CHAPTER 4
PRINCE CUONG DE was the direct descendant of the senior branch of the Nguyen dynasty and proud of it. He worshiped his venerable ancestor, Gia Long. Born in 1882, Cuong De saw himself as the next in line to rule and as the emperor who would modernize Vietnam. The French of course did not necessarily see it this way and passed him over in favor of a host of seemingly more docile candidates, culminating in the crowning of Bao Dai in 1926. Anticolonialists, however, turned to Cuong De precisely because of the royalist legitimacy they felt he could confer on their efforts to drive out the French and remake Vietnam. In 1906, the patriot Phan Boi Chau brought the young prince to Japan to serve as the figurehead for a series of associations-in-exile and governments-in-waiting.
Cuong De, however, always marched to his own drum. He closely followed colonial and international developments from his position of exile, moving from Tokyo to Guangzhou by way of Bangkok, waiting for a favorable conjuncture to present itself. He recruited supporters from inside Vietnam and searched out new allies wherever he could. In 1913, thanks to German support and attracted by the liberal policies of the new Governor General of Indochina, Albert Sarraut, Cuong De travelled to Berlin to let the government know that he was ready to negotiate. The French never took him or his reformist ideas seriously and the prince never trusted the French again. He turned permanently instead to the Japanese, convinced that they would free Vietnam from its colonial hold and restore him and his rightful branch of the royal family to the throne.
In the end, Cuong De lost his bet when the Japanese failed to support him during their occupation of Indochina during the Second World War. He died in exile in Tokyo in 1951, a broken and bitterly disappointed man. But at the turn of the twentieth century, he and hundreds of others looking to free their country had no way of knowing what the future would bring. Cuong De’s itinerary took him to Asia. Others travelled to the West. Some went to Moscow, while many more stayed in Vietnam. Some gambled that the French would help them to remake Vietnam. Others were convinced it would be a futile effort.1
REFORMISM AND CHANGE: ASIAN CONNECTIONS, IMPERIAL ALLIANCES
East Asian Reformism
The consolidation of Paul Doumer’s Indochina at the turn of the century did not sever Vietnamese elites from their Asian world. Indeed, until the end of the First World War, a wide-range of reform-minded mandarins turned to the surrounding region as much as to France for models of successful economic, political, and scientific modernization and information about regional and world events. At the outset, Japan was a particularly attractive model. Since the seventeenth century, Tokugawa rulers had relied on mainly Dutch traders to provide them with books and information on European science and thought. This school of ‘Western studies’ (rangaku) contributed to the country’s take off when Meiji leaders assumed power in 1868. Three decades later, fellow Asians marveled at the revolutionary transformation of Japan into a modern nation-state, with military power and economic force increasingly on par with the West. Thousands flocked to Tokyo to see for themselves, including several hundred Vietnamese.
There was more to this Asian connection for these Vietnamese than the attraction of the Meiji miracle, however. Linguistically, neither the French language, nor the colonially backed Romanized script, quoc ngu, could replace the elite’s centuries-old use of Chinese characters overnight. Until the First World War, most Vietnamese discovered the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau in Chinese translation rather than in the French original. This was particularly true in Annam and Tonkin, where the Confucian-based civil-service examination was longest established and relayed in Chinese characters for the greatest period of time. (It was eliminated in 1919.) This meant that most of the young male elite continued to study in Chinese ideograms (in the hope of passing the exam and landing good jobs). Although quoc ngu and French developed earlier in Cochinchina, it was not until the 1920s that colonial schools truly began producing a new generation of Vietnamese at ease in both. Lastly, until the French created the redoubtable political police in 1917, the Sûreté générale, determined anticolonialists could readily use false papers and ingenious disguises to board visiting ships bound for Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Yokohama.2
