resistance to the Japanese invasion of Taiwan. He succeeded Tang as the second and last president of the short-lived Republic of Formosa.
The Black Flag Army was a splinter remnant of a bandit and mercenary group recruited largely from soldiers of ethnic Zhuang background and former Taiping soldiers who crossed the border in 1865 from Guangxi, China into northern Vietnam, during the Nguyễn dynasty, and were hired and sponsored by Vietnamese authorities to fight against other bandits and rebels. Although brigands, they were known mainly for their fights against the invading French forces, who were then moving into Tonkin. The Black Flag Army is so named because of the preference of its commander, Liu Yongfu, for using black command flags.
Henri Laurent Rivière (1827–1883) was a French naval officer and a writer who is chiefly remembered today for advancing the French conquest of Tonkin in the 1880s. Rivière's seizure of the citadel of Hanoi in April 1882 inaugurated a period of undeclared hostilities between France and Dai Nam that culminated one year later in the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886).
Hoàng Kế Viêm (1820–1909) was a Vietnamese General and a Dong'ge Grand Secretariat during the Nguyễn dynasty. He played a significant role in suppressing borderlands banditry and resisting French invasion during the second half of the 19th century.
The Battle of Gia Cuc, fought on 27 and 28 March 1883, during the Tonkin Campaign between the French and Vietnamese.
The Battle of Cầu Giấy or Paper Bridge, fought on 19 May 1883, was one of the numerous clashes during the Tonkin Campaign (1883–86) between the French and the Black Flags. A small French force under the command of capitaine de vaisseau Henri Rivière attacked a strong Black Flag defensive position near the village of Cầu Giấy a few miles to the west of Hanoi, known to the French as Paper Bridge. After initial successes, the French were eventually enveloped on both wings, and were only with difficulty able to regroup and fall back to Hanoi. Rivière and several other senior officers were killed in the action.
The Battle of Phu Hoai was an indecisive engagement between the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps and Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army during the early months of the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886). The battle took place during the period of increasing tension between France and China that eventually culminated in the Sino-French War.
The Sơn Tây campaign was a campaign fought by the French to capture the strategically important city of Sơn Tây in Tonkin from Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army and allied contingents of Vietnamese and Chinese troops. The campaign was one of several clashes between the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps and the Black Flag Army during the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886), and took place during the period of undeclared hostilities that preceded the Sino-French War.
The Cần Vương movement was a large-scale Vietnamese insurgency between 1885 and 1896 against French colonial rule. Its objective was to expel the French and install the Hàm Nghi Emperor as the leader of an independent Vietnam. The movement lacked a coherent national structure and consisted mainly of regional leaders who attacked French troops in their own provinces. The movement initially prospered as there were only a few French garrisons in Annam, but failed after the French recovered from the surprise of the insurgency and poured troops into Annam from bases in Tonkin and Cochinchina. The insurrection in Annam spread and flourished in 1886, reached its climax the following year and gradually faded out by 1889.
The Tonkin Flotilla of 1883 was a flotilla of French Imperial gunboats and despatch vessels used to enforce French Colonial rule on the waterways of Tonkin. It was organized during an episode of the French Conquest of Vietnam known as the Tonkin campaign (1883–1886), in which the French were to fight against—variously—the Vietnamese, Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army and the Chinese Guangxi and Yunnan armies with the objective of occupying Tonkin and entrenching a French protectorate there.
French–Vietnamese relations started as early as the 17th century with the mission of the Jesuit father Alexandre de Rhodes. Various traders would visit Vietnam during the 18th century, until the major involvement of French forces under Pigneau de Béhaine from 1787 to 1789 helped establish the Nguyễn dynasty. France was heavily involved in Vietnam in the 19th century under the pretext of protecting the work of Catholic missionaries in the country.
The Tonkin campaign was an armed conflict fought between June 1883 and April 1886 by the French against, variously, the Vietnamese, Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army and the Chinese Guangxi and Yunnan armies to occupy Tonkin and entrench a French protectorate there. The campaign, complicated in August 1884 by the outbreak of the Sino-French War and in July 1885 by the Cần Vương nationalist uprising in Annam, which required the diversion of large numbers of French troops, was conducted by the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps, supported by the gunboats of the Tonkin Flotilla. The campaign officially ended in April 1886, when the expeditionary corps was reduced in size to a division of occupation, but Tonkin was not effectively pacified until 1896.
