Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe's empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers' prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.”Footnote ¹ This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

In recent years historians and anthropologists influenced by gender studies have contributed to a turn in the historiography of empire highlighting the significance of the home, family, and childrearing.Footnote ² Meanwhile, sociologists discussing the significance of ethnographic knowledge in stabilizing discursive representations of native groups have remarked upon the significance attributed by contemporaries to categories of age.Footnote ³ However, scholarship on empire has addressed the significance of childhood and youth tangentially at best, usually within studies primarily focusing upon gender, and framed against an explicitly feminist historiographical problématique.Footnote ⁴ The need has emerged for scholars to take more seriously contemporary sensitivities to the significance of age in the history of empire, and to address this rigorously. This study seeks to address the importance of the variable of age and its subcategories to the development of colonial policy through the study of European responses to the challenge posed by people of biracial heritage.

To illustrate the significance of the variable of age this article examines engagements with the presence of people born of mixed-race unions in colonial communities within the outposts of Europe's two largest empires, those of Britain and France. Focusing upon European colonies in East and Southeast Asia, it takes for its specific focus “Eurasians” in the colonial cities of Saigon and Hanoi, in French-ruled Indochina, and in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.Footnote ⁵ These particular colonial cities have not been selected as exemplars, but rather because their size, role, and location ensured that they shared certain problems and features facilitating comparison. All three were acquired through war, and were the yield of ambitions to monopolize trade with China. They functioned as interconnected nodes of waterborne trade and centers for large bureaucracies and military installations. All three were located at a remove from metropolitan influence, within “the tropics,” a zone associated with the endangerment of white populations. They possessed multi-ethnic populations that grew beyond levels associated with “large city” status. Within them, cohorts of racially mixed people burgeoned with the European presence, acquiring in all three contexts significance out of all proportion to their actual numbers.Footnote ⁶ While Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Saigon differed in many ways, they provide a focus facilitating the comparison of European engagements with people of biracial heritage.

To examine the significance of the variable of age to colonial policy and culture this essay first addresses British and French interpretations of the so-called Eurasian problem in metropolitan and colonial culture before the 1880s. It then illustrates the divergent strategies developed by British and French colonial elites in response to the presence of Eurasians during the intensive phase of colonial state formation from roughly 1880 to 1918. Finally, it shows how, as anti-colonialism intensified and acquired a mass character in the early twentieth century, age and the subcategories of childhood and adolescence in particular proved integral to British and French efforts to naturalize controversial policies directed toward the resolution of the Eurasian question.

MISCEGENATION AND THE MÉTIS IN MID- TO LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY METROPOLITAN AND COLONIAL CULTURE

In his Métis et congaïes d'Indochine of 1928, P. Douchet argued that the French, as “young colonials,” approached colonial rule with naïveté and impulsiveness, and that this had produced the “métis problem,” while the characteristic reserve of “old colonials” such as the British had, in contrast, delivered them from similar difficulties.Footnote ⁷ The recognition of and reverence for an imperialism distinguished by the rejection of concubinage was a relatively recent development. In outposts of the British Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such relations had been tolerated. In India the offspring born of these unions had been able to claim access to certain educational and professional privileges on the basis of their mixed parentage. However, as imperialism was refashioned into an affair of the state following the Rebellion of 1857, and after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1867 facilitated the movement of larger numbers of European women to the colonies, sex across the color line began to be identified as inconsistent with bourgeois norms of respectable behavior. Intimate contact between colonizer and colonized certainly persisted, but it had by the turn of the century become the focus of interdictory interventions reinforcing associations between British imperialism and an authoritative abstemiousness.Footnote ⁸

A similar shift away from interpretations of racially mixed people as inevitable “byproducts” of the imperial relationship and toward measures for the suppression of concubinage also occurred within the reconstructed French empire at roughly the same time. Enthusiastic mid-nineteenth-century predictions that a fusion between European and non-European peoples might yield mutually beneficial results faded as tentative experiments with métissage (notably in Algeria) instead lent credence to criticisms of the dangers of miscegenation. These criticisms were set forth by the anthropologist Arthur Gobineau in his Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853–1855), and by Paul Broca, the founder and first president of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, who argued that human “hybrids” were inherently unstable and lacking in fertility. Though more influential in Anglophone contexts, these studies retained currency in France as arguments for biological fusion and political assimilation became less fashionable into the late nineteenth century.

References to the assimilative possibilities of “Latin” variants of imperialism died hard, however, and they were to reemerge on the colonial fringe as empire building recommenced in earnest under the Third Republic. In Hanoi and Saigon, colonial elites fashioning the machinery of civil governance interpreted their own response to Eurasians as exemplifying differences between “Anglo-Saxon” and Latin interpretations of empire building. In Saigon, capital of the Indochinese Federation from 1887 to 1902, the response of the city's burgeoning entrepreneurial and administrative elites to the proliferation of racially mixed people was to create in 1894 a Société pour la Protection des Métis Indochinois. Three Eurasian representatives sat on the organizing committee of this society, which was dedicated to preparing the métis for “emancipation.” Commended by the governor general, the Society was celebrated in Saigon's newspaper press for demonstrating the humanitarian traditions of the Latin race and embodying a colonial culture thought to contrast favorably with that of its British rival for regional influence.Footnote ⁹ The French presence in Asia was construed as flexible and absorptive, while that of the British was characterized contemptuously as a “foreign body in the organism … threatened from one day to the next with expulsion.”Footnote ¹⁰

Along the China coast, in the decades that followed China's cession of Hong Kong to Britain, in Anglophone accounts this Crown Colony was cast as the epitome of the anti-assimilative Anglo-Saxon presence in Asia. Sir John Bowring, governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859, noted, “The separation of the native population from the European is nearly absolute” and “social intercourse between the races wholly unknown.”Footnote ¹¹ Though Bowring disapproved of this division, by the early twentieth century administrative and entrepreneurial elites had fashioned a colonial culture in which, as one writer put it, “They never tire of telling you with an air of quiet approval that nowhere in the East is the color line so strictly drawn as in Hongkong.”Footnote ¹² The presence of several generations of people of mixed European and Chinese heritage went almost entirely unacknowledged in official circles. Even the small but influential cohort of Eurasians that had risen to important positions within the developing colonial state was obscured in official discourse by the tendency to identify them as Chinese.

