Consul versus council: how the French Concession was governed, 1848–1875

The short answer. The French Concession was not a smaller copy of the International Settlement. Next door, the land renters elected a council that governed; in the French Concession the consul governed, and the council, when it existed, advised him. That outcome was not planned. It was settled in a quarrel of 1865 between a consul-general who thought the councillors “mere administrators” and five merchants who thought they ran a town, and written into a règlement of 1866 that lasted, with one revision, until 1943. The concession’s own official history, published in Paris in 1929 from the consulate’s archives, tells the story with a candour its sponsors may not have expected.

Read with: this is the close-up of the first thirty years. For the whole system from 1849 to the handover of 1943, the definitive statute of 1868–69, the utility contracts and the extensions, see How the French Concession was run.

1848: a consul, a merchant and 2.4 mu

France had a treaty right to a settlement at Shanghai from 1844 and no one to use it. The man sent was Charles de Montigny, named consular agent by a decree of 20 January 1847, who left Le Havre on 20 May that year, changed ships at Singapore, and “débarquait à Changhai le 25 janvier 1848, après un voyage de plus de huit mois”, without his credentials, to lodge in the one hotel in the British settlement. He had no compatriots to govern. The first French merchant, a thirty-two-year-old named Rémi who had sold watches, wine and spirits at Canton for six years, arrived at the end of July 1848 and asked to buy land. Montigny used the request as the pretext for his own: a formal demand to the daotai for a French concession, dated 6 August 1848.

The French history is clear-eyed about how little was at stake on the ground. Rémi had wanted about twelve mu; the owner of the plot he chose, which held forty-six houses and a stock of stored coffins, asked 300 taels a mu, a hundred for each house and fifty a coffin. After more than eight months of haggling, on 8 January 1849, Rémi bought “2 mows, 3 feuns, 8 li et 5 hao”, a nearly empty strip beside the Yangjingbang, for 457 dollars in all and a perpetual rent of 1,500 cash a mu. The authors call it “le premier jalon”, the first survey marker. The Chinese gazetteer, drawing on the same episode, records that Montigny had threatened the daotai with a French warship to get the price fixed.

6 April 1849: a charter without an area

The proclamation that created the concession was posted on Friday 6 April 1849, the fourteenth day of the third month of Daoguang’s twenty-ninth year, over the daotai Lin Gui’s seal, in a translation the history takes from the Jesuit sinologist Pierre Hoang. It is, the authors write, at once the concession’s “acte de naissance et la Charte”. It fixed four limits, the city moat to the south, the Yangjingbang to the north, the river between the Guangdong–Chaozhou guild hall and the creek’s mouth to the east, and the Guandi temple and the Zhu family bridge to the west, and said that if the ground proved insufficient more would be agreed later, that rents must follow local prices, and that other nationals wanting land inside must apply through the French consul. It gave no area. The figure of 986 mu that every later account repeats, including the Chinese gazetteer’s, is a survey result, not a term of the grant; the French history never uses it, and gives the concession’s size only once before 1928, as 59 hectares after the 1861 extension, which is about 885 mu.

The limits were not filled for years. The history notes that the southern limit, the moat, was reached only in 1861, and that the western limit was a creek, the Zhoujing, which was covered over in 1900 to make the Boulevard de Montigny, the concession’s tribute to its founder and today’s Xizang Road South. The consulate itself stood by the river at the Yangjingbang’s mouth, beside Rémi’s plot, and the concession’s first street, the Rue du Consulat, ran west from it.

1862: a council of five

For thirteen years the consul ran the concession through a small roads committee, three of whose members would sit on the first council, and the daotai’s officers went on collecting Chinese taxes inside it. The council came in the spring of 1862, when the Taipings were at Shanghai’s edge for the second time and the Settlement across the creek was building drains and barracks. A consular order of 28 April 1862, published the next day by the consul Benoît Edan, “a établi un conseil d’administration municipale, composé de cinq membres”, all five French: Schmidt, Buissonnet, Meynard, Maniquet and Fajard, merchants appointed for two years and presented to the landowners’ assembly on 5 May. They chose Buissonnet as president and Schmidt as treasurer and held their first working session at the consulate on 9 May. Edan’s position was that municipal administration “ne peut être exercée que par des citoyens français”; the British consul Medhurst protested politely on 15 May that a separate French council contradicted the Land Regulations all three consuls had signed in 1854, and Edan answered that the French minister had told him Paris had never approved that signature.