Asia also continued to flow into colonial Vietnam. The French may have terminated Hue’s tributary missions to Beijing, thereby ending the court’s ability to import books and information directly from China, but they provided a substitute by accelerating Chinese immigration to the colony. Many of the Chinese living in Indochina and elsewhere were avid readers of ‘new books’ (hsin-shu) and sympathetic to well-known mainland reformers such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. Some of these overseas communities (‘huaqiao’) traced their origins back to seventeenth-century Ming loyalists who had fled Qing conquest in 1644. Chinese nationalists, opposed to the same dynasty for two and a half centuries, later often found natural allies among these overseas Chinese communities. The father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, travelled widely between Singapore and San Francisco, making stopovers in Saigon and Hanoi in the early 1900s. He solicited donations, enrolled young recruits, and established nationalist associations among the Chinese diaspora. Vietnamese anticolonialist memoirs repeatedly mention Chinese traders and skippers shuttling them all over Asia well into the 1950s.3
This also meant that there was no shortage of Chinese language books, papers, reformist pamphlets, religious texts, and translations available in Chinese bookshops and associations in French Indochina. While few Vietnamese mandarins could actually speak Chinese, they could communicate via ‘brush conversations’ and increasingly frequented Chinese bookshops in search of these new publications they could easily read. As one French official reported at the time: ‘The majority of Chinese residents in Indochina are in sympathy with the [Chinese] revolutionary party, and it is in part by means of the journals they receive, as well as their remarks and their conversations, that they contribute to the spread of new ideas among the Annamite population’. In 1910, the French were shocked to learn that mandarins in the provinces were still reading the works of Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, thanks to Chinese skippers carrying papers and books from one port to another (as they had done for centuries). Meeting them on the docks were trusted couriers, who quickly shuttled these materials to waiting mandarins. As another worried colonial official described the last step, nicely, ‘Thanks to their knowledge of characters, the literati re-copy the articles which interest them. These are then put under their robes and smuggled to the most distant villages’.4
That Chinese reformist ideas attracted Vietnamese attention is hardly surprising. Reformers in China and Vietnam confronted many of the same problems, not least the struggle against imperial aggression and the quest to unlock the keys of Western modernization. However, as noted above, a major shift occurred in this China-centered East Asian world. Thanks to its rapid modernization (free of foreign domination), Meiji Japan (1868–1912) sought to replace the seemingly sick Chinese imperial giant. By the turn of the century, the Meiji navy had not only inflicted a military defeat on the Qing over Korea and had colonized Taiwan, but Japan had also become the home to an array of organizations promoting a Japanese-centered Asia based on common cultural and racial ties. The possibility that the Chinese empire would implode seemed likely for many.
Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, and Sun Yat-sen travelled to Japan in the hope that Meiji would help them against the Qing and provide students with the modern knowledge and military science needed to build a new China. The Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905—the victory of a ‘yellow race’ over a ‘white’ one—further shifted the center of gravity eastward, convincing many that the Europeans were not invincible and that there was an Asian way out of the Social Darwinian dead end (which held that ‘white’ stood for both ‘right’ and ‘might’), and that it had started in Japan. In 1905, Sun Yat-sen created the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance headquarters in Tokyo, the precursor of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang, or GMD). Liang established schools the Qing would have never authorized back home. The Japanese operated the East Asian Higher Preparatory School: one of its pupils was a certain Zhou Enlai. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek studied in the Imperial Japanese Army Academy Preparatory School. Both men would become leaders of twentieth-century China and each would play a part in shaping Vietnam’s twentieth-century destiny.5
Vietnamese elites were part of these wider movements. This was certainly the case for the great literati, Phan Boi Chau (1867–1940) and Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926). Both men had been born in the heart of the Nguyen dynasty and had come of age during the violent French conquest of their country. Like their fathers, both men had diligently studied classical Chinese until their twenties and prepared tirelessly for the civil service exams. In the end, however, neither made a career in government. Each in his own way was determined to rethink a Vietnam that was no more. Disappointed by Tu Duc’s failure to implement reforms, both became avid readers of new books and closely followed events in Asia and the world. Trinh would distance himself from Chau’s support of armed liberation and confidence in the Japanese. He turned instead to the French to implement Western change. Like Cuong De, both men gambled on their foreign allies and each would be bitterly disappointed. But neither could know it at the time.