This disinclination to distinguish Eurasian cohorts did not go unchallenged. Bowring, a radical liberal, set the tone, reporting his concern that “a large population of children of native mothers by foreigners of all classes is beginning to ripen into a dangerous element out of the dunghill of neglect.”Footnote ¹³ Alarming accounts of a rising underclass of rootless, culturally lost children for whose existence the governing class was partly responsible were the subject of bitter satire in The China Punch. This journal's caricaturists mercilessly lampooned the British ‘gentlemen’ in whom mere proximity to Eurasian infants in public space was sufficient to arouse intense embarrassment.Footnote ¹⁴ Reform-minded representatives of the governing elite and critics of British colonialism in Hong Kong mapped metropolitan visions of childhood, emphasizing vulnerability and malleability, onto Eurasians.

From 1879, in a wide-ranging debate over the British colonial record sparked by revelations of the colony's Chief Justice Sir John Smale concerning kidnapping, trafficking, and child slavery, references to the Eurasian street urchin continued to figure prominently. Smale claimed that it was impossible to pass through Victoria's streets “without counting beautiful children by the hundred whose Eurasian origin is self declared.”Footnote ¹⁵ Advocating a government enquiry into the condition of such children, he declared himself certain that girls were “sold to the profession of their mothers” while boys sank into the degraded status of, “the mean white of the late slave holding States of America.”Footnote ¹⁶

In Indochina too, as overtly assimilationist positions fell into disfavor, factions within European colonial society seeking and critiquing authority began to represent Eurasians as children, endangered and dangerous. Only months after its launch, Saigon's métis protection society collapsed into schism over its “emancipatory” aims.Footnote ¹⁷ The society was superseded a year later by the Société de Protection et d'Education des Jeunes Métis Français de la Cochinchine. Playing down references to citizenship or emancipation, the new secretariat of the society advocated instead the advancement of the protection and education of “abandoned” Eurasian children.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly named “protection” societies emerged in Hanoi (1897), Cholon (1905), Vientiane (1908), and other major cities within the Indochinese Federation. As in Hong Kong, critics portrayed Eurasians as vulnerable children abandoned by European fathers. Girls were cast as victims of native mothers keen to capitalize upon the financial opportunities which the skewed sex ratios in these colonial cities presented, while boys figured as drifters living on the margins of European and native society.Footnote ¹⁹

In all three cities, commentators emphasized the urgency of the situation by linking the Eurasian problem to the concept of “degeneracy,” a shorthand term through which bourgeois anxieties over the deleterious impact of the dangerous classes and the urban environment upon the reproductive qualities of the race were articulated. Immigration from British and French colonies into working-class areas of London and Paris and the outward movement of working-class European emigrants to tropical colonies had prompted metropolitan commentators to link the concept of degeneracy to empire. In Britain the interpenetration of working-class areas with immigrants from empire coincided with the configuration of the children of the “slums” as radically unintelligible and even racially alien.Footnote ²⁰ In France, anxieties over comparatively low rates of population growth and high levels of immigration (notably by Algerian Jews) informed assertions that the protection of children against “pathologies” likely to result in hereditary degeneracy constituted a national priority. In the tropical outposts of these imperial nations, where climate and environment were acknowledged as vectors in the transmission of degeneracy, British and French elites discussed the presence of “poor white” emigrants in similar terms. Liberal-minded critics of empire configured metropolis and colonies as different fronts in the same broad civilizing process, and integrated the rhetoric of child-saving into debates over the colonial state's responsibility for resolving “the Eurasian question.”

EURASIANS, AGE, AND THE SHAPING OF COLONIAL POLICY IN HONG KONG, 1880–1918

In Hong Kong, authorities were largely able to rebuff arguments—even those embellished with sentimental references to beautiful, tragic street children—for the Eurasian question as falling within the purview of the colonial state. In response to John Smale's intervention, the Governor of Hong Kong Sir John Pope-Hennessy directed the German missionary and Inspector of Schools Ernst J. Eitel to apply his Orientalist knowledge to this troubling question. Eitel's report distanced the British colonial elite from responsibility for the Eurasian problem, and located it instead within the lowest substratum of colonial society. In his reading, Hong Kong's Eurasians constituted the unfortunate yield of marriages of convenience between the most morally degenerate European transients and the most “disrespectable” Chinese women.Footnote ²¹ Though neither of these groups was considered appropriate beneficiaries of support from the state, Eitel was sure to emphasize existing contributions from the colonial budget to educational services from which their Eurasian offspring benefited. As he put it: “[Eurasian] boys are invariably sent to the Government Central school where they generally distinguish themselves, and as a rule these boys obtain good situations in Hongkong, in the open ports and abroad. The girls crowd into the schools kept by Missionary Societies … they do not resemble the mean whites in the Southern States of America.”Footnote ²² With appeals to sentiment rebuffed and attributions of whiteness flatly denied, the furor stirred by the Chief Justice faded.

The fascination of conservative sections of Hong Kong's ruling elite with this rich imagery of childhood endured, however, and was soon mobilized in support of a quite different agenda. The issue of political representation provoked unease among European residents in the late nineteenth century, as did the increasing influence of Hong Kong's Chinese merchant elite. As this new elite became more self-confident and assertive, its European counterpart contemplated economic eclipse. Surging levels of in-migration and rising land prices meanwhile prompted anxious commentaries from high-ranking employees of the colonial administration upon the diminishing distance, in terms of status and the spaces demarcating it, between rulers and ruled.

In this climate, Social Darwinist paradigms of progress (or regression) as the outcome of competition between races found a receptive audience. With leading sections of European society keen to re-inscribe the bases of their authority, questions of biological racial “fitness” or “efficiency” were drawn to the fore in debates over colonial rule. Growing concerns over the deleterious impact of miscegenation were endowed with legitimacy by scientific studies of racially mixed children, such as those conducted by Dr. James Cantlie, the renowned physician. Cantlie claimed that progeny resulting from interracial sexual unions suffered from an inherent lack of endurance, an exaggerated vulnerability to disease and other debilitating physical conditions. These he cited as justification for his “disparagement” of intimate relations between British and Chinese.Footnote ²³

Pejorative representations of Eurasians as children meanwhile acquired currency beyond scientific circles. British novelists and travel writers cast Eurasian street children as bearers of the stigmata of imperial decline. In the work of the travel writer Major Henry Knollys, for example, Portuguese Eurasians appeared as an embodied prophesy of the precipitous decline that would inevitably proceed from the mixing of blood. Whilst wandering through the streets of Victoria, Knollys stumbled upon a “little nucleus of a singularly effete and deteriorated Iberian population,” and recounted how the “muddy-complexioned children” in this quarter, “many of whom are the hybrid offspring of effete Portuguese fathers and half caste native mothers, arouse a disgust not entertained towards the pure blooded Chinese children.”Footnote ²⁴ Novels set in Hong Kong portrayed Eurasian characters as unfortunates who rarely outlived their youth, and whose appearance almost invariably presaged a twist in the plot culminating in the ruin or death of parents or lovers who had “crossed the color line.”Footnote ²⁵

