Bazin assassination

The assassination of Alfred François Bazin (French: [bazɛ̃]), a French labour recruiter in Hanoi, on February 9, 1929, marked the beginning of the demise of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD), which perpetrated the killing. The resulting French retribution severely weakened the fledging Vietnamese revolutionary movement and hampered its ability to undermine colonial rule.

The first account of the affair is Paul Monet's Les Jauniers: Histoire Vraie (Paris, 1930). Monet was a wounded French war veteran who visited Vietnam and became incensed by the treatment of workers by his countrymen. He coined the contemptuous term "jaunier" (Yellow-slave-trader) from "négrier", African slave-trader. According to Monet, Bazin was a graduate of the École coloniale in Paris, who had served as a colonial official before becoming a supervisor of labour recruitment in French Indochina.

Since 1884 Vietnam had been a colony of France, and along with Laos and Cambodia, was part of French Indochina. Under the direction of Bazin, Vietnamese foremen were hired to recruit Vietnamese laborers to work on plantations. In some cases, the hired work-force would be utilised in southern Vietnam, which the French ruled as the colony of Cochinchina. Others were sent to distant French colonies such as the New Hebrides. The working conditions in which the Vietnamese were placed generated indignation. The methods of recruitment often included beating or coercion, as the foreman received a commission for each recruit. The living conditions were poor and the remuneration was low. Among the Vietnamese population, the perception was that those recruited would never set eyes on their homeland again. The French colonial authorities refused to intervene, claiming both that recruitment "had no official character"; and that recruitment was beneficial to the Vietnamese, since it eased the population pressure on the crowded Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.

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