Sense and Sensibility : The French in the Philippines (2)
Bambi Harper
Inquirer News Service
ALTHOUGH our relations with France may not be as comprehensive as the ones with China, Spain and the United States, France was the first country to have a consul here, a certain Adolphe Barrot, in 1835. He rented a house in the district of San Miguel, beside the Pasig River, where eventually toward the end of the 19th century, a large brewery that we all know was located and took the name of the church and the district. Eventually, it relocated to the Malate district and then to Escolta Street, in the same building as La Estrella del Norte, which belonged to the Levy family.
At the time of Barrot's tenure, there were fewer than 10 Frenchmen in the country: "two doctors, one planter (la Gironier), one trader (Vidie who eventually bought Jala-Jala from the former), one agent, Genu, one plantation manager, one gold seeker, and one military man in the service of Spain. In 1843, there was a carriage-maker who did very well; in 1847, a band master who left his ship to supervise the music of the Manila Garrison, and in 1853, an engineer, F. Gabaud, was awarded the Legion of Honor for building the first suspension bridge in the country." By 1857, their number had grown to 26, with 20 living in Manila, two in Iloilo, one in Cebu, one in Jala-Jala, one on Negros Island, and one in Camarines Province. In 1891, there were seven jewelers, a drapes-maker, a dressmaker and three professors.
You'd be amused to learn that the ladies wanted a French couture house to be established in Manila and that the three jewelers, the Ullmans, Greilsammers and Levys, "struck it rich…through Mexican piaster-smuggling, the sale of French perfume imitations and flooding of cheap German goods under the French label."
In May 11, 1805, Captain Motard of the ship Semillante, while escorting a galleon to Acapulco, was forced into combat with a British cruiser, Phaeton, and a brig, Harrier, in San Jacinto Bay (Ticao Island, Albay). With the help of the parish priest and the people, he succeeded in subduing the enemy but lost four men with 10 others wounded. Upon leaving, he presented the priest with 12 guns and 200 pounds of gunpowder. The priest was also invited to the burial of one of the soldiers who died. Engraved in copper over his tomb in the church was an inscription: "Francois Gois, ensign of the frigate Semillante, led by Captain Motard, officer of the Legion of Honor, killed in battle, which this frigate of 36 cannon fought against a British frigate of 44 and a corvette of 20 cannonade … in San Jacinto of Ticao, of the Philippine Islands, on 14 Thermidor Year XIII. His body lies here and his comrades offered this token of their memories and regrets."
And if that church has not been remodeled beyond recognition by some zealous and ignorant parish priest or felled by an earthquake or gutted by fire, Ensign Gois' bones should still be lying beneath his inscription under this foreign sky.
I did say I wasn't going to dwell on Gironiere since many of you are already familiar with his book, "Vingt Annees aux Philippines" (1853), except to mention two things. One is that he left the Philippines in 1836 after a series of misfortunes where he lost his first daughter, his wife, his son and his brother. He returned to the Philippines in 1857 where he managed the sugar plantation of the Roxases in Calauang town in Laguna province. Apropos of nothing but curiosity, in connection with Calauang, in the church is a marble sepulchral tablet with an inscription to a lady with the surname Punzalan Vda. de Roxas. Since her name does not appear in the genealogical tree of the present-day Makati Roxases, could she be of the Hidden Valley Roxases?
Discouraged by a policy that wasn't particularly friendly to foreign investors (during the entire period of Spanish domination, there was never a French bank, their consuls had no jurisdiction over their nationals and there were numerous impediments to trade; to be fair, other foreigners had difficulties as well), the French also regarded natural calamities as another drawback. In 1880, an earthquake leveled agricultural developer Daillard's enterprise as well as the consul's residence. The latter reported that his furniture which may have had some value once "no longer has any."
The following year, a cyclone tore off the roof of the French consulate and shattered doors and windows. The consul sat on a pile of furniture writing his report. "I camp here," he wrote, "as if in the field of battle..."
The cholera epidemic that broke out in the same year claimed 100,000 victims, including the American consul and 10 French nationals. A scandal swept through the small foreign community in 1890 when the consul Nodot died in office, leaving behind a debt of 27 piastres and 300 unpaid empty bottles of wine!
The opinions of various French observers also make interesting reading. Here is Lavolee's take: "From the purely material point of view, are the Spanish friars not correct to say that the inhabitants of the Philippines are the happiest beings in the world?"
That was more than a hundred years ago. And Time Magazine recently reported the same thing: We're still the happiest idiots in the world. Nobody's attributing it to the fact that we might be laughing because it's too painful to cry.
(Data from Denis Nardin's thesis, "France and the Philippines," 1974.)
