Andrée Viollis

Andrée Viollis (Andrée Jacquet or Andrée Théry, ​“Viollis” being a penname) (9 Dec 1870, Mées, France – 9 Aug 1950, Paris) was a prominent woman journalist and writer, anti-fascist and feminist activist who denounced colonial political repression in French Indochina in the 1930s.

It was from her second husband, Henri d’Ardenne de Tizac, curator of the Musée Cernuschi (with an important collection of Southeast Asian art) and author of novels under the pseudonym of Jean Viollis, that she took the penname Andrée Viollis, writing for numerous newspapers such as La Fronde, L’Écho de Paris, Excelsior, Le Petit Parisien, The Times, Daily Mail, and left-wing publications Vendredi, Ce soir, and L’Humanité. 

Reporting from the USSR in 1927, covering the Afghan civil war in 1929, reporting on British India (‘L’Inde contre les Anglais’ [India Against the Brits])she traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia in Oct-Nov. 1931 with then-Minister for the Colonies Paul Reynaud, and published articles criticizing the brutality of the French colonial administration. In 1935, she published the book Indochine S.O.S., after serializing her travel in 1931 in Le Petit Parisien, for which she was a foreign correspondent along Albert Londres.  

Analyzing the evolution of Renee Viollis’ tone in her writings about Indochina from 1931 to 1935, Kimberley J. Healey noted

Her newspaper articles are thus overall pleasant in tone and rarely reveal any problems with the situation in Indochina. The people are quiet, the landscapes are as beautiful as those in France and the hotels have large beds. Reading Viollis, Parisians may even have been tempted to go on a holiday to Indochina. She does say that the coal mines are horrid but at the time the coal mines in France were nasty places as well. The journalistic value of these articles is questionable. […] Whether Viollis’ tepid newspaper writing is due to her gender, the minister’s influence, the difficulty in freely transmitting information or her desire to paint a positive picture is difficult to ascertain. In her book, however, she does not hesitate in shocking and horrifying the reader. She describes torture, brutality, famine, and disaster in great detail. Nonetheless, apart from a few frustrated asides, she still refrains from being overtly critical of the minister and of the French government. The text that she published in Esprit (1933) is much shorter and presents most of the horrifying parts of her book, skipping over the more detailed and balanced descriptions of daily life in Indochina. The three texts thus read as a schizophrenic series of observations although they were all supposedly written at exactly the same time based on the same journey. [Kimberley J. Healey, ​“Andrée Viollis in Indochina: The Objective and Picturesque Truth about French Colonialism,” Asian Journal of Social Science 31 – 1, 2003:19 – 35, p. 30.]

Member of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, Andrée Viollis supported the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War at the end of the 1930s, and later joined the French Résistance.

Select Publications

• L’Inde contre les Anglais, Paris, Editions du Portique, 1931.
• “L’arrivée à Saigon de M. Paul Reynaud.” Le Petit Parisien, 17 October 1931: 1 – 2.
• “M. Reynaud en Indochine.” Le Petit Parisien, 20 October 1931: 1, 4.
• “Quatre jours d’enchantement.” Le Petit Parisien, 28 October 1931: 1, 2.
• “M. Paul Reynaud poursuivant son enquête visite l’Annam.” Le Petit Parisien, 6 Nov. 1931: 1, 4.
• “Visions rapides d’un Tonkin éblouissant et fantomatique.” Le Petit Parisien, 17 Nov. 1931: 1, 4.
• “L’adieu de M. Reynaud à l’Indochine.” Le Petit Parisien, 19 Nov. 1931: 1, 3.
• “Quelques notes sur l’Indochine.” Esprit, 1st Dec. 1933: 401 – 48.
• Indochine S.O.S., Paris: Gallimard, 1935.