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Tonkin Affair
The Tonkin Affair ((フランス語:L'Affaire Tonkin)) of March 1885 was a major French political crisis that erupted in the closing weeks of the Sino-French War. It effectively destroyed the political career of the French prime minister, Jules Ferry, and abruptly ended the string of Republican governments inaugurated several years earlier by Leon Gambetta. The suspicion by the French public and political classes that French troops were being sent to their deaths far from home for little measurable gain, both in Tonkin and elsewhere, also discredited French colonial expansion for nearly a decade.
==The "Lang Son telegram"==
The "Affair" (as most French political scandals are still termed), was triggered on 28 March 1885 by the controversial Retreat from Lang Son. The retreat, which threw away the gains of the February Lang Son Campaign, was ordered by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Gustave Herbinger, the acting commander of the 2nd Brigade, less than a week after General François de Négrier's defeat at the Battle of Bang Bo (24 March 1885). General Louis Brière de l'Isle, the commander-in-chief of French forces in Tonkin, was in Hanoi at the time, and was planning to shift his headquarters to Hung Hoa, to supervise a planned offensive against the Yunnan Army around Tuyen Quang. Without waiting to sift the misleading information contained in Herbinger's alarmist cables from Lang Son, Brière de l'Isle concluded that the Red River Delta was in jeopardy and fired off a pessimistic telegram on the evening of 28 March to the French government, warning that the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps faced disaster unless it was immediately reinforced:
I am grieved to tell you that General de Négrier is seriously wounded and Lang Son has been evacuated.
The Chinese forces advanced in three large groups, and fiercely assaulted our positions in front of Ky Lua. Facing greatly superior numbers, short of ammunition, and exhausted from a series of earlier actions, Colonel Herbinger has informed me that the position was untenable and that he has been forced to fall back tonight on Dong Song and Thanh Moy. All my efforts are being applied to concentrate our forces at the passes around Chu and Kep. The enemy continues to grow stronger on the Red River, and it appears that we are facing an entire Chinese army, trained in the European style and ready to pursue a concerted plan. I hope in any event to be able to hold the entire Delta against this invasion, but I consider that the government must send me reinforcements (men, ammunition, and pack animals) as quickly as possible.〔Thomazi, 259〕
The news contained in the 'Lang Son telegram', as it was immediately dubbed, ignited a political crisis in Paris:
There was enormous feeling throughout France. This retreat of 2,500 men, who had returned to their starting positions without even being pursued by the enemy, took on from a distance the proportions of an irretrievable disaster. On the stock exchange on 30 March the 3% fell by three and a half francs; it had only fallen by two and a half francs on the day that war was declared in 1870. All the newspapers were full of accusations against the Cabinet, of false accounts of the 'bitter combats' that the 2nd Brigade, enveloped by the Chinese, must have fought to disengage, of fears for the entire expeditionary corps, whose situation was depicted as tragic. In the House, the deputies who were systematically opposed to our establishment in Tonkin were jubilant, and the proponents of a colonial policy did not dare defend their views of the previous day.〔Thomazi, 261〕
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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