In late 1923, the acting French resident in Prey-Veng, a vigorous and ambitious official named Felix Louis Bardez, reported his belief that there were three reasons why tax receipts were so low: the complete inactivity of Cambodian officials, the lack of the supervision ( over the officers expected to collect the taxes),and shortcomings in collection procedures,in the course of 1924, Bardez improved the procedures for tax collection in the Srok to the all eighteen categories of tax yielded more revenues than in 1923, he showed that the system could be made more productive by working harder himself, indeed, the two categories of tax in which revenues rose the most-rice taxes and Chinese head taxes were precisely those that could be increased by a vigorous resident on the spot, eager to expose the compromises, Doctored books, and ex-aggregations of local officials.
Bardez's success in Prey-Veng attracted the attention of his superiors,and in late 1924 he was transferred ahead of many more senior officials to be resident in Kompong-chhnang, long bedeviled by banditry and low tax revenues, Bardez's arrival coincided roughly with the promulgation of a supplementary tax to pay for the mountain resort of Bakor, but money was hard to come by, as Bardez admitted to a friend, and receipts were slow in coming, one Cambodian official trying to collect them was severely beaten by villagers in early 1925.
On April 18, angered by resorts that another village,Krang Laav, was delinquent in its payment. Bardez visited the village himself, accompanied by an interpreter and a Cambodian militiaman, summoning delinquent taxpayers to the village hall, or Sala, he had several of them handcuffed and threatened to take them to prison.even though they would not be subject to fines for their delinquency for three months, his refusal to let the prisoners have lunch while he was eating himself destroyed the patience of the large crowd of people looking on, who lacked food or shelter, in a confused melee,
Bardez and his companions were set upon by twenty or thirty people, within half an hour, Bardez interpreter, and the militiaman had been beaten to death with the chairs, fence paling, ax handles, and the militiaman's rifle butt, the corpses were then mutilated, soon afterward, incited by local leaders who were never brought to trail, seven hundred Cambodians, the crowd that had gathered to listen to Bardez- began marching on Kompong-chhnang to demand re-mission of their taxes, after a few hours, however, their fervor died down, and the marchers broke up or were dispersed by armed militia before they reached their destination.
The news of Bardez's murder shocked the French community in Phnompenh, largely because it was the first case in which villagers been killed a high-ranking French official on duty, other officials had been killed by bandits or by their servants, but none while collecting taxes, the precedent obviously was dramatic one, moving swiftly through their puppets in the royal family, the French saw to it that Sisowath sent his eldest son, Prince Monivong, to the area with a French political counselor to communicate his discontent, this took the form of a Royal ordinance changing the name of the village from Krang laav to direchan( Bestiality) the ordinance force the villagers to conduct expiatory
services for Bardez on the anniversary of his murder for the next ten years, the most interesting feature of the ordinance was its insistence on collective guilt, this was the line pursued by the defense in the trail of the eighteen men arrested for Bardez's murder, but it was dismissed by the prosecution, which saw danger in linking the murder with any kind of political discontent, interestingly, one of the men arrested for the murder was still alive in 1980, when he told an interviewer that " everyone in the village" had beaten Bardez and his companions.
The trail of the men accused of the murders opened in Phnompenh in December 1925 and was widely reported in the press, in which it was fitted into pattern of increasing anti colonial feeling elsewhere in Indochina, at the trail. the prosecution tried to prove that the defendants were "pirates" from outside the village and that robbery had been their motive in fact, although the taxes collected by Bardez disappeared in the melee, his own billfold was untouched, more to the point, his diary was confiscated by the prosecution and classified as confidential because of the "political" material it contained, testimony by several of Bardez's friends suggested that the diary may have recorded his pessimism about collecting any extra taxes, to one of them, he had remarked shortly before his death that there was simply not enough money in the Srok to meet the newly imposed demands ,high-ranking French officials interfered with witnesses for the defense, at one point , the defense attorney's tea was apparently poisoned by unknown hands, and a stenographer hired by by the defense was forced by her former employers to return to her job in Saigon what the French wanted to kept quiet, it seems was the fact that emerged at the trial. namely, that on a per ca-pita basis the Cambodian peasants paid the highest taxes in Indochina as a price for their " docility"
The Bardez incident resembles in 1916 affair and the 1942 Monks demonstration, discussed below, in that nothing like it had happened previously in the colonial era,it that exposed the mechanics of colonial rule and the unreality of French mythology about the peaceable" Cambodian character" one aspect of the widening distance between the French and the Cambodians was the fact that Bardez, after fifteen years of conscientious service in Cambodia, was still incapable of speaking Khmer , without knowing the language, how accurate could his assessments be of what ordinary people were thinking? it is as if a great deal of Cambodian life in the colonial period was carried out behind a screen, invisible and inaudible to the French, another French resident, writing at about this time, made a perceptive comment in this regard, it's permissible to ask if the unvarying calm which the [Cambodia] people continue to exhibit is not merely an external appearance covering up vague, unexpressed feeling[ emphasis added whose extract nature we can not perceive.
Residents would reply by saying that they were paid to administer the population, not to understand it, every month, they were required to complete mountains of paperwork, to sit for days as referees in often inconclusive legal case, and to supervise the extensive programs of public works, primarily roads, which the French used to perpetuate corvee' and to justify their presence in the Kingdom.
The end of The Assassination Of French Resident Bardez.
