Remembering "Other" Losses: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne

On 21 April 1984 a fire gutted and destroyed a singular building in the easternmost part of the Bois de Vincennes, in the suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, on the outskirts of Paris. ¹ The wooden edifice had seen its share of peregrinations and reinventions before then. Commissioned in 1905, it had first been transported overland, then by ship from the province of Thudaumôt, northwest of Saigon, to France, where it had served as the "Cochin-China pavilion" at the Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906.² A year later, this communal village house or dinh, variously labeled by the French a "Cochin-Chinese house," "sculpted house of Thudaumôt" or even "Annamite house," was moved to the outskirts of Paris for the 1907 Colonial Exhibition at the Jardin colonial of Nogent-sur-Marne. ³ In 1920, the displaced structure saw its function change drastically, when it was officially converted into a Buddhist temple dedicated to the memory of Indochinese soldiers who had "died for France" in the Great War (see figure 1). Losing its nominal tie to Thudaumôt, it became the Temple du Souvenir Indochinois, itself the centerpiece of a vaster site of commemoration. Its final resting place was no accident: it was moved to the heart of the Jardin colonial (later rebaptized Jardin tropical) of Nogent-sur-Marne, a laboratory of tropical agronomy akin to Kew Gardens, whose buildings— which once included a mosque—had served between 1914 and 1918 as a makeshift hospital with a capacity to treat over 300 colonial soldiers. ⁴

Today, on the other side of the Bois de Vincennes from the few remaining vestiges of the grand 1931 Colonial Exhibition, one can still visit this curious site, littered with the debris of empire. A new, smaller temple was erected in 1992, with an eye to maintaining its " Oriental" qualities. ⁵ The grounds of the rebuilt Temple du Souvenir Indochinois, and the Jardin tropical more generally, were recently defended by the mayor of Paris's twelfth arrondissement "as a lieu de mémoire in its own right." ⁶ And according to the then mayoral assistant Françoise de Panafieu, quoted in 1999, the site constitutes a "garden of memory, a historical site, testimony to the past." ⁷ Although both the original "sculpted house of Thudaumôt" and the mosque have long since been destroyed, one has only to pass through a Vietnamese archway on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes to witness the replacement temple, as well as a series of original First World War monuments to soldiers from Laos, Cambodia and even Madagascar, bridges designed in "Tonkinois" and "Khmer" styles, and the eerily neglected "exotic" pavilions of Congo, Indochina, Guiana, Madagascar, Dahomey and Tunisia, erected to house the lesser-known 1907 Colonial Exhibition. ⁸ In a remarkable continuity, the garden is still home to the "tropical" branch of the Institut national de recherche agronomique, the French national agronomic institute. Sifting through these layers of colonial ties and fantasies, it is the commemoration of Indochinese soldiers of the Great War that is the most striking function of this "site of memory" in the suburbs of Paris.

Colonial Memories

It is surprising that Pierre Nora's now famous Les Lieux de mémoire should contain only fleeting references to colonial remembrance, or to memories of empire, ⁹ a lacuna rendered all the more evident over the past three years with the opening of the floodgates of memory from the Algerian conflict—itself grafted upon memories of the Great War, when the presidents of Algeria and France made a pilgrimage to the tombs of Algerian soldiers oriented toward Mecca in a cemetery at the foot of the Drouaumont Ossuary at Verdun. ¹⁰ And although the memorialization of colonial losses in the First World War more generally is now beginning to draw some scholarly attention, the same cannot be said of the...