The Voyages of Father Pécot in the Peninsula, 1821–23

Introduction

Both Western Europe and Southeast Asia underwent revolutionary transformation in the late eighteenth century, as Victor Lieberman has pointed out.¹ In France a profound political revolution began in 1789, three years after the birth of Mathurin-Pierre Pécot in the rural village of Louvaines (Maine-et-Loire), 30km northwest of Angers in western France. During his childhood the revolutionary state closed all churches, confiscated church property, schools and hospitals and sponsored a new ‘Cult of Reason’ to replace the old religion. His region, the Vendée, staged the most important revolt against these revolutionary extremes in 1793–99. It ended with the massacre of thousands of the church’s supporters, recently politicized by Pierre Chaunu and others as ‘the first ideological genocide’.² Pécot’s teenage years, when he opted for the seminary, were the period of Napoleonic rule (1799–1814), when the functioning of churches and seminaries was renewed under explicit state control. He was educated, therefore, as a modern, politically conscious Frenchman of the nineteenth century Catholic revival in France, with peasant rather than aristocratic roots and a strong commitment to the Catholic hierarchy and Rome as an alternative to the abuses of the French state.

Pécot was ordained priest in 1811, becoming curate (vicaire) and in 1813 parish priest (curé) of Faye, across the Loire from Angers deep in Vendée country.³ After the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1815), Pécot may have found this quotidian role insufficiently challenging. The Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris, founded in 1660 under royal patronage but reopened after the revolution in 1815, then represented, as one of its historians acknowledged, “the great outlet for the disillusions as of the enthusiasm of the [French] Church.” Pécot entered its Paris seminary in December 1819. He had only a few months preparing for the Asian mission there and probably learning as much Portuguese as possible, but this time was nevertheless important in creating friendships and loyalties in the Society. He departed for Southeast Asia on 20 March 1820, aged 34.

His short lifetime had also marked revolutionary changes in Southeast Asia. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Europe had made French-occupied Holland an enemy of Britain, which used the conflicts to extend its authority in Asia at French and Dutch expense. Britain’s occupation of Penang as a strategic eastern base in 1786, the year of Pécot’s birth, marked the transition to the period in which English, rather than Portuguese, Dutch or Malay, became the commercial lingua franca of Asia, as Pécot notes below. Further north, the Burmese conquest of Siam and destruction of its capital Ayutthaya in 1767 inaugurated a struggle for primacy in Mainland Southeast Asia and especially its (‘Malay’) Peninsula. All three of the major states—Burma, Siam/Thailand and Viet Nam—emerged from the conflict stronger, more centralized and more militarized against the threats of the others. Siam was reconstituted initially by the general Taksin and and later by the founder of the Chakri dynasty, Rama I (r.1782–1809), both hybrid Sino-Thai, from the new, more trade-oriented capital of Bangkok. They conquered one by one the dependencies that had fallen to Burma or Viet Nam. Always expert at playing the Chinese card, the Chakri kings oversaw a huge expansion of trade with then-booming China and welcomed Chinese traders who swelled the Chinese population from 30,000 to 230,000 between 1767 and 1825.⁴

Chinese were especially prominent in the Peninsula, in tin mining, trade and even governance. In their attempts to control the booming but distant regions, the Chakri kings found Chinese merchants more effective and loyal satraps (in Ranong, Songkhla and Phuket) than the hereditary rulers conscious of their ancient dignities. Chief of the latter was the ruler of Nakhon Sithammarat, Noi, known in Thai by the title Chaophraya Nakhon and in Malay and English as Raja Ligor. He was eager to extend his power to the south, and influential enough in Bangkok to be able...