Vietnamese people in France
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| ~350,000 (2014) 0.54% of the French population |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Paris and Île-de-France region, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux | |
| Languages | |
| French (standard and Vietnamese dialect), Vietnamese | |
| Religion | |
| Mahayana Buddhism with elements of Confucianism and Taoism, significant minority Roman Catholicism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Overseas Vietnamese, Asians in France |
The Vietnamese people in France (Vietnamese: Người Pháp gốc Việt, French: Diaspora vietnamienne en France) consists of people of Vietnamese ancestry who were born in or immigrated to France. Their population was over 300,000 as of 2014.
Unlike other overseas Vietnamese communities in the West, the Vietnamese population in France had already been well-established before the Fall of Saigon and diaspora that resulted from it. They make up over half of the Vietnamese population in Europe.
France was the first Western country to where Vietnamese migrants settled due to the colonization of Vietnam by France. The French assistance to Nguyễn Ánh in 1777 was one of earliest formal political relations between the two nations. Despite continued French Catholic missions, trade and military assistance to Vietnam throughout the rest of the 18th century and 19th century, Vietnam did not become a colony of France until the Cochinchina Campaign in the late 1850s and Vietnamese immigration consisted of a mere trickle of mostly diplomats.
During the colonial period, there was a significant representation of Vietnamese students in France, which largely consisted of members from the elite class and royal household. Professional and blue-collar workers also migrated from Vietnam during this period, with some settling permanently. One of the few monuments dating back to these earliest waves of Vietnamese arriving in France is the Temple du Souvenir Indochinois, originally erected in 1907 and subsequently relocated to the Jardin tropical de Paris in the Bois de Vincennes.
The onset of World War I and World War II saw the French Empire recruit soldiers and locals of its colonies to volunteer with the war effort in Metropolitan France. Roughly 50,000 and 20,000 Vietnamese migrated to France during these periods respectively. The wave of migrants who came during World War I was the first major presence of Vietnamese people in France. While many migrants returned to Vietnam following the war, a significant number resettled in France to work as factory workers, railroad builders, artists, and service workers, primarily in Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France region, as well as in Lille.
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