Content area
Full Text
LES MISSIONNAIRES FRANCAIS AU TONKIN ET AU SIAM, XVIIe-XVIIIe SIECLES. Volume 1. By Alain Forest. Paris and Montreal: L'Harmattan. 1998. 462 p. F210, 00, paper. ISBN 2-7384-7124-2.
LES MISSIONNAIRES FRANCAIS AU TONKIN ET AU SIAM, XVIIe-XVIIIe SIECLES. Volume 2. By Alain Forest. Paris and Montreal: L'Harmattan. 1998. 302 pp. F140,00, paper ISBN2 7384-7125-0.
LES MISSIONNAIRES FRANCAIS AU TONKIN ET AU SIAM XVIIe-XVIIIe SIECLES. Volume 3. By Alain Forest. Paris and Montreal; L'Harmattan. 1998. 495 pp. F230, 00, paper ISBN 2- 7384- 7126-9.
THis magisterial and meticulously researched history of the activities of French missionaries in Siam and northern Vietnam in the 1600s and 1700s can be said to make an important contribution to comparative Southeast Asian history, not just to the history of Western religious colonialism in Asia. (Forest in fact warns against giving this subject a colonialist stigma, arguing that unnamed Western scholars of Asia, so politically correct that they seem "more Asiatic than Asiatics themselves," are on shaky moral ground in denying the authenticity of Asian Christianities just because Asian elites resisted the new religion [vol. 1, p. 16] ). Basing himself upon the archives of the French Foreign Missions Society, created in Paris in 1663, and upon much wider reading as well, Forest organizes his three volumes around one cogent question. Why did French missionaries fail to make significant numbers of Christian conversions in Siam, yet achieve at least "a relative success" when they brought their religion...