While scientific and literary discourses gave expression to deep anxieties over the extension to non-whites of the regenerative possibilities assumed by metropolitan reformers to inhere in childhood, Eurasian children emerged in elite circles as an embodied threat to European ideals of the family. White women and children had become a more significant presence in Hong Kong by the end of the nineteenth century. To those who made their careers in the colony this ideal of the European home and family exerted a powerful appeal. Indeed, in the face of prevailing scientific opinion, at a moment interpreted in terms of imperial equipoise, expectations grew that white children might serve as auxiliaries of empire building, performing ‘true’ childhood in such a way as to afford European residents a sense of the familiar, of connectedness to the metropole and of imperial rejuvenation.Footnote ²⁶

Colonial administrators denounced mixed-race children as unwelcome referents of a bygone tolerance for concubinage, referring to them in arguments for intervention by the colonial state to accelerate the shift to white conjugality within the colony's British community. A full seven years before the Colonial Office was to issue the notorious Crewe Circular of 1909, serving warning of the “disgrace and official ruin” that would be the fate of civil servants taking concubines, Hong Kong's Colonial Secretary Francis Henry May began to agitate for the dismissal of public officers marrying Chinese or Eurasian women. In 1912 May, as governor, eventually succeeded in introducing a scheme whereby employees of the state living in such relationships forfeited their right to government lodgings.Footnote ²⁷

For those who sought to realize this ideal of home and family, social segregation appeared essential. However, in Hong Kong this imperative ran up against rising land costs which, as early as the 1880s, provoked anxious predictions that Europeans would soon be “pushed out of the town of Victoria” altogether.Footnote ²⁸ Concern to shore up status quickly translated into demands for legislative intervention to safeguard pockets of ‘white’ elite residential homogeneity. Under the governorship of Sir George Des Voeux, European Hill District Reservation Ordinances in 1888 declared illegal the construction of Chinese-style tenement buildings within a strictly demarcated “European district” in Victoria.Footnote ²⁹ These ordinances, however, failed to provide the kind of exclusive enclave some demanded, and by the turn of the century “Victoria Peak” had come to be regarded in elite circles as the last refuge of elite white residential homogeneity.

In 1868 Governor Sir Richard MacDonnell, seeking cooler, healthier environs, had set up the first residence on the upper reaches of “the Peak.” The flight of wealthy foreign residents to higher altitudes was facilitated by the opening of a funicular tramline in 1888. However, fears that this last “stronghold” would be compromised by the arrival of wealthy Chinese prompted residents to deliver in 1904 a petition to the Hong Kong government demanding action in defense of white residential homogeneity.Footnote ³⁰ The response of Acting Governor Francis Henry May, who resided with his wife and four children at the Peak, was to press for a “Hill District Reservation Ordinance” demarcating a zone within which it was to be made illegal for owners, tenants, or occupiers to allow land or property for residential use by Chinese.

On 19 April 1904, speaking in support of the bill at its second reading in the Legislative Council, May articulated the purpose of the bill in terms of realizing the ideal of the European family home. It would, he claimed, secure an area where Europeans' “wives and their families can reside.”Footnote ³¹ This argument proved persuasive. Though Dr. Kai Ho Kai, a Chinese member of Legislative Council, detected “a decided savour of the nature of class legislation” in the bill, he endorsed it, acknowledging that special precautions were required for the preservation of Europeans' health, and “especially for the children.”Footnote ³² With the reservation in place, May enthused to his colleague C. P. Lucas that as a result, “the growth of a Eurasian population is checked, if not altogether stopped.”Footnote ³³ May's wife Helena, meanwhile, revealed that in these new circumstances her husband would be willing to pass up the possibility of taking governorships elsewhere and “remain here, as Colonial Secretary … as long as the children can be with us.”Footnote ³⁴

May's elation at securing the ordinance was short-lived; it was soon undermined by representatives of precisely that demographic whose diminished presence he had prematurely predicted. In the late nineteenth century, with the number of genuinely bilingual and bicultural Chinese still fairly small, Eurasians able to speak English and Chinese had come to occupy important positions within the port city's trading companies. One example was Robert Ho Tung. Born in 1862 to a Chinese mother and European father, Ho Tung developed at Government Central School the linguistic abilities that would assist him in becoming, by 1883, “chief comprador” at the British trading company Jardine & Mathesen. In this advantageous position, Ho Tung's entrepreneurial skills enabled him to acquire vast wealth, some of which he used in 1906 to purchase residences within the Hill District Reservation. Ho Tung relocated to the Peak with his second wife, Clara, and her children, exploiting a loophole in the loosely-worded ordinance of 1904, which in fact prevented only the “permitting” of anyone Chinese, except servants, from living at the Peak, an interdiction not extending to owners themselves.

In 1917, Ho Tung's brother, the businessman and philanthropist Ho Kam-Tong, also purchased a house within the reservation at a public auction and entered into negotiations to buy more.Footnote ³⁵ Though Ho Tung's decision to reside within the Reservation had long suggested the limitations of the 1904 ordinance, his brother's actions in 1917 raised the possibility of a proliferation of Eurasian families within the Peak Reservation and elicited a sharp reaction from residents. Sir Francis Henry May, who had acceded to the full governorship of Hong Kong in July 1912, deemed the forestalling of any such development essential. May was aware, however, that an amendment to the 1904 ordinance was likely to arouse considerable controversy. The home government, from which permission would have to be secured, was reluctant (at a critical juncture in the Great War) to concede any blanket ban on “Asiatics” at the Peak for fear that this might unnecessarily antagonize its Japanese war allies. Meanwhile, the hostile response May received from representatives of the Chinese elite left him in no doubt as to the delicacy required if negotiations within Hong Kong were to deliver their assent.Footnote ³⁶

May pursued his goal by presenting arguments for an amendment on cultural grounds, focusing in particular upon white children's vulnerability to their “degenerate” Eurasian counterparts. Seeking approval for the amendment from Secretary of State for the Colonies Walter Long, May identified the movement of Eurasian children to the Peak as a direct threat to the vulnerable bourgeois European child in whose interests the 1904 ordinance was said to have been created. He expressed his regret that the earlier ordinance “was not perhaps sufficiently emphasised as regards children,” adding, “there are many more children now at the Peak than there were in 1904, and European parents are bitterly opposed to any contact between their children and Chinese children.”Footnote ³⁷ May conjured a vision of the “numerous progeny” of Eurasian families, “thrown into daily contact with the European children.”Footnote ³⁸

