How the French Concession was run: the consul, the council and the règlement, 1849–1943

The short answer. Shanghai had two foreign towns, and they were governed on opposite principles. North of the Yangjingbang the International Settlement was run by a council of nine elected by the ratepayers, with the consuls kept at arm’s length; south of it the French Concession was run by the French consul-general, who chaired its council, convened it when he chose, could refuse to put its resolutions into effect, commanded its police, and in 1865 dissolved it outright. The rules that said so, the Règlement d’organisation municipale of 1866, revised in 1868, were written in Paris after that dissolution, sanctioned by the powers’ ministers in 1869 on the same day as the Settlement’s own Land Regulations, and were still the concession’s constitution when it was handed over in 1943. This article follows them from the ordonnance of 1862 that created the council to the handover, mostly through the history that two French officials, Maybon and Fredet, published in 1929 from the consulate’s own archives.

Read with: this is the overview of the institutions over ninety-four years. The founding decades, the merchant’s 2.4 mu, the council the consul dissolved in 1865 and the Ningbo guild riot of 1874, are told in detail in Consul versus council.

1849: a concession on a different footing

The French consul Charles de Montigny got his concession on 6 April 1849 by an exchange with the daotai Lin, eight months after he began asking, and he got it on a principle the British had not written into theirs: “no Chinese or foreign official would be allowed to exercise his power within the boundaries of the French Concession”. The ground was a wedge between the city moat, the Yangjingbang and the river, and for its first thirteen years it had no government but the consulate. When the Settlement’s land renters adopted the Land Regulations of 1854 and elected the first Municipal Council, the French consul Edan signed with the British and American consuls, and the French Concession was for a time part of the arrangement. Paris never ratified the signature, and that omission became the French Concession’s founding fact.

1862: a council of five, by consular order

Edan created his own council in the spring of 1862, while the Taipings were at the gates and the Settlement was building the Defence Creek. His justification, which he quoted from the French minister Bourboulon, was that the regulations of 1854 “are since remained a dead letter” for France. By an arrêté dated 28 April 1862 and published the next day, he set up “a municipal administrative council, composed of five members, to whom he delegates his full powers”. The five were French, Schmidt, Buissonnet, Meynard, Maniquet and Fajard, and they were to take office “from 1 May next”. On 5 May the council was presented to the concession’s landowners, a meeting Maybon calls, quoting his own lecture of 1924, “the true birth certificate” of the council. The British consul protested mildly. Edan wrote home that “every day I congratulate myself on the creation of my municipal council, which is working”. Pott, writing in English in 1928, gives the date as 13 May and the character as “all its decisions were subject to the approval or veto of the French Consul”, which is the one thing every account agrees on.

It was a small administration with a small income and large expenses. The French police “counted, at the start of 1862, eighteen men”, which Maybon calls too few. The treasury, Pott says, “depended largely on income derived from licenses to opium divans, brothels and gambling houses”, and Maybon’s chapter on the financial difficulties of 1864–65 has a section headed “the question of the gaming houses”. The Settlement’s council, which banned gambling and licensed opium for revenue, was in no position to sneer, but the contrast was noticed, and it coloured relations between the two councils for eighty years.

1865: the consul dissolves his council

The councillors of 1862 had been given the consul’s “full powers”, and within three years they had begun to act as if they had powers of their own. The consul by then was Brenier de Montmorand, and his view was stated in a letter of 30 June 1865 over a licence dispute: “The only executive power at Shanghai on the French concession is the consulate-general of France.” The councillors, he wrote, “are mere administrators and not a power”. He had told the legation in Peking on 16 June that “my ordinance of dissolution was ready”. What set it off, Maybon says plainly, was the police: “it was the police question that provoked it.” The council voted written instructions to the chief of police on 10 August 1865 and sent them to him on 2 October, as if the police were its own; the règlement that followed would say in so many words that they were not.

The ordonnance was “made and given at the consulate-general of France at Shanghai, 12 October 1865”. It dissolved the council, appointed a provisional municipal commission and gave the old councillors a month to render their accounts. Maybon adds, from the consul’s papers, that the councillors had meant to resign with a flourish and that the dissolution forestalled them. The landowners met on 19 October, “thirty-two owners (out of 39)” present or represented, with the police ordered to keep the doors of the municipal hall closed, and the dissolved councillors absent. The commission of eight that Brenier named under E. Morel had three French members and five foreign ones, Tyson, Bernard, Dent, Hanbury, Allen, Whitthall and Massais; Maybon notes that Brenier was later reproached for the foreign majority and excused himself by the shortage of Frenchmen willing to serve. The concession had thirty-nine landowners and a government that had just abolished itself; a constitution had to come from somewhere else.

