France ruled southern Vietnam directly for decades and built it around rubber
From 1862 to 1949, the Mekong Delta and Saigon formed French Cochinchina, the only part of Vietnam governed straight from Paris, with its own deputy in the National Assembly. Its plantations, cut from virgin rainforest, supplied rubber for French industry, and its landless peasants became fertile ground for nationalist and communist movements.
The conquest began in 1858, when Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, backed by Spanish troops from the Philippines, attacked Tourane, now Da Nang, claiming to protect Catholic missionaries whom the Nguyễn dynasty saw as a political threat. He moved on to Saigon in 1859 but could not break out of the city, and a Vietnamese siege held until 1861. The 1862 Treaty of Saigon ceded three southern provinces and guaranteed Catholic worship; in 1867 Admiral Pierre de la Grandière seized three more, putting the whole delta under French control. The territories became a formal colony in 1871.
When the Union of French Indochina formed in 1887, Cochinchina differed from the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin by being ruled directly. It also had the largest European population in Indochina, an estimated 16,550 at its 1940 peak, mostly in Saigon. French authorities took land from Vietnamese owners to expand rice and rubber, and from 1907 cleared the fertile red lands of the east for plantations, chasing the profits British planters were making in Malaya. By 1930 a quarter of landowners held 80% of rice land, and 57% of rural people were landless labourers.
Unrest followed. Plantations recruited indentured workers from crowded northern villages, who carried Ho Chi Minh's communist ideas south despite police screening. In 1930 some 1,300 labourers on a Michelin estate at Phú Riềng held out in a week-long armed standoff, and from 1930 to 1932 the authorities detained more than 12,000 political prisoners. In 1937 communists and their Trotskyist rivals even ran a joint slate in Saigon's municipal elections.
The Second World War broke French power. About 140,000 Japanese troops occupied the south on 28 July 1941, leaving the French administration in place under supervision until a Japanese coup in March 1945. After the war the French returned with British help and pushed the Viet Minh out of Saigon. Proclaiming an Autonomous Republic of Cochinchina in June 1946 helped spark the First Indochina War, and in June 1949 the territory was merged into the State of Vietnam under Bảo Đại.
Source: French Cochinchina
