5 - Southeast Asian Studies in France

Summary

The general conception outside France is that Southeast Asian Studies are centred mainly on the area which before the Second World War was known as “French Indochina”, and that, with the exception of studies on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, few French studies are devoted to this part of the world. The conception has been reinforced by the fact that English is now the principal medium in this area, and that very few Southeast Asian scholars are at this moment able to use French sources or French studies.

Historical Development

However, French interest in the “East Indies” is very old; in fact it began almost as early as that of the Portuguese. As early as 1529 the two brothers, Jean and Raoul Parmentier, left, on board La Pensée and Le Sâcre, the harbour of Dieppe on the northwestern coast of France, for the “Spice Islands”. They left us a journal of this first French expedition which recorded their meeting with the people of the western coast of Sumatra, near Tiku. One interesting fact to note is that they had with them as truchement (interpreter), a certain Jean Masson, who was attached to the captain of the expedition, Jean Parmentier, and who acted as the chief intermediary between the French fleet and the Malay Molana. Jean Masson must have had a good command of at least the spoken language (acquired during a previous voyage to the East?) as both sides seem to have understood each other very well. This interest continued during the following centuries and in fact French ships called at Malay, Siamese and Filipino ports as often as at the Vietnamese ones.

During the seventeenth century there were well-known travellers who wrote long reports on the main sultanates of the Archipelago, especially Francois Martin de Vitre and Augustin de Beaulieu who went to Aceh (the former in 1602 and the latter in 1620, during the time of Iskandar Muda).