Free When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker Page B

increased and the revenues sent off to Hanoi, Saigon, and Paris, where they were used for the benefit of France and the French administration of Vietnam. Cambodia would support France and Vietnam but would receive nothing in return. More Vietnamese settlers migrated and farmed Cambodian land, fished its waters, and helped run the French administration.
    The French had decided that the Vietnamese were the industrious race of the future and the Khmer a lazy doomed people grown decadent on Buddhism and the rule of their opulent monarchs. The Vietnamese accepted modernity and seemed unfettered by a demanding, all-consuming faith; Taoism seemed an atheist’s philosophy compared to what the French saw as the peculiar, otherworldly Buddhism of the Cambodians. The French administrators in Cochin China never quite gave up their dream of annexing Cambodia to southern Vietnam, an ambition fed by the Vietnamese themselves.
    King Norodom coped under the protectorate. Few beyond the court circles understood how complete was French control over him. But he lost much of his dignity and much of his tax revenue needed to maintain his regal lifestyle. He was flamboyant and did what was necessary to increase the royal treasury. He became ruthlessly corrupt, selling offices and privileges whenever he could. He died at the turn of the century a broken man in self-imposed exile at his palace.
    Paradoxically, as his real power withered, the king’s prestige among his people increased. When the evidence of their daily lives told them how their country had become a weak colony of France, they turned ever more enthusiastically to the symbolism of the king as the anchor of the nation, as produced by the French colonialists. The symbols of Cambodia became more removed from the power running the country, but the people worshiped the symbol, not the power, a habit that fed illusions and quashed rebellion. The men who followed Norodom on that throne inherited the contradictory legacies of loyalty from the masses and loathing from the cognoscenti who knew how the king had betrayed his sacred mandate and the country.

    The French did provide some benefits for Cambodia. They protected the country from invasions by neighbors. Khmer peasants no longer fled to
Thailand to avoid wars, as they had done in the nineteenth century, nor were they carried off by raiding Siamese armies. They stayed on the land and reclaimed fallow fields, increasing Cambodian rice production. The population tripled under the French. There was a new political calm interrupted only rarely by outbursts against the French.
    But perhaps the most profound fruit of the French presence in Cambodia was the seemingly arcane pursuit by a handful of French scholars to “recover” a history for Cambodia. The results of their scholarship were nothing less than the reinvention of Khmer pride in their country’s heritage and the ideological foundation of the modern drive for an expression of an independent Khmer nation.
    It is hard to imagine modern Cambodia without the magnificent towers of Angkor Wat to point to as the symbol of Khmer culture. Those spires have decorated every flag of independent Cambodia. But before the French archaeologists and historians arrived, the temples were silent ruins largely abandoned for 600 years in the jungles of northwestern Cambodia. The French overcame much of the Cambodian superstitious fear of the temples and in the nineteenth century began the monumental restoration work that went hand in hand with the task of deciphering the country’s buried past. By the time their work was halted in the 1960s, the French had proved the Khmers ranked with the Romans and Greeks as unrivaled artists and innovators of the ancient world.
    The work of these scholars coincided with a debate in France over the attitude French colonialists should adopt toward native cultures in their colonies. The question was whether the French should force the natives to