1866: the règlement

It came from Paris. A commission at the foreign ministry under Baron Gros, who had negotiated the treaty of Tientsin, with Admiral Jaurès and the diplomats d’Arlot, Herbet, Berthémy and Lavollée, drafted a Règlement d’organisation municipale for the concession. It also considered, and rejected, a British proposal passed through Lord Cowley by Consul Winchester at Shanghai to merge the two foreign towns into one. The commission’s answer on 21 April 1866 is the French theory of the concession in a sentence: “With us, it is the consul who represents the French element before the Chinese authorities.” Brenier sent the règlement to Morel on 9 July 1866; the North-China Herald printed it in full on 14 July, under the date 11 July; it was to take effect on 1 September.

Its articles, which Maybon prints, are worth setting beside the Settlement’s. The council “consists of the consul-general of France and eight municipal councillors, four French and four foreign”, serving two years with half renewed each year (Article 1). The franchise (Article 2) went to residents of twenty-one who held land, paid rent of a thousand francs a year, or had lived three months in the concession on an income of four thousand; candidates (Article 4) had to be twenty-five and pay 240 francs in land tax, 4,000 in rent or have 10,000 francs’ income. “Each list must comprise an equal number of French residents and foreign residents” (Article 5), so that the French, a minority among the concession’s foreigners, could never be outvoted at the table; and the same article allowed “one or more Chinese notables or heads of guilds”, named by the consul with the daotai, to be “admitted to the sittings with a consultative voice”, a provision the Settlement would not match for sixty years and the French would use in 1914. “The council meets only when it is convened by the consul-general” (Article 6), though he had to convene it if half the members asked in writing. “The presidency of the council belongs by right to the consul-general” and “the president’s vote is decisive” (Article 7). “The consul-general has the right to suspend or to dissolve the municipal council” (Article 8), suspension for three months at most, with an election within six months of a dissolution and a provisional commission of his naming meanwhile. The council deliberated on the budget, tariffs, taxes, relief, property, new streets, quays and bridges, sanitation, expropriation and by-laws (Article 9); the consul-general “may, by reasoned decision, refuse to make a resolution executory” on the last of these, subject to the minister at Peking, and must promulgate the rest within eight days (Article 10). The council ran the services, roads, water, lighting, works, the cadastral plan and the tax rolls, and named its secretary subject to the consul’s approval (Article 12). Then the article the councillors of 1865 had fallen over: “The police force, whose expenses are borne by the municipal budget, is placed exclusively under his orders” (Article 13). “No foreigner may be arrested within the limits of the concession without the authorisation of the consul-general of France” (Article 16). The consul could summon “all electors, and even non-electors” to an extraordinary assembly (Article 17), and a closing note reserved his right to amend the whole.

The Settlement’s ratepayers elected their council and the council hired its own police; the consuls had a chair at the annual meeting and no vote. The French landowners elected half a council which the consul chaired, convened, could veto on the matters that mattered, and could send home. Both arrangements were called municipal self-government, and both were, in law, Chinese soil.

1868–1869: the definitive statute

Paris revised the text on 14 April 1868, and the revision took a little from the consul. Dissolution passed from him to the French representative at Peking, “subject to the approval of the Emperor’s government”, leaving the consul suspension only; Article 4 was reduced to “every elector aged twenty-five is eligible”; the expropriation-arbitration clause was deleted; and Article 16, on arrests, was rewritten on a basis of reciprocity after an arrangement with the other consuls. “This règlement fixed the definitive statute of the concession,” Maybon writes. On 24 September 1869 the legations of France, Britain, the United States, Russia and the North German Confederation approved, in one accord, both the French règlement of 14 April 1868 and the revised Land Regulations of the International Settlement, “both alike to have the force of law on and after the first day of November 1869”. The two Shanghais got their constitutions on the same day, from the same five signatures, and neither constitution was ever replaced. A press series on the French regulations collected in the Settlement’s police files in 1923 begins from “the regulations of 1868 and the plans for modifications”, still in force fifty-five years on.

Trams, light and water, by contract

What the French council could not do by vote it did by contract, and in 1906 it did it all at once. On 24 January 1906 the “municipal administration of the French Concession” signed conventions with a Paris group giving it the right to run tramways on the concession and on its outside roads and “the monopoly of public and private electric lighting”. On 26 June 1906 the statutes were drawn before a Paris notary, and the Compagnie française de tramways et d’éclairage électriques de Shanghai was constituted with “a capital of 3 million francs” by Joseph Courcelle of the Banque de l’Union Parisienne and Lucien Michelot of the Banque de l’Indochine. “On 1 May 1908 the company obtained, in addition, the lease of the municipal waterworks.” The tram and lighting concessions and the water lease were all to “end simultaneously on 1 May 1983”, with a right of repurchase every eleven years from 1939. The Settlement, across the creek, had bought its electricity works in 1893, run them itself, and sold them in 1929; it had let its trams to a British company in 1905 and its water to a British company in 1880; the French Concession put trams, light and water into one French company for seventy-seven years. At that company’s meeting of 17 June 1927 its president put the concession’s population at “about 300,000 inhabitants against 900,000” in the Settlement, trebled in twenty years, and told the shareholders that unlike the Settlement’s tramways, the French ones were not yet saturated.

