Tôn Thất Thuyết
With the Treaty of Huế signed, French forces led by General Henri Roussel de Courcy arrived in Vietnam to take control of the country in mid-1885. de Courcy made demands that seemed to signal to the Vietnamese that his goal was to completely subjugate them: for example, he demanded to walk through the central doors of the palace, which only the Emperor could do. The Vietnamese, led by Phạm's fellow mandarins Tôn Thất Thuyết and Nguyễn Văn Tường, decided to launch a surprise attack against the French in a last-ditch effort for independence. Known as the "Huế ambush", it failed, and France seized the Huế royal palace.