제국의 통치 구조와 주권 분할의 변주들: 프랑스의 베트남 통치를 중심으로

This study analyzes the varied repertoires of rule mobilized by the French Empire in Vietnam from the establishment to the dismantling of its imperial order. The colonization of Cochinchina in 1862 was less an intended goal than the outcome of a combination of contingent events. For the northern and central part of Vietnam, France sought to establish protectorates, considering this mode of rule – which partially recognized the sovereignty of the Vietnamese monarch and court – more effective than colonial annexation. Yet the administration of Tonkin and Annam, which became French protectorates in 1883, gradually evolved toward diminishing the sovereignty of the local authorities. Mutual distrust between the protector and the protected prevented the effective functioning of divided sovereignty; this, in turn, made imperial rule increasingly difficult to exercise. The French imperial order in Vietnam began to crumble from 1940 onward. Vietnam’s decolonization unfolded through a series of phases marked by the emergence of states with incomplete sovereignty, as well as by France’s efforts to reconfigure the patterns of divided sovereignty in order to prolong its imperial order. The evolution of these modes of rule reveals that sovereignty was not a singular and absolute entity but a political resource subject to division and redistribution. The imperial order was built, maintained, and ultimately dissolved through the varied allocation of this resource – a process that was constantly renegotiated between rulers and ruled.