p38γ and δ promote heart hypertrophy by targeting the mTOR- mTOR-inhibitory protein DEPTOR for degradation

In 1863, after lengthy negotiations, the French concluded a treaty of protection with Cambodia’s King Norodom. The treaty was a lifeline for Cambodia, after continued Vietnamese and Thai annexation had threatened its very existence.²⁹French intentions, although marked with the air of self-righteous piety that characterized the French colonial ex-perience in other countries, were decidedly nonchalant. Early French explorers, although exotic in their descriptions, generally believed Cam-bodia was inhospitable and its people lazy. The benefit to the French in establishing a Cambodian protectorate was to exploit its strategic geo-graphic location. France was able to offer Cambodia protection against its predatory Thai and Vietnamese neighbors. In return, for no other reason than its position, Cambodia would “protect” the lucrative French colony in Cochinchina (now southern Vietnam) against encroachments by both Thailand and the British colonies west of Cambodia.

It is difficult to understand what the French hoped to achieve in Cambodia. There is little doubt that for at least some of the French authorities, the mission civilisatrice was a fundamental concern. How much of a concern may never be known. There is also little doubt that

in comparison to the neighboring Vietnamese colonies, the French demonstrated very little interest in establishing a serious presence in Cambodia. A revenue crisis, caused by King Norodom’s administrative ineptitude, in tandem with the righteous conviction conjured up by the mission civilisatrice, led to an increase in French intervention toward the end of the nineteenth century. At no stage was this intervention to seri-ously infiltrate the world of the Cambodian peasantry.

French Colonial Ideology

French colonial policies were almost always developed in Paris. From there, they were sent to the furthest realms of French occupation. Any definition of French colonial ideology must therefore take account of what was happening in the French capital, where debates about the eco-nomic benefits of colonialism were coupled with a righteous sense that colonization would benefit uncivilized natives. As early as the sixteenth century, French colonists were accompanied on their journeys by a be-lief in the righteousness of their actions. A noted historian of the French colonial presence in Vietnam and Cambodia argued that “a dominant theme of colonial theory, in both Cochinchina and Cambo-dia, was the belief in a French mission civilisatrice.”³⁰It was an argument firmly grounded in the writings of the early French explorers who trav-eled to the region, and it served to justify the French commitment to assimilation.³¹

Assimilation was arguably the backbone of French colonial ideology.

The theory was aimed at “the elimination of parochial cultures and the creation of men who are peers and culturally undifferentiated.”³² Its roots were grounded in the deep-seated political and philosophical tra-ditions inherited and absorbed by postrevolutionary France: notions of egalitarianism, a commitment to administrative centralization, and a desire for precision in legal and constitutional matters.³³Each of these influences helps us to understand the French attempt to impose uni-formity and European rationality on its socially, geographically, and cul-turally diverse colonies.

Before arriving on the Indochinese peninsula, the French had ac-tively pursued their assimilationist doctrine in Africa. Typical French colonial policy there was characterized by annexation, the attempted destruction of native culture, the destruction of native government, and the economic principle of l’exclusif, a tariff arrangement whereby French colonies could only export to France and could import only from or through France using French ships. The French initially approached

Indochina in much the same way as they had approached Africa. The years that followed the establishment of the Cochinchinese colony saw protectorates established in the other states of Indochina, Cambodia be-ing the first. Disregardbe-ing indigenous cultures, France attempted “to lump five dissimilar states into a loose union.”³⁴

In terms of our understanding of French Indochina, the period of early French involvement is remarkable only in terms of the depth of its failure. The French soon realized, in a most expensive manner, that Southeast Asian trade patterns bore no similarity to those of Africa and that traditional systems of authority and government were of consider-able strength. The problems were compounded by the fact that colonial policy, directed with global uniformity from Paris, was placed increas-ingly under the microscope and was widely criticized by those humani-tarians inspired by the Enlightenment.

