[TONKIN] Ensemble de 59 lettres autographes signées et adressées à sa famille

Paris, Auxerre and various places, January 1886-August 1887.

A collection of 59 autograph letters signed by Gustave Borgnis-Desbordes and addressed to members of his family, comprising approximately 180 pages, mostly octavo. Most are written on black-bordered mourning paper; several bear the letterhead of the French Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, Inspectorate-General of Artillery.

The letters extend from January 1886 to August 1887. Almost all were written in Paris, a few bear no place, and one was written at Auxerre on 1 July 1886. Forty-seven are addressed to his sister Claire, wife of Henry Lethier, an engineer of the Ponts et Chaussées then stationed at Auxerre; eleven to his brother Ernest Borgnis-Desbordes (1843-1925), a graduate of the École Polytechnique, artillery officer and future divisional general; and one to his sister-in-law Émilie Lacœille, Ernest's wife.

The collection is housed in a modern full red cloth box with black lettering-piece.

An important family correspondence covering nineteen decisive months in the career of Gustave Borgnis-Desbordes, from the aftermath of the Tonkin crisis and his promotion to general officer to his departure on an extensive inspection tour through the French possessions of the Indian Ocean and Pacific.

A member of the 1859 class of the École Polytechnique and an officer of Marine Artillery, Borgnis-Desbordes already had a considerable colonial career behind him. Between 1880 and 1883 he led several French campaigns in the Upper Senegal and Upper Niger, established the posts of Kita and Bamako and played a major role in the French military advance towards the Niger. He was subsequently sent to Tonkin, where he commanded the artillery of the expeditionary corps during the Sino-French War.

The Lang Son affair forms the background to the earliest letters. Following the setback at Bang Bo, General de Négrier was seriously wounded on 28 March 1885 during the fighting around Lang Son. His deputy Herbinger then assumed command and ordered a precipitate retreat which, magnified in Paris by Brière de l'Isle's alarming telegram, precipitated a major political crisis and the fall of Jules Ferry's government. Borgnis-Desbordes was called upon shortly afterwards to assume temporary command of the brigade and on 24 April submitted a particularly severe report on Herbinger's conduct.

By 1886 the episode was far from closed. From Paris, Borgnis-Desbordes undertook a succession of visits, approaches and conversations in an effort to defend both his record and his position within the army. The letters make it possible to follow almost day by day this network of military and political support: Faidherbe, Brière de l'Isle, de Négrier, admirals and the Minister of the Navy, as well as the parliamentarians and journalists who continued to debate the affair. Family intimacy is thus interwoven with a remarkable chronicle of the corridors of power.

Herbinger's death on 26 May 1886 did not immediately end the controversy. A few weeks later, however, Borgnis-Desbordes obtained the promotion he had been awaiting: in July he was appointed brigadier general. In a letter of the 26th he announces that he has finally seen his appointment in the Journal officiel and gives free rein to his irony towards those whom he believed had attempted to obstruct his advancement.

At the same time, this military correspondence becomes a striking chronicle of political Paris during Jules Grévy's second presidential term. Borgnis-Desbordes comments on parliamentary debates, the ministers he meets, Jules Ferry, Clemenceau, Rochefort and Louise Michel, and above all the spectacular rise of General Boulanger. Minister of War from January 1886 and enthusiastically acclaimed at the review of 14 July, Boulanger was rapidly becoming a political phenomenon whose nationalism and taste for confrontation Borgnis-Desbordes regarded with open suspicion.

The Schnæbelé affair of April 1887 suddenly gave these anxieties an international dimension. The arrest of the French police commissioner on the German frontier created a crisis during which Boulanger contemplated partial mobilisation, while Grévy and Foreign Minister Émile Flourens sought to prevent escalation. Schnæbelé's release on 30 April temporarily eased the tension but further increased the War Minister's popularity. The letters therefore capture Boulangism at the very moment when a soldier's personal popularity was beginning to develop into a political threat.

At precisely the same moment, Borgnis-Desbordes's career returned to the wider colonial world that had shaped it. In the spring of 1887 he learned that an extended inspection mission would take him across the Indian Ocean and Pacific. The correspondence gradually records the itinerary: the Seychelles, Madagascar, Réunion, New Caledonia, followed by the return journey through Aden and Obock. The voyage was expected to last more than six months. The letters consequently cease little by little to be the chronicle of an officer seeking support in Paris and become the epistolary journal of an inspector travelling through some of the most distant territories of French expansion.

The mission also marks a change in the nature of his career. Borgnis-Desbordes was no longer simply the officer of the Upper Niger columns or the artillery commander of Tonkin: he was now inspecting military organisations, installations and defensive systems in territories already conquered or undergoing administrative consolidation. His visit to Diego-Suarez in 1887 is reflected in military decisions taken following his inspection, while the archives of New Caledonia preserve the report produced from the same mission.

The letters finally touch upon an even broader administrative transformation. Borgnis-Desbordes was close to Paul Dislère, his fellow member of the École Polytechnique class of 1859. A naval engineer who had become a Councillor of State and formerly served as Director of the Colonies, Dislère was by 1887 one of France's leading specialists in colonial administration. On 15 June he joined the commission appointed to consider the administrative unification of Cochinchina, Cambodia, Annam and Tonkin. The project to which he contributed led only months later to the decrees of 17 and 20 October establishing the Indochinese Union. Borgnis-Desbordes's correspondence therefore captures these discussions before they had even taken regulatory form, at the moment when French military expansion was seeking a common administrative structure.

These fifty-nine letters consequently trace a particularly revealing trajectory. At the beginning of 1886 Borgnis-Desbordes was still absorbed by the consequences of a military retreat that had become an affair of state; nineteen months later he had been entrusted with inspecting territories scattered across several oceans, while men within his immediate circle were considering the administrative centralisation of Indochina.

A remarkable family correspondence of approximately 180 pages, at once a first-hand testimony to the aftermath of Lang Son, a chronicle of political Paris at the dawn of Boulangism and the journal of an extensive colonial inspection. From the Sudan to Tonkin, and from Madagascar to New Caledonia, it captures Borgnis-Desbordes at the precise moment when his career was moving from military conquest to the organisation of empire.