The danger of such contact was twofold. Drawing upon powerful, shared understandings of age, class, and degeneracy, May presented Eurasian children, blighted by a nomadic racial indeterminacy, as vectors for the transmission of sickness from the streets of Victoria to white families on the Peak. He referred to the reservation as a kind of cordon sanitaire breached by Eurasian families whose “closer communication with the Chinese portion of Victoria,” increased “the chance of the carriage and dissemination of communicable diseases.”Footnote ³⁹ This contagion was all the more powerful, however, for its perceived potential to extend from the realm of public health into the cultural domain of racialized identity. Referring to Eurasians at times as “Chinese” but also as “semi-European” or “semi-civilised,” May represented to the Colonial Office an alarming scenario in which a group less radically unintelligible to white children than their Chinese counterparts might easily transmit degenerate behaviors across the racial divide.Footnote ⁴⁰

Associating Eurasian children whose parents possessed considerable wealth and social standing with street urchins was, of course, anachronistic. Ho Tung, who had been knighted in 1915, possessed titular distinctions and trappings of gentility sufficient to permit his alignment with the colony's ruling class. It was precisely for this reason that May recognized the variable of age as essential to the fashioning of a compelling argument for the amendment. Well aware of the home government's sensitivity to the racial issue and the fact that the existence of the reservation since 1904 (and Ho Tung's longstanding residence within it) diminished appeals made on the grounds of health alone, May exploited dichotomous views of childhood to secure agreement for the amendment. In April 1918 the Hong Kong government received clearance from Walter Long and the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to introduce the amendment.Footnote ⁴¹ By foregrounding age-related tropes of white vulnerability May also attempted to attenuate elite Chinese perceptions of the amendment as a flagrant racial insult. Following readings in the Legislative Council on 23 and 30 May 1918 the amendment was secured. A notice making residence at the Peak conditional in all cases upon the governor's approval was published in the colony's Government Gazette.Footnote ⁴²

EURASIANS IN SAIGON AND HANOI: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF COLONIAL STATE FORMATION

In French Indochina the métis question was also intimately linked to conflicts within European communities and to the cultural politics of colonial state formation, though here connections between racial intermediacy and childhood played out in quite different ways. In the late nineteenth century the idea that the métis problem could and should be addressed as a problem of child protection provided a rare basis for agreement within the multiply divided European communities of Hanoi and Saigon. Framing the métis problem in such terms directly served the aspirations of the burgeoning bourgeois sections of colonial communities. References to the métis as children to be taken off the streets appealed to those keen to lay claims to represent a more moral variant of colonialism. Civil servants, commercial and agricultural entrepreneurs (referred to as colons), and members of the liberal professions were well represented in the membership lists of protection societies.

In France, a broad and politically variegated movement for the “protection” of childhood had emerged in the late nineteenth century. Through sharp criticisms of the neglectful attitudes of transient elements of colonial society toward their métis offspring, society members aligned their œuvre with this metropolitan movement and presented themselves as true guardians of French honor and prestige on the edge of empire.Footnote ⁴³ Those alarmed by earlier claims for Eurasians' “emancipation” meanwhile found little to criticize in references to age-related minority or the deferral of questions of citizenship that such a shift implied.

Métis protection societies also appealed to those keen to claw back the political influence they had seen dwindle before the advancing power and efficiency of the colonial state. Tellingly, the dynamism of Saigon's society increased (around a zealous campaign for the promulgation of the metropolitan child protection law of 24 July 1889) as the city's entrepreneurial elites saw their aspirations for peninsular influence fade following the transfer of capital city status to Hanoi in 1902. In Hanoi, among sections of a burgeoning civil society situated in closer proximity to the center of imperial governance, a keen sense of the political significance of the city's protection society also emerged, inspiring staunch resistance to attempts by the Government General to redirect funding to societies in other towns in Tonkin.Footnote ⁴⁴

In pursuit of political leverage, protection societies' spokesmen used the métis problem to expose the gulf between colonial theorists' grandiose claims for empire as tutelary kinship and what they saw as a deficit of benevolence in French colonialism. One means of accomplishing this was by drawing embarrassing contrasts between French, Vietnamese, and Chinese approaches to their mixed-race offspring. Grevosty, a marine accountant and spokesman of the Saigon Protection Society, decried the fact that “Many Frenchmen abandon their métis children and worry very little that they might be eaten by pigs.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Society members distinguished themselves from such men by proclaiming their paternalistic right to “substitute themselves for fathers who have defaulted on their duty, assuring the survival, education and the placement of abandoned métis children.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Protection Society members' appeals to benevolence proved effective in conveying the view that inaction over the métis problem was inimical to the interests of the colonial government. The prevalence of civil servants within the ranks of protection societies allowed arguments for the neglect of métis as damaging French prestige to permeate the ranks of an administration in which the importance of prestige to the “associative” partnership with the Vietnamese was widely acknowledged. By 1912, officials within the Government General were prepared to concede, “In the eyes of the annamites who are very much attached to their children, the abandonment of young métis is not a gesture of the kind that is likely to augment, in the colony, the prestige of the conquering people.”Footnote ⁴⁷

While Hong Kong's ruling elite had brushed aside intimations of individual or collective responsibility for Eurasians, in Indochina these societies' portrayals of the métis problem as a matter of personal responsibility proved more influential. Between 1893 and 1911, though the colonial government issued numerous warnings against concubinage, the prevention of “miscegenation” was pursued with less zeal in Hanoi and Saigon than in Hong Kong. Concern over the pejorative economic consequences likely to follow from requiring those staffing a sizeable French administration to uphold bourgeois European norms of family life in the tropics helped to attenuate the severity of such interdictions. The phenomenon of mariage à la mode continued to transcend class into the twentieth century, precluding any easy disavowal of the problem as one of “poor whites.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Society literature and the colonial newspaper press featured portrayals of Eurasians as the offspring of proud colons and respectable administrators whose deaths or departures had left beloved children unprotected and “abandoned,” and not merely as degenerate by-products of immoral unions.Footnote ⁴⁹

Through such romantic references, society spokesmen strove to inflame paternal sentiment in ‘true’ Frenchmen and to counter oft-heard arguments that the native milieu would naturally absorb abandoned children. In the service of such efforts they portrayed mothers of métis as congaïs (a term widely used to refer to native women serving as domestics and intimate companions of French bachelors) and as “morally loose children,” too young to fulfill duties of care toward their offspring.Footnote ⁵⁰ With a zeal calculated to throw official inertia sharply into relief, society members compiled dossiers containing evidence of the threats faced by Eurasian girls living in the native milieu and accused native mothers of profiting from the divestment of their children into trafficking and slavery. Through such overtures societies pressured the administration for the extension of their powers and contributed to the process of fashioning a new bourgeois colonial morality.Footnote ⁵¹