The impact of the doctrine of assimilation on Cambodia was neg-ligible. The early years of French administration have been described as a “heroic period,” where the “government remained in the hands of young naval officers hungry for glory, eager for promotion, and en-tranced by the exotic setting in which they found themselves.”³⁵By the late 1870s, with a reasonable degree of control established in Vietnam, the French increasingly turned their attention to Cambodia. They were immediately repulsed by the oppressive yet haphazard administration of King Norodom and his many sycophants. The French reaction, fueled by economic concerns, was the treaty forced on Norodom in 1884 by the governor-general of Cochinchina, Charles Thomson.

The two main elements of the treaty were the placement of French résidents in provincial centers and the abolition of slavery. The presence of French officials throughout the country did little to incite the Cam-bodian elite. Their major contention arose from the decision to abolish slavery, a move that would significantly undermine the traditional sys-tem of exploitation through which the precolonial state had been main-tained. The treaty, although ratified in 1886, was never fully imple-mented, after a nationwide rebellion sponsored by the elite broke out in 1885. The event was not an outright defeat for the French. Instead, it signaled the beginning of a shift in approach. In the following years, rather than directly attack the Cambodian monarch, French officials surrounded Norodom with an entourage of sympathetic advisers.³⁶In doing so, they were intricately weaving the threads of European moder-nity with the fabric of the traditional polity.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the French slowly began to exert greater influence at the Cambodian court, although at no stage was it

extended to the masses in the countryside. Elsewhere in Indochina, the French were having difficulty establishing control. Eager to hear of French conquests and victories throughout the empire, Parisian policy-makers became disillusioned with the region, whose checkered history was a pall on the colonial landscape.³⁷It was within this atmosphere that Paul Doumer arrived in Indochina in 1897. Firmly committed to a rigid system of organization, Doumer believed he could bring economic de-velopment to the region. His appointment as governor-general is sig-nificant in that association, rather than assimilation, was more actively pursued in Indochina.

The policy of association, in contrast to that of assimilation, “empha-sized the need for variation in colonial practice.”³⁸In effect, it adopted many of the practices of British colonial policy, where indirect rule through the retention and utilization of native institutions was a de-fining feature. Central to association policy was the achievement of eco-nomic development, as it was believed that cooperation would lead to a more responsive labor force whose efforts would increase productivity.

The mission civilisatrice, rather than repudiated, was modified. The French, by their mere presence in a foreign land, still felt a moral oblig-ation to improve the social, cultural, and material status of the natives.

For Paul Doumer, Cambodia remained virgin territory. Indigenous institutions, although tinkered with by his predecessors, had functioned largely without the involvement of colonial administrators. Doumer’s approach was to allow Norodom and his appointed officials to govern as they had been, while continuing the delicate enmeshment of modernity and tradition by limiting French résidents to completely advisory func-tions. Like Thomson, he reinforced the presence of résidents throughout the country and attempted to abolish slavery. In terms of Cambodia’s development, the difference between Doumer and his predecessors was Doumer’s land titles ordinance of 1897, which recognized French titles to land.³⁹This new edict signaled the beginning of a more steady French infiltration of the Cambodian countryside.

Despite Doumer’s influence and efforts to restructure the Cambo-dian bureaucracy, the French never seriously pressed their claims for a substantial role in Cambodian administration. Two notable events illus-trate the limited extent to which the French had infilillus-trated the village world in the countryside. The first was the protests of 1916, when Cam-bodian peasants seeking to have the tax burden on them reduced, by-passed the French administration and presented their grievances di-rectly to the king. It was only after the king canceled any further corvée for 1916 and ordered the peasants back to their villages that the protest

delegations ceased.⁴⁰The second event, in 1925, was the assassination of French résident, Felix Bardez. After addressing an assembled crowd at the village of Kraang Laev, and arresting a number of delinquent tax payers, Bardez was set upon by a small group of people. The result of the struggle that ensued was the violent mutilation of Bardez and his com-panions. Reacting to the imperatives of local leaders, the large crowd that had earlier gathered to listen to Bardez then marched to Kompong Chhnang, demanding the remission of their taxes.⁴¹ In both cases, French administration, the French justice system, and French authority were all firmly rejected, and ignored, by the angry peasants.

