This article is taken from
Figaro Histoire
“French Indochina, from the conquest to Diên Bien Phu”
. Discover in this issue
the history of France's Asian century.
Cover of issue on French Indochina. Le Figaro History
This May 29, 1914, at the dawn of a conflict that will tear Europe apart, it has been sixteen years since Léon Busy left the distant metropolis and settled in Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin, in the north of French Indochina. . Born in 1874, a polytechnician at the age of 21, he opted for the colonial army and served since 1898 as a commissary lieutenant. There, he can also combine his two passions: exoticism and photography, a still-infancy art that he practices, during his leave, on behalf of the Geographical Society, keen to collect photos of these still little-known regions. This May 29, informed of the existence of a major project aimed at documenting through images all the countries of the world, our man is applying to provide his testimony on this region of the world that he knows better than anyone else.
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