Biography

French naval physician, natural scientist and colonial administrator in Southeast Asia. Jules Harmand was born in Saumur and studied medicine in Paris and Strasbourg. He first stepped ashore at Cochinchina (present-day south Vietnam) in 1866 as a medical officer in the French navy. Soon after serving in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he was in the East again, joining Louis Delaporte at Angkor in Cambodia as an expedition scientist. He also made scientific collections in Tonkin (north Vietnam), where he served under the command of Francis Garnier and explored the Red River with Balny d'Avricourt in 1873. He returned to France in 1874, then sailed again to Indo-China in 1875, where he explored parts of southern Laos, the Mekong River and Siam (Thailand), as well as ascending several peaks in the great mountain chains of Indo-China.

After a sojourn in France from 1878-1881, during which time he organised the Indochina section of the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Harmand's diplomatic career began as he was appointed French Consul in Bangkok. He later took up the post of French civil commissioner-general for Tonkin in June 1883, which saw him involved in the Sino-French War. In 1885 he moved to Calcutta as Consul General and in 1889 visited Chile in a plenipotentiary role. In 1894 he was involved in frontier negotiations with Siam (Thailand), while his final role in foreign diplomacy was as plenipotentiary minister in Tokyo from 1894, during conflicts between that country and China and Russia. He retired with the title of ambassador in 1907 and settled in Paris, where his interest in Southeast Asian affairs continued as an active member of several committees and societies dedicated to colonial politics and science in the region.

Harmand often published accounts of his travels in the bulletin of the Paris Geographical Society and other French journals. He was president of the French Geographical Society from 1912. Harmand's major oeuvre however, was a political work, Domination et Colonisation, published in 1910. An influential tome, it championed indirect rule and argued against assimilation. He was also against Western education for the subjects of colonies in Asia and Africa, claiming that advanced scientific learning was unsuited to their minds, which he considered less advanced evolutionarily to those of the European.

Harmand died at Poitiers in 1921. His papers (mostly to do with Southeast Asian politics) are held at Cornell University Library. The plant genera Harmandia Pierre ex Baill., Harmandiana B. de Lesd. and Harmandiella Constantin are not named after this Jules Harmand but in honour of the contemporary French clergyman and lichenologist Julien Herbert August Jules Harmand (1844-1915).

Sources:
L. Finot, 1922, "Jules Harmand", Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 22: 402-404.