The protests and the assassination of Bardez provide important anec-dotal evidence that the French grossly underestimated the strength of Cambodian social organization. In 1916, and again in 1925, the French were relying on their misguided perception of the docility and naïveté of Cambodia’s peasants in order to increase the degree of their ex-ploitation. Both events were the result of the French attempting to in-crease their tax receipts in Cambodia, even though the country was al-ready the most heavily taxed of the French concerns in Indochina. The marches on Phnom Penh and Kompong Chhnang are both evidence of the ability of the Khmer to organize and mobilize themselves and to establish effective lines of communication through their indigenous sys-tem of social relations. In turn, the so-called 1916 Affair and the assas-sination of Bardez point to a complete lack of French understanding of Cambodia and its people.⁴²

At no stage did French policies in Cambodia ever reflect the idea of assimilation. On the surface, we could entertain the idea that asso-ciation was more actively pursued in the Cambodian protectorate. A deeper analysis reveals, however, that this is clearly not the case either.

The French did not pursue a coherent policy of indirect rule in Cam-bodia that would benefit both themselves and the native population. In-stead, their policy direction, although characterized by a greater degree of control in matters of administration, resembled a series of contin-gencies, each determined by inadequate personnel and a complete lack of continuity.

The impact of French control on the lives of Cambodia’s peasants, in the main, had been insignificant. Preoccupied with their day-to-day sur-vival, with the food on their table, with rice cultivation, and with their Buddhist lifestyle, Cambodians continued to be locked into a cycle of lo-calized patron-client relationships. They continued to pay taxes to a higher authority as they had always done, supporting the lifestyle of an elite whom they rarely saw and with whom they had little in common.

French Educational Reforms

Early French efforts in regard to education in Cambodia reflected the nonchalance of initial attempts at administering the protectorate. In 1867, after only four years of the protectorate, King Norodom, under French patronage, established the first secular school in Cambodia, for the children of the royal family. A second school was established by Fer-reyrolles, a French military officer, in Phnom Penh in 1873.⁴³

Little is known about these schools. French concepts of reform in Cambodia, and their idealistic desire to civilize its people, were consis-tent with their policies in Cochinchina. The difference between the two lies in Cambodia’s status as a protectorate and Cochinchina’s status as a colony, where a concerted attempt at full assimilation was pursued. With a shortage of personnel, and operating under the pretext of indirect rule, Cambodia’s protectorate status “was honored to the extent that French interference stopped short of the mass of the people.”⁴⁴ The schools established in the early years of the protectorate were testament to this pattern. Their most discernible characteristic was their establish-ment by French residents and their exclusive use by the children of French residents, members of the Cambodian elite, Chinese merchants, and children of Vietnamese immigrants, recruited by the French to un-dertake tasks of administration in Cambodia.⁴⁵

The French education system had not touched the lives of the peas-antry. Early attempts to extend secular education beyond the elite had been met with a lack of commitment and foresight. A program inte-grating secular with Buddhist education established by M. Baudoin, in conjunction with a French teacher, M. Menetrier, in Kompong Cham province, for example, had not been pursued by his successors, seem-ingly because of a lack of official instructions.⁴⁶ The appointment of Albert Sarraut, a noted advocate of association policies, as governor-general of Indochina, marked a broadening of the mission, where edu-cation based on Western notions of formal schooling was to be extended to the local worlds of Cambodia’s peasantry. Prior to that, the token ed-ucational efforts of the colonial sovereign had catered to Cambodia’s ruling class. Cambodia’s peasants continued to be educated at the wat.

In 1918, Sarraut approved an educational blueprint whereby the children in the five countries of Indochina would receive identical schooling. It is worth noting that the proposed system for French dren and that for the non-French majority would differ. Whereas chil-dren from France would receive an education identical to that received in France, children native of the Indochinese countries would receive

an education similar to that of their French counterparts.⁴⁷While critics could not claim that the system, directed from Hanoi, had been de-signed in Paris and standardized for all colonies, its primary flaw was that it failed to take account of the diversity of Indochina. The religious, cultural, geographic, and demographic differences existing between the countries that made up the French union were steadfastly ignored.