Metropolitan critiques of colonialism also, inadvertently, strengthened protection societies' claims for authority. By the turn of the century, French feminists had begun to work visions of the “abandoned children of empire” into campaigns for the revision of metropolitan paternity law. Novelists built scathing criticisms of the French colonial record around Eurasian characters. Facing growing pressure to act, the Minister of Colonies Albert Lebrun issued a formal demand that governors general raise awareness of the need for European fathers to fulfill their “duties toward their children born of native women.”Footnote ⁵²

Historians have identified this response as evidence that before 1914, “metropolitan conceptions of morality encroached ever more closely on the colonies.”Footnote ⁵³ However, in the case of Indochina this encroachment had long been preempted by the work of the protection societies. In 1907, six years before Lebrun's intervention, the colonial government in Indochina had upgraded the Hanoi Protection Society's status to that of a “public utility” (according the same privilege to Saigon's Protection Society in 1911). When the metropolitan law of 16 November 1912 extended the right to paternity of children born of “concubinage” to the colonies, Indochina was one of the few parts of the empire in which this legislation was adopted in the same form as in France. Well before the First World War, then, the philanthropic societies had succeeded in generating recognition within the ranks of the colonial government that “the Administration has the absolute duty to provide for these children.”Footnote ⁵⁴

FROM GUTTER-SNIPES TO “GRAND OLD MEN”: EURASIANS AND ANTI-COLONIALISM IN HONG KONG

The rise of indigenous anti-colonial movements in outposts of European empire between the wars transformed British and French engagements with the Eurasian question. In the case of Hong Kong, pronounced instability had emerged as a feature of the political landscape in southern China following the revolution of 1911. In the 1920s a series of anti-British protests, most notably the 1922 seamen's strike and the strike-boycott of 1925 to 1926, impacted directly the Crown Colony. While these crises reinforced official perceptions of the precariousness of colonial rule they also prompted the administrative elite to address with greater urgency the challenge of cultivating good relations with the colony's Eurasian elite.

Awareness of the political value of such an alliance was by no means new. While a full-fledged Chinese bourgeoisie had developed in Hong Kong by the end of the nineteenth century the lack of Chinese candidates fitting the criteria of British subjecthood and “loyalty to the crown” set down for accession to positions within the colonial state resulted in wealthy Eurasian men becoming “exponents to the British of Chinese thought and sentiment.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Many elite Eurasians of this generation, such as Robert Ho Tung, self-identified as Chinese, and it served British interests to refer to them as such. Indeed, the value of this group as intermediaries prompted the colonial government to exercise a degree of flexibility when implementing racially exclusionary legislation, such as the ordinance of 1904. Notably, neither Sir Robert Ho Tung nor his second wife and children were actually banished from the Peak in spite of the ordinance and its amendment. Ho Tung was also (albeit reluctantly) granted permission to send his children to the Peak School in spite of its racially segregationist admission policy.Footnote ⁵⁶

While sections of the British ruling elite acknowledged the importance of the allegiance of wealthy Eurasians, a marked ambivalence continued to characterize attitudes toward this group. A sharper sense of confrontation with a distinct, powerful, and mercurial elite developed during and immediately after the First World War as Eurasian businessmen coordinated resistance to the Peak Reservation Ordinance amendment, carved out new opportunities for the acquisition of vast wealth, and used this to outbid Europeans in land auctions.Footnote ⁵⁷ An acute sense of reliance upon this group was, however, reinforced as anti-British feeling among Chinese intensified in the early 1920s. During the general strike led by the Chinese Seamen's Union in 1922, Governor Sir Edward Stubbs offered the gloomy prognosis, “We can rely on nobody except the half-castes and even they will throw in their lot with the Chinese if they think they will be on the winning side.”Footnote ⁵⁸

As anti-British sentiment grew, peaking in Hong Kong during the strike-boycott of 1925 and 1926, categories of age became intertwined with colonial policymaking and efforts to rationalize the controversial intermediary role played by elite Eurasians. The paradigm of maturity in particular proved integral to the Hong Kong government's efforts to interpret policy to London and to preserve collaborative relations with the Chinese elite. With memories of the furor in the British Parliament over “child slavery” in Hong Kong still fresh, the colonial government was well aware of the need to prevent interpretations in London of the strike as a response to administrative neglect. Officials strove to counter such views by appealing to the idea that Hong Kong was one node in a global imperial network linked by a common “Britishness” which, while fluid and multivalent, could be located in a genre of governance characterized by moral manliness.Footnote ⁵⁹ This allowed the frontiers of British influence in Hong Kong to be defined and delimited in terms of a “maturity” that contrasted sharply with that of the negative external referent of China defined as impulsive, impressionable and contrastingly “young.” Unrest in 1925–1926, blamed upon a Bolshevik plot hatched in Canton, was in this way essentialized, externalized, and traced to a naïve and juvenile fascination with dangerous new ideas from the West.Footnote ⁶⁰

During the 1920s, assumptions that through years of “indirect” tutelage a kind of civilized “maturity” had been inculcated in local elites undergirded officials' efforts to find a language through which a sense of shared interest in defeating this threat could be articulated. Certainly, the language of social class presented possibilities. However, hopes that a sense of common cause might cohere in a straightforward way around social class, allowing racial tensions to fade temporarily into the background, were complicated by the longstanding, carefully cultivated, and profound social distance which separated Hong Kong's British and Chinese elites.Footnote ⁶¹ This divide perpetuated the government's continued reliance in the crises of the 1920s upon elite Eurasians to represent “responsible” Chinese opinion, in particular upon the Legislative Councillor Robert Kotewall. Elite Eurasians performed social class to a standard permitting access to representative roles within the colonial government. However, at a time when Chinese nationalism had acquired a mass character and more clearly defined racial-geographic parameters, the enhanced visibility, distinctiveness, and reliance of the colonial government upon this group brought longstanding concerns over the willingness of local Chinese to accept Eurasians as political representatives firmly back to the fore.Footnote ⁶²

