Vietnam’s history: French missionaries’ correspondence now online
The Missions Etrangères de Paris has inventoried and made available online 400 boxes of documents from the Vietnam Collection with documents on missions from the late 19th century to 1975. The material is also available for consultation by historians at IRFA in Paris.
Paris (AsiaNews/IRFA) – The France-Asia Research Institute (IRFA)[*] has created an online archive with all the correspondence between the Missions Étrangères de Paris (Paris Foreign Mission, MÉP) and its missionaries in Vietnam for anyone in the world who wants to study Vietnam’s troubled 20th-century history.
Over the past year, 400 boxes of archived material covering a period between the end of the 19th century and 1975 have been inventoried and catalogued and are now available online.
Researchers interested in the history of Vietnam can consult the IRFA archives, already open to the public in the reading room of MÉP’s headquarters on the rue de Bac in Paris.
The Vietnam Collection (Fonds Vietnam) consists mainly of correspondence between the various branches of the MÉP s and local missions.
Except for the dioceses of Hung Hoa and Kontum, which handed over their archives to MÉP in 1963 (by Bishop Mazé) and 1964 and 1975 (by Bishop Seitz) respectively, no Vietnamese diocese has handed over its own archives to the Paris office.
MÉP arrived in Vietnam in the 17th century. In 1662, Bishop Pierre Lambert de La Motte became the first Apostolic Vicar of Cochin China.
Father Louis Chevreuil was the first European missionary to reach the region on 26 July 1664, as vicar delegated by Bishop de La Motte. Father François Deydier arrived in Tonkin in 1666.
By 1790, only four MÉP missionaries had made their way to the Tonkin. The French Revolution and the closure of the seminary in Paris ended any hope of boosting the number of missionaries until 1815.
In the second half of the 19th century, following the Treaty of Huế and the establishment of French Indochina in 1887, missionaries were able to reorganise – the country was divided into several vicariates, staff increased, and more conversions were reported. The number of Catholics in western Tonkin rose from 140,000 to 220,000.
At the start of the 20th century, the MÉP transferred ecclesiastical responsibilities to the local Vietnamese clergy as a result of the difficulties faced by the French administration, famine, and economic crisis.
During the Indochina War (1946-1954), the situation of missionaries in Vietnam varied depending on whether they lived in an area occupied by the Vietminh or the French army.
This led almost 700,000 Catholics to take refuge in the South; by 1970, no MÉP missionary was present in the North.
After reunification in 1975 and the proclamation of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, all remaining missionaries were expelled from the country.
[*] Created in 2019 by the Foreign Missions of Paris (MEP), the Institut de recherche France-Asie is in charge of the society's historical legacy.
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22/05/2022 14:26
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