Episode I - Napoleon's Vietnam Debacle
Napoleon’s Vietnam Debacle

Crown Prince Phuc Canh looks upon Napoleon III
PoD - April 1862 - Vietnamese Emperor Tu Duc refuses to negotiate with the French.
The Franco-Vietnamese War in 1862 marked a pivotal point in Vietnamese history as well as foreshadowing the beginning of the end of Napoleon III’s empire. What was suppose to be a small, punitive task against the Nguyen Dynasty for persecuting Catholic missionaries turned out to be a long and costly debacle, who some historians consider to have distracted Napoleon from the rising thread across the Rhine.
Vietnamese Emperor Tu Duc was have reported to have said “We will not give up one inch of land” to the Franco-Spanish forces and broke off all negotiations with the Western powers. Although many of the upper mandarins were satisfied with his strong sense of sovereignty, many of the lower class, including the Catholic population was not.
Tu Duc was now faced with a dilemma at home as well, rebellions were occurring in the north and he needed to send his troops to put them down. Yet at the same time, the Emperor was also facing advancing French troops from the south [1]. His priority was to quickly crush any rebellion at home first and would hopefully turn his troops southwards to stave off any French advancement further into Vietnam.
Napoelon III, on the other hand, faced no such dilemma and approved Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly’s plan, as commander of the French forces in the Far East, to take any actions needed to make an all out advance towards Tonkin and capture the key cities of Hanoi and Hai Phong. The French forces, however were already stretched thin enough in the vast country side of Vietnam in hostile terrain and tropical climate. The admiral however, had an ambitious plan.
First he would request more troops, needed for such a massive undertaking. Napoleon at first hesitated at the Admiral’s plan to transfer 30,000 men from the Mexican expedition to such a backwater but the Admiral insisted that it was Tonkin merely a stepping stone towards becoming Emperor of China.
The second step was to make a deal with the local natives. The Admiral sent a message to the King of Siam, Chulalongkorn. In exchange for a free hand in Cambodia [2] and the Lao borderlands, Siam would send an expeditionary corps to assist the French invasion from the West. Although the King distrusted the intentions of the French, it was the dream of the Thais to secure her natural borders against her hereditary rival, Vietnam. The King agreed to the Franco-Thai Agreement.
The final step was to secure some of the Vietnamese cooperation. Many vague, if sometimes contradictory, promises were made to agitate distrust against Tu Duc. The biggest asset proved to be the Vietnamese Catholic population weary of persecution. In hopes of winning some support of the Vietnamese overall, Phuc Anh Nhu, a grandson of the Catholic Prince Canh [3], was promised the throne.
The Franco-Thai invasion proved to be a success as Tu Duc’s forces were defeated by the Thais at Bien Dien Phu and the French with the bombing of Hai Phong and costly siege of Hanoi.
Tu Duc, the last independent ruler of Vietnam was deposed and Phuc Anh Nhu was installed as the next Emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty. France had conquered all of Vietnam. Siam achieved it’s new borders and Spain was compensated with the transfer of France’s Pacific Islands [4]. The occupation of Vietnam proved to be a different matter. Disposing one monarch and replacing him with another was quite unpopular with much of the Vietnamese population. Guerilla attacks and the insurgency forced Napoleon to keep a large force permanently stationed to keep order. The Admiral suggested a troop surge be sent to keep order. This time Napoleon III agreed hesitantly and without the enthusiasm as before. Before the end of the 1860s, as many as 60,000 troops stationed to occupy Vietnam although later sources proved it to be a liberal estimate [5]. The invasion into China was outright canceled.
Although most of Napoleon’s cabinet approved of such an invasion for prestige, the general will of the French public did not. Nearly 10,000 French casualties were suffered. Taxes were increased and leaks of the brutality of the insurgency and counter-insurgency gave the public a distaste for such foreign debacles that would affect French foreign policy towards such “colonial adventures” for decades. Even more dangerously, it shifted France’s focus away from the rising eagle.
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[1] Tu Duc initially favored negotiations of the French in order to put down the rebellions, here he is trying to fight both the French and the rebels.
[2] Cambodia initially applied to become a French protectorate in order to avoid partrion between Vietnam and Thailand. ITTL, it now is a territory of Thailand. Roughly the French conquest of Indochina but 30 years early and without Laos and Cambodia.
[3] Prince Canh was a guest at the court of Versailles, proving very popular with the Bourbons during the era of French assistance to the early Nguyen Dynasty. Since he died young and was a Catholic, his father’s sucessor was instead his younger half brother. IOTL, there were rebellions to restore the Canh linage to the Nguyen Dynasty. His portrait at Versailles will have minor affects on France later on.
[4] Tonkin was initially suppose to be a Spanish colony.
[5] Something I sort of made up. There were around 40,000 troops in Mexico soo… yea.