"...longstanding practice of bringing "French Orientals" back to the metropole, usually as the wives of lay missionaries or members of the Foreign Legion, had given way since around the start of Napoleon V's reign to shifting towards a primarily student population. In tandem with the decline of the proportion of French-Orientals of Korean descent with the sharp decline in French influence in what Paris still regarded as their rightful protectorate, [1] the internal makeup of the demographic went from overwhelmingly female and poor veteran men to a more affluent cohort who often had already enjoyed the French school system in their native land and now were being educated, often in the law, to join the civil service back home. With the French academy still largely conservative and Catholic, the elite mission schools of the colonial Orient were the main source of students, who the French Colonial Service hoped and intended would further their studies in the Metropole, inculcate their "Frenchness," and return with this knowledge and renewed commitment to France to instill the same on their countrymen as administrators and the new bureaucratic elite.
This did not work for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the experience of the Oriental students in France was generally overwhelmingly negative. The French had long taken a view that their colonial empire was, unlike the British approach to India or the savagery displayed by Germans and Belgians overseas, one of merit. Through their civilizing mission, anyone who joined the Foreign Legion or converted to Catholicism could, in theory, "become French," whereas in England an Indian would always be Indian, so on and so forth. That a huge number of French soldiers and missionaries took Oriental wives and brought them home was a point of pride to the Colonial Service, who from their perch in Paris saw it as an easy solution to France's demographic disadvantages compared to high-birth neighbors and a way to create instant and clear familial ties between colons and citoyens. The issue was that this was theory; Oriental wives were seldom accepted in broader society and Foreign Legionnaires by the mid-1910s found themselves often living in concentrated ethnic enclaves, sometimes even denied attendance in Church parishes of ethnic Frenchmen. The half-Oriental children of these common mixed marriages were typically bullied at school and dismissed as "mongrels" by their peers, sometimes into adulthood. Oriental students, thus, suffered much of the same treatment upon arriving in the Metropole. They were discriminated against at university by their professors and those who wished it were often denied access to the stultified academy; practicing law in France as an Oriental was virtually impossible. Racism and violence towards Orientals in Paris in particular was not uncommon. Politically they had virtually zero support, for most radical and socialist Frenchmen were anti-imperialists who viewed such students as an ideological enemy in their project to dismantle the colonial empire.
The broader issue, though, was the increasing intensity of tensions in the Orient itself. While the Code de l'Indigenat, one of the most infamous implementations of institutional racism in the history of European imperialism, was in theory meant to apply only to Algeria and, increasingly, West Africa, [2] colonial administrators in the late Second Empire were increasingly careerists rotated around the entire French colonial empire rather than establishing themselves at a single posting, and much of the French-born civil service and colonial military command in the Orient came to be men who had served in the very different Indigeniste [3] context of Africa and applied many of the attitudes and practices they had absorbed in Algeria or Dakar to Indochina. Natives were expelled from civil service positions ad hoc, state-sanctioned violence became more arbitrary, and demands on agricultural plantations grew, as did the cruelty of the foremen responsible for them towards the peasantry bound to them. This occurred at a moment where the Oriental intelligentsia, both in Indochina and Formosa, was becoming increasingly hostile to the French administration, both for domestic and international reasons. The symbiotic escalation of tension between colonizer and colonized that stemmed from Pan-Asian liberationist ideology against the sheer panic that said idealism had instilled in European colonial authorities in the wake of the successful Philippine Revolution and collapse of the Qing Empire had spread; the same impulses that would lead to 1915's Ghadar Mutiny in India's Punjab region were festering in Tonkin and Formosa, where Sinophilic elites who spoke Chinese imported revolutionary ideology that pushed for an indigenous cultural and economic renaissance free of European meddling.
Ironically enough, the people to whom such sentiment appealed the most were the social peers and families of those students in Paris who were now organizing cross-national ideological networks and turning increasingly hostile to French authority. Radicalized abroad, when they returned home they found fertile ground for both homegrown and European revolutionary ideologies and a local administration that was increasingly unwilling to compromise with locals, only creating more converts to their cause..."
- The French Orient
[1] So mea culpa here that my approach to Korea's foreign policy and who, exactly, it is a protectorate of has been a bit all over the place. We went from it being a French protectorate/tributary, and them fighting a war with China to keep it that way officially, to now having Russia and Japan reach an "understanding" on their spheres of influence within it, and the US basically buying Port Hamilton off of Seoul. Essentially my thinking here is that France has the equivalent of a treaty port/concession in Busan and a "sphere" in its hinterland, which considering Japanese strategic concerns is a big problem in terms of Paris-Tokyo relations
[2] The French are, uh, going to have a bit of a different reputation ITTL. Like, "South Africa on steroids" different.
[3] Here we have our Franco-apartheid equivalent term. We'll see if I stick with it
