This book has all the characteristics which make for a work of rigorous scholarship and enduring value. It deals with an interesting and important topic in a relatively understudied field; it is thorough in research and precise in documentation; it is very well written and edited; and it does not shy away from making historical judgments while remaining basically fair-minded. The author did a great deal of careful research in French archives, many of them only recently opened.

The broad context of Ernest Young's endeavor is the whole history of the French missionaries in China from the late 1500s to the mid-twentieth century, and, secondarily, the Chinese Catholic church which came into existence during those centuries. His focus, the French Religious Protectorate, a somewhat informal (that is, not precisely described in diplomatic documents) set of arrangements under which the French Government, through its diplomatic officials in China, played a unique political-diplomatic role among the Western nations in modern China. The “protectorate” began in the 1840s and lasted in some aspects until the 1940s. By Young's account, suggestive rather than accusatory, the institutional results of the protectorate were an egregious case of Western imperialism in modern China.

The European missionaries in China, including the French, were somewhat successful in building a Catholic church of perhaps 300,000 nationwide by the early 1700s. All of the missions were severely hit by the imperial expulsion of missionaries after the well-known “rites controversy” and then the outright proscription of Christianity in 1724. For more than a century, until the Opium War of 1839–1842, Christianity was outlawed; European priests continued to sneak into China, to give the sacraments to the faithful, but the Europeans were few, and always on the move. Moreover, there were only a few Chinese Catholic ordained priests. However, as recent scholarship has shown, this period resulted in Chinese lay Catholic leaders emerging to maintain the coherence of Christian life. The result was a dispersal of largely self-regulating Catholic communities across the land, mostly in rural and semi-rural areas. By the time the missionaries (Protestants as well as Catholics now) returned, after more than a century of absence, there was firmly in place in many Catholic communities with a considerable degree of autonomy, local Christian gentry elite managing tasks such as catechism, maintenance of the church building, and so forth.

When China was forcibly opened to foreign commerce and to foreign residence after the Opium War of 1839–1842 and then the second China war in 1856–1860, the government of France in this decade established a unique place in the structure of China's relationships with the West. This was the “French religious protectorate.” Conceived by diplomats and executed by them and a few French missionaries acting as translators and interpreters in the complicated negotiations to end the second China war during 1858–1860, the French government wound up having the right to represent legally and to defend the interests of all of the Catholic missions and all of the individual Catholic missionaries, of whatever nationality. This demarche of the French was achieved partly because of the other Powers' preoccupation with trade and other matters, and partly due to the Quai d'Orsai being very keen on gaining a prestigious role for France in China. This unusual arrangement was secured by other measures such as all non-French missionaries being required to carry French passports. Moreover, parties to lawsuits or other legal actions, could, if they were French, go directly to the French ministry in Beijing or a French consulate and skip dealing with the local Chinese government officials. This feature of the Protectorate in particular probably reinforced more contentiousness and seething popular volatility between Chinese and foreigners as any other.

All in all, the Protectorate was a pernicious influence on Sino—Western relations in the late Qing and Republican periods. It aggravated tensions and escalated local issues to national ones, and it made the stakes higher to sue or be sued. In the context of the unequal treaties of earlier decades, with extraterritoriality still putting all foreigners beyond Chinese law, the French stood out even more prominently than did the other Western imperialist nations. For example, being able to speak for the entire Catholic enterprise in China, the French succeeded in sometimes levying huge fines and indemnities for alleged damage to goods and property by Chinese, and far higher indemnities in cases of loss of a foreign life. The French took the lead in imposing hard-nosed punishment for China in the Boxer Protocol negotiations in 1902; a number of Catholic missions, especially in north China, became embarrassingly wealthy from the indemnities they received in the years after 1902.

The French government was well entrenched in its religious protectorate by the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Yet it clung to the Protectorate tenaciously. With the Vatican shut out of China by the monopoly of the French, only the secular entity of the French Protectorate constituted a unifying factor for Catholic China missions. There was a bewildering array of administrative units in the church in China, but there was opportunity for neither Rome nor any other country to challenge the French position. There was growing sentiment from priests in China, such as Vincent Lebbe, a Belgian, in the years 1910 to the mid-1920s. Lebbe and a few others in China, and several in Rome close to the Pope, engineered the first major step toward a real Chinese church—the consecration of six Chinese bishops in 1926. This move, however, was the first creation of Chinese bishops since the 1600s and was not followed up until the eve of the Communist takeover in the late 1940s. The church hierarchy in China had Lebbe exiled from China. The Protectorate limped on until after World War II, long since a historical anachronism.

It appears that the Protectorate was beneficial neither to China nor to France. In addition to fomenting turmoil on the local level, it fostered a two-class system in the church and a strong odor of colonialism and racism as well. Young shows this in several ways; for example, this quote from a French seminary director in the late nineteenth century: “The Chinese priests are like the people among whom they were born. They are fickle, lazy, ambitious, vain, cunning, hypocrites, liars, ungrateful, greedy for money, rebellious, and with regard to chastity, extremely weak” (133–134).