1874, 1898, 1914: the concession and its neighbours

The règlement said nothing about the Chinese residents, who were the concession’s population. Its roads went through their ground, and twice the ground fought back. In 1874 the council’s plan for a road through the cemetery of the Ningbo guild, the Siming Gongsuo, brought what Pott calls “the first riot in Shanghai”, put down with “the aid of the volunteers, police and firemen of the International Settlement”, which was not an aid the French consul liked to ask for. In July 1898 the same cemetery, the same road and the demolition of the guild’s walls produced a worse riot and twelve dead, in the middle of the Settlement’s negotiations for its own extension; the French minister’s protest that the Settlement wanted land “already earmarked for the French Concession” delayed both, and when the Settlement’s extension came in 1899 “simultaneously the French Concession was largely increased”, though without the British and American land along the river whose owners “objected to being deprived of the jurisdiction of their own courts by being included in the French Concession”. The gazetteer dates the French extension to June 1899, proclaimed 27 January 1900, 2,135 mu.

The great extension came in 1914, and it was made by the method the règlement had allowed for. The French council had built roads west to Xujiahui far beyond its line; the government of Yuan Shikai wanted the revolutionaries who used the concession as a refuge expelled; and the agreement of 8 April 1914 traded the one for the other. The new boundary took effect on 14 September 1914 and the concession reached 15,150 mu, fifteen times Montigny’s wedge. The same agreement provided that “two Chinese notables shall be designated by common accord by the Commissioner of Foreign Affairs and the Consul-General for France” to arrange “questions touching Chinese residents in the French Settlement with the French Municipal Council”. It was the consultative Chinese voice of Article 5, now written into a treaty. Pott, surveying the Chinese demands of 1925 on the Settlement, remarked that “the policy of meeting the wishes of the Chinese had a good deal to do with the consent of the Chinese authorities to the extension of the French Concession”, and that measures the Settlement’s ratepayers had refused, “such as the licensing of printed matter, and the licensing of the stock and Produce Exchanges”, were “actually put into force in the French Concession”. A consul could do by order what nine councillors could not get past a ratepayers’ meeting. His verdict on the whole system in 1928 was a sentence: “their Municipal Council is only an advisory body, and the final authority rests with their Consul-General.”

1943: the keys

The French Concession outlived the Settlement’s independence by twenty months, because the Vichy government was not at war with Japan and the Japanese did not occupy it in December 1941. It did not outlive the war. On 23 February 1943 Vichy announced that it would give up its concessions in China, and on 30 July 1943 the consul-general, Roland de Margerie, handed the keys of the concession to the mayor of Shanghai of the Wang Jingwei government, which made it the city’s eighth district. The treaty of 28 February 1946 between France and the Chinese government, in force from 8 June, completed in law what the consul had done in fact, and the règlement of 1868 expired with it.

What the sources disagree on

The council’s birthday is 28 April, 1 May or 5 May 1862 in Maybon, who prints the consul’s own papers, and 13 May in Pott; the article follows Maybon. Maybon and Fredet’s history ends in 1875, so the 1900 and 1914 extensions, the 1927 reforms that gave Chinese members a place on the council and the handover of 1943 rest on Pott, the gazetteer, a company dossier and secondary accounts; the Chinese gazetteer’s chapter on the Conseil municipal could not be read for this article because its site serves no chapter text. Whether the two Chinese notables of 1914 sat as members or as advisers is given differently by different modern accounts; Pott calls them notables designated by agreement, and the règlement’s own word for a Chinese presence was “consultative”. The rates and revenues of the two concessions could not be compared from the sources used. The date of the 1943 handover is 30 July in the French, English and Chinese accounts consulted, and 31 July in one French legal chronology seen only in a search result.

What to look for

The consulate-general stood on the French Bund, by the old Rue du Consulat, today’s Jinling Road East; the building is gone. The council’s later hall, the Gongdongju on Avenue Joffre, is now a school on Huaihai Road Central; its earlier hall near the Bund, whose doors the police held shut in 1865, has left no trace. The Yangjingbang, the line that made the French Concession a separate town, is Yan’an Road East. The Siming Gongsuo’s gate survives on Renmin Road, the only piece of the cemetery the French roads went through. The tram company’s lines are gone, but its power station and the water tower on the Place du Château d’Eau were the concession’s utilities for half a century, and the plane trees along the roads west to Xujiahui are the 1914 extension’s most visible legacy.