In facing the challenge of sustaining a collaborative counter-response to anti-colonial protest and of iterating convincing claims for British benevolence and Chinese loyalty, the flexible and mutable status of age, a unity configured in terms of maturity, proved invaluable. Eurasians such as Kotewall, a businessman and Chinese representative on the Legislative Council, emerged as exemplars of a reassuring respect for social and cultural conservatism expressed in official circles in terms of a venerable seniority. A staunch Confucianist (aged forty-five in 1925), Kotewall played the “age card” aggressively. He traced the origins of the trouble in Hong Kong to students in the colony's schools. Kotewall declared, “It was the students who started the strike in Hongkong; and it was the students who created the shooting incident at Shameen as in Shanghai … practically all the boy-schools were more or less contaminated.” He lamented, “schoolboys and students in China have been arrogating to themselves the right to assist in the government of the country” and proposed as an “antidote” “the development of the conservative ideas of the Chinese race in the minds of the young.”Footnote ⁶³ He celebrated the response of the older generation of Hong Kong Chinese to the strike, lauding in reports to the Hong Kong government the response of the “old Chinese literati.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Through references to age and authority the government and its mediators steered beyond vague, rhetorical references to “loyal Chinese,” and defined a real community of interest in terms transcending the fixed and fraught categories of race and class. Age provided a subtle and fluid means through which tensions over racial identity and class allegiance could be circumvented and leadership by an ambiguous group naturalized. Significantly, British commentators celebrated the conclusion of the strike-boycott in October 1926, and the fading of the anti-colonial challenge thereafter, through references to the crisis as a kind of “coming of age” for Hong Kong itself.Footnote ⁶⁵ Elite Eurasians emerged as metonymical representatives of this purported maturation. By 1926, one observer claimed to be able to distinguish between Chinese born in China and “Hong Kong Chinese” on the grounds that the latter were “stronger in their denunciation of Canton than any foreigners in Hongkong,” spoke “of the needs of the Empire and the Colony much as Englishmen do,” and (in contrast to their mainland counterparts) regarded Eurasian influence “so much as a matter of course that it is not discussed at all.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Official expressions of gratitude extended beyond the conferral of honors to those who had shown leadership in the crisis, notably Kotewall.Footnote ⁶⁷ Sir Robert Ho Tung, age sixty-eight in 1930 and the most prominent representative of the colony's Eurasian elite, was anointed “The Grand Old Man of Hong Kong.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The assignation of iconic status to members of the Eurasian elite occurred at a moment when the return of imperial stability and investment in educational initiatives had already begun to erode the political value of this group in the eyes of government officials. Eurasian boys had been beneficiaries of the “Anglo-Chinese” school model that since the 1860s had aimed to enable a small section of the rising generation to bridge the cultural divide. However, the emergence of larger numbers of native Chinese graduates trained in English overseas, and (from 1912) at the University of Hong Kong, by the late 1920s threatened to further diminish the particularity of Eurasian claims upon biculturalism.Footnote ⁶⁹ As stability returned, officials venerated this group, but significantly, in doing so they referenced not maturity but old age, and thereby ushered the Eurasian elite toward a senescence connoting marginality. This maneuver helped to foreclose the political jeopardy of conceding the possibility of further maturation to a group already conceived of as threatening the boundaries of Britishness.Footnote ⁷⁰

In these circumstances, Hong Kong's elite Eurasians sponsored the development of institutions that expressed their own sense of separateness and defined explicitly the parameters of their collective identity. An important example of this response was the philanthropic “Welfare League,” which held its first general meeting in July 1930. Sir Robert Ho Tung served as president and Robert Kotewall as vice-president.Footnote ⁷¹ In a speech announcing the initiative, Carl G. Anderson, the League's secretary, defended the notion of a Eurasian community, locating its unity not in terms of race or civilization but in terms of maturity, good citizenship, and a fusion of blood (in which that of “Old China” was ascribed special significance).Footnote ⁷² Outlining the Welfare League's plans to assure the future of the Eurasian community, its spokesmen located claims for authority in ‘maturity’ and a ‘natural desire’ to take responsibility for ‘unfortunate’ Eurasian children. This initiative was inspired in part by concerns that official celebrations of elite Eurasian authority were unlikely to endure, or translate into tangible benefits for this community. These concerns were borne out in July 1940 when the evacuation of Hong Kong commenced on explicitly racial lines. As the Japanese threat loomed, ‘pure European’ children were relocated to safety while their Eurasian counterparts were left to face an uncertain fate in the ‘in between place’ which they had come to represent.Footnote ⁷³

ENFANTS DE LA COLONIE: CHILDHOOD, CITIZENSHIP, AND ANTI-COLONIALISM IN INDOCHINA

Anti-colonialism in Indochina also elicited a far-reaching reappraisal of the Eurasian problem. During the First World War, the performance of colonial troops and workers (including young Indochinese Eurasians) inspired a slew of writings reaffirming the benefits of empire building. The contribution of the colonies raised questions in some quarters as to whether France had adequately fulfilled its tutelary claims. Those inclined to skepticism pointed to the métis question, interest in which had surged in the specific case of Indochina following anti-colonial protests (in particular the poisoning of the Hanoi garrison in 1908). These incidents gave new impetus to concerns that Eurasians might become a “caste” of politicized pariahs, supplying, in the words of one military officer, “leaders or auxiliaries to the annamites who seek to undermine our domination”Footnote ⁷⁴

The growing anti-colonial fervor of the 1920s ensured that concerns over the efficacy of protection services were re-ignited. In Hanoi and Saigon, such services had centered round the provision of a kind of age-based urban quarantine for Eurasian children. The urban, secular societies formed in Indochina during the late nineteenth century co-existed with older regional networks of missionary-run institutions that had pioneered provision on the enclosure model.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Saigon and Hanoi, protection societies fed, clothed, accommodated, and educated children in (sex-segregated) homes and orphanages, and arranged for their placement in further education, the workplace, or (in the case of girls) directly into marriage.Footnote ⁷⁶

While in Hong Kong the Eurasian “problem” had been defined by the ruling elite in terms of a failure to confine young Eurasians to such institutions within an urban and cultural Chinese milieu, it turned in Indochina upon concerns over whether these children were adequately acculturated to Frenchness within a milieu considered sufficiently French. Turn-of-the-century deliberations over racially mixed children in Indochina proceeded contemporaneously with efforts to make Hanoi and Saigon more authentically “French.”Footnote ⁷⁷ These efforts rendered more distinct both the native milieu where the majority of non-recognized children of European descent born to native women were raised, and the French quarters wherein it was supposed that their salvation might be effected. Since the effectiveness of redemptive strategies defined in terms of acculturation was understood to diminish with distance from the French milieu, care providers in Hanoi and Saigon fretted over breaches of institutional enclosure. In 1897 this concern prompted the Saigon Protection Society to deny young métisses the right to return to their mothers during holidays.Footnote ⁷⁸ The writer, Isabelle Massieu, who visited one society's headquarters, observed, “the mother has the right to visit her girl, but not to take her out.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In Hong Kong (where missionaries remained broadly disinterested in tailoring salvation to this specific group and no direct equivalent existed of secular protection societies specifically for Eurasians) such constraints were less common and the return of children, Christianized, back into the cultural context of their origin often represented the ideal outcome of intervention.Footnote ⁸⁰