Even casting aside its ignorance of diversity, Sarraut’s system was not without other shortcomings. It was soon realized that few children re-mained at school longer than three years; that parents preferred for their sons to continue to receive an education at the temple; that cultural constraints excluded girls from regular participation; that a significant shortage of trained teachers existed; that the scarcity of the population meant that village schools were not accessible to many pupils; and finally, that the public was largely apathetic to the system. Writing from a per-spective sympathetic to French colonial interests, one analyst propheti-cally declared that “it is natural for [Cambodian peasants] to think that a peasant’s son can acquire little information at the state school, where much French is taught but no agriculture.”⁴⁸

To overcome the obstacles, it was decided to use the temple schools, but to reform them. The reason for reform, it was stated, was that the temple schools, without curriculum, timetable, inspectors, or examina-tions, were inadequate and in a state of degeneration.⁴⁹To be fair, as one Cambodian historian observed, the temple schools were not with-out problems. The students often spent time engaging in activities in which their learning was limited, while the fact that monks could leave the pagoda as they pleased disrupted the stability of the system.⁵⁰While temple schools offered insufficient instruction, the underlying reason for the reforms sponsored by the French was that the monastic system was not synonymous with the Western notion of formal schooling. After deeming successful a teacher training program carried out in Kampot province in 1924, it was decided to expand the new system throughout the country.⁵¹It is tempting to conclude that the severe jolt inflicted by the Bardez assassination in April 1925 was related to the rapid acceler-ation in the expansion of the use of reformed temple schools and therefore the potential expansion of French sovereignty in the follow-ing years.

It could easily be argued that the “modernized” temple schools were a fine example of “association,” in which colonial ideas and native insti-tutions were blended in harmony. A more cynical and possibly realistic assessment is that the modernization of the temple schools was a

finan-cially prudent move for the French. Rather than finance an entire edu-cation system, they were able to rely on existing teaching staff and exist-ing infrastructure financed by the villages themselves.⁵²Although it was stated that the modernized temple schools were only a temporary mea-sure, with the aim being the establishment of universal Franco-Khmer public schools, very little progress was made in the transformation phase or, in fact, at any other level of education.

Considering that modern education was regarded as a touchstone in the mission civilisatrice, the statistics of educational development prior to the onset of World War II paint a damning picture. In 1932/1933, there were 225 modernized temple schools in Cambodia. By 1938/1939, the number had increased to 908. Franco-Khmer public schools, offering the full primary curriculum, numbered 18 in 1932/1933, with the same number of establishments in 1938/1939. Despite the policy of transfor-mation, there was not a single Franco-Khmer primary school inaugu-rated during these years. Enrollments at Franco-Khmer primary schools increased by approximately 150 percent during the period, compared with almost 500 percent for modernized temple schools. In 1938/1939, only 294 students passed the Certificat d’études primaires complémentaires (Certificate of Complementary Primary Studies), despite the fact that almost 60,000 students were enrolled at primary schools.⁵³ Full sec-ondary education was offered for the first time only in 1935, when the Collège Sisowath was given full lycée status.⁵⁴Although some technical and administrative education was available, students from Cambodia wishing to pursue further studies were forced to travel to Saigon, Hanoi, or Paris.⁵⁵

It is questionable whether the French were ever truly serious about providing Cambodia’s peasants with modern education. Given the steady decline in French activity, it appears that the enthusiasm gener-ated by Sarraut’s reforms quickly subsided in an avalanche of impedi-ments and problems. It is obvious that Cambodia was never afforded the same degree of French commitment to education as were the French colonies in Vietnam. In order to carry out their mission civilisatrice there,

It is questionable whether the French were ever truly serious about providing Cambodia’s peasants with modern education. Given the steady decline in French activity, it appears that the enthusiasm gener-ated by Sarraut’s reforms quickly subsided in an avalanche of impedi-ments and problems. It is obvious that Cambodia was never afforded the same degree of French commitment to education as were the French colonies in Vietnam. In order to carry out their mission civilisatrice there,