Charles Robequain

Charles Robequain (23 June 1897, Auberives, Isère, France — 28 Sept. 1963, Rennes, France) was a French geographer, historian, economist and writer, amateur photographer, a pioneer in colonial and tropical geography who produced the first field-based doctoral monograph in geography on a region in the tropical world, the Thanh Hoa in Annam [Vietnam]. 

Enlisted in World War I, he resumed his studies in 1919, becoming secondary school teacher in 1922. From 10 April 1924 to 10 April 1926, he was corresponding member of EFEO in Annam [he signed ​“Former member of EFEO” after 1928], presenting his doctoral thesis on the Thanh Hoa region in 1928. He stayed in French Indochina until 1935, teaching at Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi and traveling extensively in the region.

Professor of geography at Rennes University, then at Sorbonne University, he was incarcerated by the collaborationist authorities in 1940 – 1941, resuming his teaching after World War II, advocating an ​“enlighted colonialism” until the independence movements made this view obsolete in the 1950s. His study L’évolution économique de l’Indochine française (1939), translated into English in 1944, was one of the main working papers for Charles de Gaulle’s Comite de la France Libre (French Committee of Liberation). In 1950, he also served as president of the Board of the quadripartite EFEO, short-lived institution launched in 1949 to associate not-yet independent Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos to the scientific activities in the region.

• Le Thanh Hoa. Étude géographique d’une province annamite (thesis), Paris/​Bruxelles, EFEO/​van Oest (PEFEO, 24), 1929, 2 volumes, 243 & 636 pp.
• “Le pays et les hommes”, in Indochine [ed. Sylvain Levi], Paris, SEGMC, 1931.
• Thanh Hoa, Documents historiques et legendes villageoises reunies en 1924 – 28, manuscript given to EFEO Library by C.R. in 1939.
• L’évolution économique de l’Indochine française, Paris, Hartmann, 1939; English: The Economic Development of French Indochina, tr. Isabel A. Ward, New York, Oxford University Press/​Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944. 
• Le monde malais — Péninsule Malaise — Sumatra — Java — Bornéo — Celèbes — Bali et Les Petites Isles De La Sonde — Moluques — Philippines, Paris, Payot, 510 p., 1946. 
• L’Indochine française, Paris, A. Colin, 1948.
• “Les genres de vie montagnards”, in L’Indochine (Viet Nam, Cambodge, Laos), Paris, A. Colin, 1952, p. 77 – 98.
• Paesi dell’ex Indocina : il Cambogia, Milano, 1957 [brochure with photographs and map]
• Madagascar et les bases dispersées de l’Union française, Paris, PUF, 1958.
• Malaya, Indonesia, Borneo, and the Philippines: Geographical, Economic, and Political Description, London, 1961.

Photo: Charles Robequain portrayed in a 1937 Ouest-Éclair periodical publication, via Wikipedia.