The council’s first discovery was that it had no money. “Naturellement aucun budget n’était prévu”: the consul had simply drawn on the cash box. In principle an eight per cent tax on the rental value of Chinese houses brought in some 10,000 dollars a year, and that was the only regular revenue; the European tax was not being collected at all, and the fees on gambling houses, brothels and boats were “fixed arbitrarily by police agents”. The councillors resolved to collect everything themselves. They refused a Chinese contractor’s offer to farm the boat, opium-den and restaurant taxes for 2,000 dollars a year, took over the Chinese taxes from 1 June, backdated the European tax to 1 January, and set licences: 150 dollars a year for a hotel, bar or European restaurant, two dollars a room a month for a Chinese one. On 1 June 1862 they took over the police as well, a force of twenty-three men under a commissioner paid 200 dollars a month; thirteen of the twenty-three went on strike and were dismissed on the spot. The books for the year to 31 March 1863 show receipts of 20,378 taels and 46,115 dollars against spending of 19,374 taels and 44,373 dollars. In April 1863 the daotai ended Chinese taxation inside the concession and agreed to pay a police subsidy of four to five thousand taels a year, the same bargain his predecessors had struck with the Settlement. By 1865 the council’s budget was 111,522 taels, and the largest single item on the receipts side, 43,500 taels, was licences on gambling houses. The French Concession’s municipal government was founded on the tables.

1865: who commands the police?

The quarrel that decided the concession’s constitution began over those tables. The consul-general from 1864 was the vicomte Brenier de Montmorand, a career diplomat with no patience for merchants’ assemblies. By the landowners’ meetings of 1 and 24 May 1865 the two sides were arguing in the open about whether the consul could appoint councillors at all. On 10 June he ordered the gambling houses closed from the 12th without consulting the council, which wrote that it refused its “concours”, then thought better of it and withdrew the letter; Brenier told the legation that “mon ordonnance de dissolution était prête”. The Chaigneau affair of 30 June, a dispute over the handling of a case, produced his statement of principle: “Le seul pouvoir exécutif à Changhai sur la concession française est le consulat général de France”, and the councillors “sont de simples administrateurs et non un pouvoir”. The council’s claim that paying for the police gave it the right to command them he met with a soldier’s comparison: the paymaster of a regiment would then have more right than the colonel to command it.

The council pressed the point anyway. On 10 August 1865 it voted to give the police chief written instructions, approved the text on 30 September and sent it on 2 October without telling the consulate. On 12 October 1865 Brenier dissolved the council by ordinance, “faite et donnée au consulat général de France à Changhai”, citing an ordinance of 1681, and named a provisional commission of eight in its place: three Frenchmen and, for the first time, five foreigners, among them the British merchants Dent, Hanbury and Whittall. When the landowners met on 19 October, thirty-two of thirty-nine present or represented, no one said a word in the dissolved council’s defence. The Chinese gazetteer’s summary is that from this conflict the French foreign ministry’s règlement fixed the consul’s absolute authority over the council; the French history, written under the council’s own patronage, says the same thing at greater length.

1866: the règlement

The Règlement d’organisation municipale, drafted in Paris and dated 11 July 1866, was published in the North-China Herald on the 14th and in force from 1 September. Its first article gave the concession a council of the consul-general and eight members, “dont quatre Français et quatre étrangers”, elected for two years and renewed by half each year. The consul presided by right, with a casting vote. He could suspend the council for up to three months or dissolve it, with elections within six months. The police were under him alone, though the budget paid for them. And the key clause, article 10: “Les délibérations du conseil municipal ne sont exécutoires qu’en vertu d’un arrêté du consul général”. On budgets, tariffs, taxes and property he had to issue the order within eight days; on streets, public works, health rules and expropriations he could refuse by a reasoned decision, subject to the minister in Beijing. Article 5 allowed “un ou plusieurs notables chinois ou chefs de corporations”, chosen by the consul with the daotai, to be admitted “avec voix consultative”, a voice and no vote, and only if the council agreed. The authors’ summary is exact: Brenier’s idea “que le conseil devait seulement remplir des fonctions délibératives, soumises à la décision du consul, se trouvait confirmée”. The council was “affranchi de la tutelle des résidents, mais pour se trouver sous celle, plus étroite, du consul”. The landowners’ assembly, which across the creek was the sovereign body, lost its powers altogether.

