Charles Edouard Hocquard, army medical officer and reporter and correspondent for the Havas agency at Tonkin from 1884 to 1886 bequeathed us in heritage a collection of beautiful pictures dating from  the first colonial war of Viet-Nam. He brought  back  more than 200 stereotypes composing a portfolio of 80 boards in photoglytie published in 1887. He reported with acuity and humor in “an expedition in Tonkin”, the picturesque anecdotes with the  area’s peasants, the knowledge of the local flora, the memories on the war of Tonkin and Vietnamese people etc. He did not obtain the business success discounted with the publication of his illustrated reports.  But he succeeded in showing that it is possible to find in the conflict French-Vietnamese an another more objective glance, that of one scientist to the meeting of another culture at the dawn of the 20th century. He is deceased with  an infectious influenza on January 11th, 1911 at the age of fifty-eight years.

A French doctor between passion and mission