Here is a new photograph of Martin Troyes (1905-1997). I presume it is from either just after he receives his undergraduate law degree (in 1926?) or shortly after he began his apprenticeship as a military magistrate in 1936 or 1937. I have been spending a fair amount of time working on the Martin Troyes Papers over the last month and developing grant applications related to them specifically, and related to the Nghe-Tinh Soviets more generally (for the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, for the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and for the National Endowment for the Humanities). I hope that I can receive some funding in order to continue my research uninterrupted, since I have some good momentum built up now!
Two days ago, I received copies of all of Troyes’s performance reports for his entire career from the Centre des archives du personnel militaire [the Center for Military Personnel Archives] in Pau, France. Very interesting, all 500 pages! I look forward to going through them and building a timeline of those reports, although I can’t quote from or reproduce them in any way. They do shed a little new light on his combat experience in Hà Tĩnh province during Fall 1930, and on the military and police conflict in Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh provinces in general 1930-31, so I will have to make a few changes to the rough draft of my recently-submitted article, “The Gecko and the Mosquitoes: A French Officer’s Insights into the Early Phase of the 1930-31 Nghệ-Tĩnh Soviets.” By the way, if anyone would like to read the draft and provide feedback, I would happily share it.
As I argue in some of my grant applications, I think that after his combat command in Hà Tĩnh province during Fall 1930, and during his time commanding the isolated outpost at Thanh Thủy in Hà Giang Province, northern Vietnam (then, Tonkin) from 1931-1935, Troyes underwent a moral transformation. His correspondence loses the prejudice and disdain of his earlier letters, and he becomes more sympathetic to local people. Apparently he undertook the study of Vietnamese, culminating in 1936 with him receiving a certificate of aptitude from the Centre des études du langue annamite [i.e., Vietnamese] in Toulouse (somewhat lost to time) during his regular military convalescent leave in France. My question is to determine, why? Why this change of heart at the edge of France’s empire, among the Hmong and Thô and Chinese refugees and everyone else who found themselves in the shadow of the Tây Côn Lĩnh mountain.
Since I can’t travel there myself right now, I have to find a way to acquire the monthly security reports on Hà Giang Province for 1931-1935 from the Centre des Archives d’Outre-mer [the Center of Overseas Archives] in Aix-en-Provence, France.