Free When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker

China and offset the British foothold there. But the Siamese court resisted the French through skillful maneuvers using the British against France and strong control over its people. The Siamese retained their independence in exchange for abandoning their claim on the Cambodian court but winning, in the process, Lao and Cambodian territory from the new French colonizers.
    The French had convinced King Norodom that they wanted his vulnerable country solely as a protectorate, to act as a buffer between the more highly prized Vietnamese colonies and Siam, by then considered part of the British sphere of influence. King Norodom signed the 1863 and 1864 treaties with France to protect his throne from a series of claims by pretenders and from control by the Vietnamese or the court of Siam. As a last gamble, he immediately moved to try to outmaneuver the French by negotiating a secret treaty with the Siamese. He failed.
    The French told Norodom he would control his country; France would only dictate Cambodia’s foreign policy. As long as the French believed they had a chance to reach China via the Mekong River, Cambodia itself did not seem to matter to them. Norodom could reign as a semidivine autocrat, the bearer of a reinvented Cambodian tradition.
    And Norodom could be made to fit the part well. A contemporary French chronicler in 1888 imputed to him the stereotypical characteristics such as having “a great sense of Asian politics and a very high appreciation of the nobility of his race. One may say, without deceiving oneself, that he is the first Cambodian of his kingdom, if he is not the only one.” Norodom indulged his passions and whims without restraint. He beat unruly ministers of the court, he executed unfaithful women of his harem. But, the story went, regardless of his behavior he had the undying devotion of his subjects. The king was the country, or so it seemed. “The attachment of the Cambodians to their hereditary chiefs is as profound as it is sincere,” a French official asserted. “The nation has long been accustomed to the idea of not separating its own existence from that of the royal house. The monarch is the living incarnation, the august and supreme personification of nationality.”
    In reality, Norodom had had to earn the support of the nobility and popular legitimacy to be considered the king. His two half-brothers—Prince Sisowath and Prince Si Votha—made claims to the throne and there were hereditary chiefs who had to accept him as the personification of kingship.
The royal family feuds were constant. Sisowath tried to dethrone Norodom by currying favor with the French; Si Votha by arming hill tribesmen and inciting them to revolt.
    By then the French realized the Mekong would not provide an entree into China and that Cambodia’s usefulness had to be realized in another fashion. The logic of colonization eroded the short-lived pragmatic relationship that had kept Norodom his country’s ruler. First the French assumed responsibility for collecting taxes on opium and alcohol; Norodom agreed even though the French claimed the money was payment to cover French costs for protecting Cambodia. The people abhorred the taxes. Then, in 1884, the French demanded control over the country’s lucrative customs service. This time Norodom refused. “It will be thought that the king has lost all authority over his subjects,” he wrote.
    Angered, the French decided to end this game with what they denigrated as an Oriental despot, and they wrote a new treaty granting themselves authority over all of Cambodia’s administrative, judicial, financial, and commercial affairs—reducing Cambodia to a near colony. To add greater insult, the French governor-general got King Norodom to sign the new treaty by storming into Norodom’s sacrosanct private chambers and ordering the king to sign at gunpoint. 1
    This affront wounded what the French and their subjects would