Resumen de Devant le champ de bataille de MaWei (Chine)
The twenty-fourth of December 2006 was the 140th anniversary of the foundation of "ChuanZhen XueTang", the first naval academy in China, in a way the first western-style university in China, established - by the French Navy officer Prosper Giquel - at MaWei (MaMoi) near FuZhou (FooChow) within a naval shipyard, the most advanced in Asia at that time. Under Giquel's direction (1866-1874), the institution deployed some seventh five European teachers and engineers whose tasks it was to convey technical know-how to about 2,500 students and workers. Among their number were Yan Fu (translator of Montesquieu, Adam Smith, etc.) and many other Chinese reformers and leaders. By an "irony of history", it was the French themselves, in the person of Admiral Courbet, and at the direction of Jules Ferry, a prime minister otherwise celebrated as a pioneer of progressive Republicanism and a founding father of free education for both sexes, who destroyed the "Foochow Arsenal", along with a dozen ships of French design, in 1884. This was two moths after the shipment from France of Bartholdi's "Liberty enlightening the World" statue to New York. The context was the War of Tonkin and in the Strait of Formosa, a conflict whose effects would poison Franco-Chinese relations - already seriously compromised by the "sack of the Peking Summer Palace" by the troops of Napoleon III, in alliance with the British - for a century to come. Today only one building remains, albeit an impressive one, from Giquel's venture. It has now been converted into a museum, and was opened to mark the anniversary. Invited of this ocassion to participate in a historical symposium, René Viénet sought to redress the imbalance in the respective reputations of the widely memorialised Ferry and Courbet and the well-nigh forgotten Giquel, and to revisit the rarely examined paradoxes of French colonial history in late-nineteenth-century China. The present article expands and documents Viénet's remarks in MaWei in December 2006, and seeks to help Western readers understand how it came about that the progressive Ferry laid waste to Giquel's remarkable achievements and did so much to wreck France's future prospects in China. Most characters in this recent war were distinguished members of the Société de Géographie.