With political violence against the colonial state intensifying in Indochina in the 1920s, societies' claims that enclosure within the cité française alone could ensure “that the métis does not one day become a revolutionary” began to appear quaint and outdated.Footnote ⁸¹ Critics in both metropole and colonies contended that as long as Eurasians' legal status remained, anomalous attempts to protect them would remain ineffectual. Pre-war reform had barely improved access to citizenship for non-recognized Eurasians.Footnote ⁸² Those taken in by protection societies and acculturated to Frenchness remained legally native upon leaving orphanages or ouvroirs and were compelled to wait until age twenty-one to apply for naturalization. They found access to positions within the French colonial state restricted, a state of affairs prompting one commentator to decry the fact that “no comparison is possible between the abandoned French child and the métis.”Footnote ⁸³

Transfer to metropolitan France emerged as a potential solution to these difficulties. In March 1925 a small group with links to protection societies secured support from colonial and metropolitan authorities to formalize transfers of pupils from Indochina to France (which continued after the cessation of hostilities). A reception committee in Coutances, Normandy, headed by the lawyer and former president of the Hanoi Protection Society, Galuski, assigned newly arrived pupils to host families in the countryside, where they attended local schools. It was assumed that, thus removed from “contrary influences,” such as “prejudice over colour,” in “True France” these children would find “fixity,” and the “affection and concern necessary in childhood.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Repatriation was not envisaged, since the intention was to prevent the pupils' becoming “useless, dangerous elements … in their land of origin.”Footnote ⁸⁵

While metropolitan transfer had powerful supporters, the number of pupils involved was never sufficient to render it a viable solution to the ongoing problem of legal exclusion in the colonial context. In 1925 Hanoi's Société de Protection des Enfants Métis Abandonnés sent to France thirty-seven pupils between ages ten and fifteen, and by 1930 there were only 129 boys and ten girls from Tonkin in France.Footnote ⁸⁶ As a succession of political protests destabilized French rule (shortly before the Yen Bay uprising of 1930 was to send shockwaves through the imperial edifice) colonial authorities acknowledged that the clarification of the legal status of the métis in Indochina could no longer be deferred.

On 4 November 1928 a decree was passed allowing non-recognized Eurasians to become legally French. Remarkable for its inclusiveness, given the opposition of those who favored a separate legal category for Eurasians, the decree permitted those recognized as having la qualité française to attend French schools, undertake military service in French barracks, and sit the same examinations as French candidates for posts in the colonial administration. In a recent study examining this reform from the perspective of colonial jurisprudence Emmanuelle Saada makes the important point that in the process of defining the conditions of admission to Frenchness, race and culture were viewed as correlates.Footnote ⁸⁷ For precisely this reason, appeals to age proved integral to the process of justifying and implementing this controversial legislation.

Childhood, heavily associated in western cultures with the trope of malleability formed an important point of reference for those advocates of reform who referred to Eurasians not as potentially dangerous pariahs but as children with the potential to become culturally French. By appealing to such associations, advocates of legal reform effaced differences between Eurasian and French children, portraying the métis as a child trapped in a legal limbo of French creation. Jurists larded otherwise rather dry legal arguments for reform with sentimental representations of Eurasian orphans. Albert Sambuc, for example, reminded readers, “The interested parties are young children … happy to have found refuge, trusting in those who took an interest in their misfortune … rushing up joyful, eyes bright, arms extended, toward those they have seen before and whom they recognise as friends.”Footnote ⁸⁸ By associating the Eurasian “condition” with the less ossified alterity of age, advocates of inclusive solutions to the métis question maneuvered beyond interpretations of the social failure of mixed race people as inborn.

Ideas about age, and in particular about childhood malleability, sustained demands for legislation and continued to shape intervention after 1928. Legal reform removed earlier restrictions confining this process to those in their majority, permitting Eurasian children to be declared French, “even in their minority, and however low their age.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1929, the link between childhood and the conferral of citizenship was further reinforced as protection societies were assigned the right to act as legal tutors for unrecognized Eurasian minors and to oversee the application process on their pupils' behalf.Footnote ⁹⁰ Certainly, courts in Indochina never granted admission to citizenship purely on the basis of age. Tests of individuals' physical appearance, cultural background, and upbringing were also employed in adjudicating on such matters. Children adjudged to be too dark skinned were more likely to be left in the native milieu. However, in a context where race and culture were considered correlates, assumptions about childhood and childrearing assumed considerable significance in thinking about the acculturation process and the granting of citizenship. As one report from the office of the high resident in Tonkin in 1937 suggested, “It is crucial that French society assimilates and absorbs these new French, [who are] fortunately children for the most part at the moment and consequently easier to mould.”Footnote ⁹¹

It soon became apparent that revising the legal status of the métis alone had failed to deliver sufficient social uplift. With government handouts diminishing after 1930 in a worsening economic climate, protection societies struggled to cater for their target demographic. The office of the high resident in Hanoi grew concerned that “a most insufficient percentage of demands for admission” were being accepted by Tonkin's protection societies.Footnote ⁹² In Saigon only 25 percent of those in need received assistance and the city's Foyer des Jeunes Filles closed after the administration refused to pay its monthly grant.Footnote ⁹³ In 1930 medical professionals in Hanoi reported that Eurasian girls were “starting to become numerous in the place de Hanoi and none can find work, nor marry,” concluding, “it is not unusual that many become prostitutes.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1933, La Quinzaine Coloniale also took up the issue, warning that in Indochina even when “admitted to the cité français, the young métis, if unrecognized, remain abandoned and on their own, without parents, without friends, without means.”Footnote ⁹⁵ R. Bonniot, who campaigned for intervention on a more extensive footing, demanded to know why “so many métis children were on the street without instruction, profession, trade, consigned to the worst fall.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Evidence of enduring Eurasian vulnerability within the French milieu, in public spaces constructed to showcase imperial confidence and grandeur, attracted anxious commentary at a moment when European residents' own sense of vulnerability was prompting strong criticisms of these “French cities” as insufficiently secure. This problem was attributed partly to the failure to plan for the effective segregation of European and non-European residential zones, especially in Hanoi, a city geographically proximate to the heartlands of anti-colonial movements.Footnote ⁹⁷ While such problems had undermined the viability of protection within the cité française, transferring young Eurasians to the metropole had also by this time been invalidated owing to fears for “the regrettable influence of the pupils' inevitable contact in the metropole with certain political milieux.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Amid deteriorating economic and political circumstances the enduring vulnerability of a group associated with youthfulness prompted those who campaigned for a still stronger protective commitment from the colonial state to compare the condition of métissage with that of adolescence. In the late nineteenth century adolescence had been subjected to intense scientific scrutiny and had come to be understood in metropolitan middle-class circles as a distinct life-stage after childhood but before adulthood, a universal, age-related condition marked by a period of extended dependency and pseudo-autonomy. The adolescent self was characterized by disharmony but also potential, and a tendency to tack between delinquency and dynamism. As a sort of hybrid life-stage combining elements of childhood and adulthood (a métissage of age), adolescence bore a striking resemblance to the condition of racially mixed heredity. This had not gone unnoticed in scientific circles. In 1919, the economic geographer Louis Vignon, lecturer at the École Coloniale, remarked upon how the métis “suffered from a ‘conflict of heredities’ the symptoms of which were markedly close to those psychological characteristics associated with the adolescent.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Similar observations were entertained in the colonies as pressure to resolve the métis question intensified. In 1937 the high resident of Tonkin reported, “If already in France the modern adolescent of pure race is aware of the difficulties he will encounter in achieving the status that he believes he merits in present day society … we can imagine the torments that might come to undermine those souls comprised of far more complex elements.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