The Capture of Nam Định, a confrontation between the French and the Vietnamese, was one of the early engagements of the Tonkin Campaign (1883–86). In a brief campaign in the last week of March 1883, Commandant Henri Rivière captured the citadel of Nam Định, the second-largest city in Tonkin, with a flotilla of gunboats and a battalion of marine infantry.
The Tonkinese Rifles were a corps of Tonkinese light infantrymen raised in 1884 to support the operations of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps. Led by French officers seconded from the marine infantry, Tonkinese riflemen fought in several engagements against the Chinese during the Sino-French War and took part in expeditions against Vietnamese insurgents during the subsequent French Pacification of Tonkin. The French also organized similar units of indigenous riflemen from Annam and Cambodia. All three categories of indigenous soldiers were known in Vietnam as Lính tập.
The Battle of Hanoi was fought on 20 November 1873 between France and Đại Nam. A French expeditionary force composed of 140 sailors, 30 marines and 8 officers under the command of Navy Lieutenant Francis Garnier captured the provincial capital Hanoi, where they had been sent by France on a diplomatic mission, without superiors' orders.
The Garnier Expedition was a French expedition in Tonkin between November 1873 and January 1874. Lieutenant Francis Garnier, who had been sent by France on the demand of Vietnamese Imperial authorities to bring back Jean Dupuis, an unruly French trader who was causing trouble in Hanoi, instead decided to side with Dupuis and captured the city of Hanoi, the capital of the Tonkin region.
Marc Gilbert Paul Hautefeuille (1852-1923) was a French naval officer, who also served as governor of Monaco from 1909 to 1910. He is chiefly remembered for his bold capture of Ninh Bình when he was serving as a young aspirant under Lieutenant Garnier during the French expedition in Tonkin in late 1873.
The Capture of Ninh Bình took place on 5 December 1873, during Francis Garnier's expedition in Tonkin. A small party of six seamen and one civilian interpreter led by Aspirant Marc Hautefeuille captured the fortified city of Ninh Bình, at the time defended by 1,700 troops.
The French conquest of Vietnam1 (1858–1885) was a series of military expeditions that pitted the Second French Empire, later the French Third Republic, against the Vietnamese empire of Đại Nam in the mid-late 19th century. Its end results were victories for the French as they defeated the Vietnamese and their Chinese allies in 1885, the incorporation of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and finally established French rules over constituent territories of French Indochina over Mainland Southeast Asia in 1887.
Lonlay, D. de, Le siège de Tuyen-Quan (Paris, 1886)
Milton Osborne, River Road to China: The Search for the Source of the Mekong, 1866–73 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999) ISBN0-87113-752-6
Milton Osborne, "Francis Garnier (1839–1873), Explorer of the Mekong River", Explorers of South-east Asia, Six Lives, ed. Victor T. King, (Kuala Lumpur: OUP, 1995)
Milton Osborne, River Road to China: The Mekong River Expedition, 1866–1873 (London and New York, 1975)
The narrative of the principal expedition appeared in 1873, as Voyage d'exploration en Indo-Chine effectué pendant les années 1866, 1867 et 1868, publié sous la direction de M. Francis Garnier, avec le concours de M. Delaporte et de MM. Joubert et Thorel (2 vols.) Only 800 copies were printed, and the original work is now rare.
Travels in Cambodia and Part of Laos: the Mekong Exploration Commission report (1866–1868), volume 1 (White Lotus Press, 1996)
A pictorial journey on the old Mekong: Cambodia, Laos and Yunnan: the Mekong Exploration Commission report (1866–1868), volume 3 (White Lotus Press, 1998)
An account of the Yang-tsze-Kiang from Garnier's pen is given in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Geog. (1874).
His Chronique royale du Cambodje, was reprinted from the Journal Asiatique in 1872.
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Second French Empire 
![Francis Garnier Monument [fr], erected 1898 in Paris Monument a Francis Garnier, Paris 6e 3.jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Monument_%C3%A0_Francis_Garnier%2C_Paris_6e_3.jpg/220px-Monument_%C3%A0_Francis_Garnier%2C_Paris_6e_3.jpg)
