In the mean time, if we look at the colonial era in terms of the waxing and waning of French, control(the first of the three perspectives), the years break fairly easily into phases, the first phase lasted from the establishment of protectorate in 1863 to the outbreak of a national rebellion in 1884, the second phase would extend from the suppression of rebellion 1886 to King Norodom's death in 1904, when a more cooperative monarch, Norodom's half-brother, Sisowath, came to the throne, the third phase lasted until Norodom-Sihanouk's coronation in 1941 and spans the Reigns of Sisowath(r 1904-1927) and his eldest son Monivong(r 1927-1941) this period, it can be argued, was the only systematically Colonial one in Cambodian history,for in the remainder of the colonial era(1941-1953)
The French were concerned more with holding on than with systematizing their control.
From a Cambodian perspective, however, it is possible to take the view that the colonial era falls into periods rather than four, with the break occurring at Sisowath's coronation in 1906, from that point on, Cambodians stopped governing themselves and the westernization of Cambodian life intensified, what would have been recognizable in a Srok in 1904 to a Cambodian official of the 1840s had been modified sharply by 1920, when French government, particularly at the local level, had been organized as part of a total effort in Indochina.
But until the late 1940s, I suspect, few Cambodians would have considered these mechanical changes, or French presence as a whole, as having a deleterious effect on their lives or on their durable institutions of subsistence farming, Buddhism, and Kingship, the political stability that characterized most of the colonial era can be traced partly to French patronage of the King and the King's patronage of the Sangha, which tended to keep these two institutions aligned- politically, at least- with French objectives, partly because Kings, Monks and officials had no tradition of innovation and partly because popular methods of questioning their authority, heresy and rebellion had been effectively smothered by the French since 1880s, in terms of economic transformations, the significant developments that occurred in the technology of rice farming tended to be limited to the northern part of the Kingdom, where huge rice plantations had come into being, in the rest of the country, as Jean Delvert has shown, the expanding population tended to cultivate rice in small, family oriented plots.
Because of this stability, perhaps, the French in many their writings tended to romanticize and favor the Cambodians at the expense of the Vietnamese, at the same time, because in their terms so little was going on they tended to look down on the Cambodians as " Lazy" or "Obedient" an ambiguous and not very thoughtful romanticism suffuses many French language source composed on the colonial era, especially in the twentieth century, when cliches' about the people were passed along the heirlooms from official( or one issue of a newspaper) to the next, at the same time, until the early 1994s, no Cambodian-language sources questioned the efficacy of French rule or Cambodia's traditional institutions.
For these reason,it is temping to join some French authors and skip over era when"nothing happened"
to do so would be a mistake, because what was happening, especially after the economic boom of the 1920s, was that independent, pre-revolutionary Cambodia( with all its shortcomings) was being built or foreshadowed in spite of large areas of life that remained , as many French writers would say part of the " Timeless" and" Mysterious" Cambodia of Angkor.
It is tempting also to divide French behavior in Cambodia into such as categories as "Political, Economic" ans Social " terms that give the false impression that they separable segments of reality, what the French meant by them in the context of the colonial situation tended to be idiosyncratic, Politic, for example, meant dissidence and manipulation rather than participation in a politic process, Ideally, in a colonial there should be no politic at all, Economics meant Budgets, Taxes , and revenues- in other words, the economic of bureaucratic control, on the rare occasions when French writers looked at Cambodia's economy, they related it to the rest of Indochina, particularly in terms of export crops and colonial initiatives, like public works, rather than to Cambodian needs and capabilities, by the 1920s, in the eyes of French officials , Cambodian had become a rice- making machine, producing revenue as well in exchange for " Guidance " this meant that the essence of government-Rajarkar (រាជការ=រដ្ខាភិបាល) or royal work- remained what it had always been, the extraction of revenue from the peasants, as for "Social" the word as French used it did not refer to solidarity among people or relationships that added up to political cohesion សិនិទ្ធពល,instead" " Society " meant a conglomeration of families, obediently at work.
The chronological perspective and the analytical ones just dealt with may be helpful in looking at the period 1863-1953, for looking at these years in terms of Cambodian history means looking at them in terms of continuity and change ,from this angle, the alterations to Cambodian Society and thinking of Cambodian elite are as important as the apparently timeless life in the villages, which was also changing.
End of The early Stages of The French Protectorate "Cambodia"