The first election under the code, on 28 September 1866, had 160 electors and returned a mixed council, Morel, Fearon, Whittall, Monnier, Yates, Théric, Dato and Millot, Morel as president. The British, American and Prussian consuls protested at once, chiefly over an article on arrests. The revised règlement of 14 April 1868 answered them, dropped the property qualification so that any elector of twenty-five could stand, and took the power of dissolution away from the consul and gave it to the French minister in Beijing with Paris’s approval; electors numbered 180 in 1867 and 204 in 1868. On 24 September 1869 the legations of France, Britain, the United States, Russia and North Germany approved the code from 1 November, and “ce règlement fixait le statut définitif de la concession”. The Chinese gazetteer adds the later chapters: however the council was chosen, every decision needed the consul’s approval, and in substance the Conseil d’administration municipale remained “a high-level advisory body to the French consul” to the end.

1874: the Ningbo guild’s dead

The règlement did not settle the question of the Chinese residents, who outnumbered the French by two hundred to one. The council’s street plan ran through the burial ground of the Ningbo guild, the Siming Gongsuo, at the concession’s southern edge by the city moat, and the guild petitioned against it on 27 January, 24 March and 27 April 1874. The council rejected the petition on 7 April. The consul-general, Godeaux, asked on 28 April that the work be suspended and on 2 May that the council reconsider; the council did not. On Sunday 3 May 1874, “à quatre heures et demie du soir”, the alarm bells rang in what the French history calls the first riot the foreign settlements had known. At about half past two a municipal guard had been attacked on the Rue du Consulat; Godeaux kept the guard inside the town hall; the roads officer Percebois fired from his house and his second shot killed a man; foreigners were beaten and houses burned, and order was restored by French and American sailors, the Settlement’s Volunteers and, after ten at night, Chinese troops. “Du côté chinois, il y avait six morts.” The next day the consul issued a proclamation annulling the council’s decision, and the council protested.

The settlement took four years. Brenier de Montmorand, by then minister at Beijing, arranged it in August 1878: indemnities of 37,650 taels, “7,000 taëls furent versés aux familles des Chinois tués”, and the council, which had claimed 3,190 taels in damages, received 1,236. The Chinese conditions were that the council give up its two streets and that the guild’s hall and ground be exempt from municipal tax. The authors call the outcome “le triomphe de l’émeute” and blame the long feud between consul and council for it. On the second Ningbo affair, in July 1898, the French history has only a footnote: “émeute très grave, qui fut réprimée par la force”, after which the municipality “resta enfin maîtresse du terrain”. The Chinese gazetteer fills in what the footnote leaves out: seventeen Chinese killed by French troops on 16 July 1898, and in the settlement that followed, the doubling of the concession to 2,135 mu, with the guild’s ground, at last, preserved.

Who lived there

The census the council recorded on 21 March 1865 is the concession’s first count: 460 Europeans, of whom 259 were French, 359 men, 79 women and 22 children, and 55,465 Chinese, some 8,000 of them floating population, a total of 55,925 against 137,771 for the two settlements together. A decade later the number had fallen by nearly half, to about 33,000 at the end of 1875, with some 300 Europeans and 100 French among them: the refugees of the Taiping years had gone home after Suzhou fell in 1864, and the French Concession, with its gambling houses and its moat, had less to hold them than the Settlement. The 1928 preface gives the other end of the curve: 358,453 inhabitants on 10,150,000 square metres, 92 kilometres of streets and a budget of 3,816,561 taels.

A note on the book

The history these pages rest on was written by Charles Maybon, who had spent twelve years in Shanghai and died suddenly before it was finished, and Jean Fredet, from archives the consulate and the council opened to them and which, they warn, have “lacunes considérables” for the first thirty years. It was published by Plon in Paris in 1929 under the patronage of the foreign ministry, the council and the French chamber of commerce, and it stops in 1875; the promised second volume did not appear. Its sponsors got a book that records their predecessors’ quarrels, their gambling revenue and the riot their street plan caused, which is more than most municipal histories manage.

What to look for

Yan’an Road East at the Bund is where the consulate and Rémi’s plot stood on the south bank of the creek; Jinling Road East is the Rue du Consulat, still with the arcades the council required of its frontages in 1928. Xizang Road South is the Boulevard de Montigny on the filled western creek. The gate of the Siming Gongsuo stands on Renmin Road, the last trace of the guild hall whose burial ground stopped a street plan in 1874 and a concession’s expansion in 1898.