With imperial stability in question, scientific studies recasting the métis question in terms of the universal age-related identity of adolescence allowed a range of shared literary, scientific, and cultural understandings to be aligned behind demands for the further extension of the protective role of the colonial state.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Crucially, among these was the understanding that adolescence could be a resource, associated as it was with vigor and potential (and being more proximate to adult agency than childhood). During the interwar era, Indochina's Eurasian population burgeonedFootnote ¹⁰²—in 1930 couples in which only one partner was French produced only one-third of all recognized births to French citizens; by 1940 they produced almost half.Footnote ¹⁰³ An important agenda in Francophone research revived around ideas of racial “hybridity” as a potentially invigorating force. Scholarly analyses following this line turned on their head the arguments of critics such as Douchet, who blamed the Eurasian “problem” upon the irresponsible young protagonists of an ‘immature’ French colonialism. As critics in the metropole worried over a crisis of childlessness and an ageing population, métis were recast as children of fathers in the “full force of their age,” and a reassuring source of racial virility.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Mapping tropes of adolescent malleability onto the métis permitted officials to advocate the extension of protection to the brink of citizenship, and to play down concomitant concerns over representation at a moment when Eurasians appeared set to become a majority in legislative elections. Juvenilizing the “métis question,” then, attenuated the sense of political risk attaching to reform while it raised the tantalizing prospect that this problem might be solved within a generation.

In the late 1930s, while the mixed-race presence continued to receive only “lukewarm attention” within the British Empire, in Indochina Justin Godart, the Popular Front government's envoy to Indochina, could still refer to it as a “very serious moral and political problem.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Jules Brévié, governor general of Indochina from 1936 to 1939, shared this view, and sponsored efforts to find a definitive solution. In 1938, a session of the Grand Conseil des Intérêts Economiques et Financiers de l'Indochine agreed that an umbrella organization should be established to federate, coordinate, and fund protection societies. Authorized in August 1939, the Fondation Jules Brévié (FJB), named in honor of the governor general, drew existing networks of voluntary provision under the control of the colonial state with a view to extending protection to all “Franco-Indochinese” children.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

With the option of metropolitan transfer effectively closed, and the need to reorient provision away from the confinement model apparent, the FJB turned to regenerative technologies already in use by French children to address the need to effectively acculturate larger numbers of Eurasian children. The hill station of Dalat, possessing a climate and hygienic apparatus believed to assist in racial reinvigoration, played an important role in these plans. Paul Doumer (governor from 1897 to 1902) had planned to develop the Dalat Hill Station, 1,700 meters above sea level, as the administrative capital of the Indochinese Federation. Escalating costs prevented this, and Dalat instead became the principal sanitary station of Indochina. In 1937, proposals to turn this site into a new colonial capital were mooted once more, and in September 1938 plans to construct a reception center for three hundred métis children were discussed.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These were informed by the assumption that “it will be easier in a region where everything is of French creation, to create for young Eurasians, completely separated from the maternal native milieu, the European conditions of life indispensable for the formation of their character.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Ultimately, this paternalist initiative was not confined to the hill station. The decision to create the FJB had followed from discussion of the suggestion of the Secretary General of the Hanoi Protection Society, Nouailhetas, that the resettlement of young métis in rural areas could help to resolve the problem of restocking under-populated rural areas. As the plight of young métis in urban centers worsened, plans for their enculturation took on strikingly similar forms to those used contemporaneously in the metropole to prepare young working-class French children and adolescents for citizenship. In France, mass unemployment, political unrest, and anxieties over industrialism reinforced the cross-party appeal of nature as a panacea for the ills of the nation. Pedagogues and medical professionals, in concert with municipal authorities, stepped up efforts to direct young people toward rural colonies de vacances, or to live and work with peasant families in the countryside. In Indochina, as in the metropole, fears over rural depopulation informed efforts to relocate young Eurasians away from urban centers and into rural spaces, notably farm schools and plantation settlements, which might serve as colonial correlates of metropolitan wellsprings of national reinvigoration.

The influx of Japanese troops into Indochina a year after the fall of France left the pro-Vichy administration in nominal control of the Vietnamese peninsula. Fears that the Japanese intended to cultivate collaborators among the “Franco-Indochinese” reinforced convictions at the highest levels of officialdom that winning and retaining this group's loyalty during childhood was critical to the future of French colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ From 1940, the governor general of Indochina Admiral Jean Decoux sought to accelerate efforts to “retrieve” Eurasian children from their native mothers. On 1 January 1943, he commissioned a census of Eurasians under age twenty-one, demanding that the FJB “follow each child … if necessary until his majority”Footnote ¹¹⁰ in order “to make them truly French.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Decrees in 1943 and 1944 allowed any Eurasian child to be placed under public tutelary authority, waiving the requirement to prove that a child had not been raised in a suitable moral and material milieu prior to its removal into custody.Footnote ¹¹² It was, however, Eurasian boys rather than girls who found themselves the primary target of inclusionary initiatives as threats to imperial security intensified.Footnote ¹¹³

In contrast to the case of Hong Kong, where the colonial government's reluctance to recognize responsibility for Eurasians was reaffirmed by its wartime evacuation policy, in Indochina well before the Japanese coup of March 1945 the FJB and its organizations were devoting considerable energy to the task of retrieving and relocating Eurasian children. The administration paid little heed to the wishes of the mothers whose children were seized. Indeed, that métis “rescued” from the native milieu were relocated to distant “havens,” necessitating “long and costly trips for the mothers” who wished to see their offspring, reflected the extent to which the colonial government saw the breaking of maternal-filial links in these circumstances as imperative if the problem posed by this group was to be resolved once and for all.Footnote ¹¹⁴