Phan Boi Chau and the Asian Sources of Vietnamese Reformism
Freed from family obligations in 1900 by the death of his father, Phan Boi Chau went to work immediately. Travelling tirelessly from north to south, he discussed what was to be done with like-minded friends, veterans of the Can Vuong movement, reformist mandarins, and patriotic youths who had flocked around him. In 1904, he united supporters into a study group called the Vietnam Modernization Society (Viet Nam Duy Tan Hoi). Unsurprisingly, Chinese reformist texts were high on everyone’s reading list. Royalists were welcome, too. Chau’s prestige was such that he easily recruited the Nguyen prince, Cuong De, to the society and made him honorary president in order to attract the widest possible support. While the Vietnam Modernization Society never went very far ideologically, it was more forward-looking than the restoration-minded Can Vuong movement led by Phan Dinh Phung. Exchanges focused on the need to implement wide-ranging socio-economic reforms. It differed too in that the new group’s leaders were determined to send students abroad.
Chau initially placed great hope in Japanese promises of uniting East Asian peoples of the ‘same culture and common race’ into a liberating and modernizing force. In late 1904, the Modernization Society dispatched him to Japan on a fact-finding mission. Chau landed in Yokohama in early 1905 as the Russo-Japanese war reached its climax. He quickly befriended Liang Qichao and, thanks to an indefatigable writing brush, explained the sad plight of the Vietnamese people and his group’s desire to obtain Japanese assistance to expel the French and modernize the country. Well aware of Japan’s imperial ambitions, Liang warned his counterpart of the dangers of relying too heavily on the Japanese and their Pan-Asianism. He advised Chau to focus first on reform, on educating the young, and awakening the patriotism of the people. ‘Your country should not be concerned about not having a day of independence,’ he counseled, ‘but should be concerned about not having an independence-minded people.’ Liang knew what he was talking about. China was in much the same situation. He was himself bringing students to study in Japanese schools and military academies.6
Liang’s warning about Meiji’s expansionist ambitions did not deter Chau from soliciting military aid. Chau contacted a wide range of Japanese politicians, diplomats, officers, and intellectuals. This included the future Japanese prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, Okuma Shigenobu, who was to be prime minister twice, and General Fukushima Yasumasa, Director of the Shimbu Military Academy. All of these meetings in 1905 occurred against the backdrop of Japan’s victory over the Russians and Tokyo’s entry into the Western-centered concert of nations. In his meeting with Shigenobu, Chau lauded Japan’s emergence as a world power, but reminded him of Tokyo’s Asian responsibilities:
Vietnam is not on the European continent, but the Asian [one]. Vietnam is common to Japan in race, culture, and continental positioning, yet the French gangsters are left to spread their bestial venom without fear. Hence the French are unaware that Asia already has a major power, already has Japan. The strength of Japan has been felt in the Northwest, all the way to the Qing and to the Russians. Why then has Japan allowed the French to trample over Vietnam without trying to help us?7
The Japanese had no intention of moving militarily against the French over Indochina, not in 1905 in any case. They were focused instead on rolling back the Chinese imperial hold in East Asia and consolidating their own colonial gains in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. Improving diplomatic relations with the West helped them do that. Phan Boi Chau could send students to study with them, but no more.
It was in this wider Asian context that the ‘Go East’ (‘Dong Du’) studyabroad program began sending Vietnamese students to Japan. Chau wrote letters and tracts urging families to send their sons. Back in Vietnam, he knocked on doors and found considerable support among reform-minded mandarins in Annam and Tonkin. So much so that, in 1907, Governor General Paul Beau conceded privately that those travelling to Japan were mainly the sons of mandarins keen on learning. Yet the Go East movement was not just an Annam and Tonkin affair. Wealthy landowners and pro-Nguyen royalists in Cochinchina also provided financial support and recruits. Gilbert Tran Chanh Chieu was a well-known Mekong landowner, entrepreneur, and naturalized French citizen. He encouraged southern youth, including his son, to study in Japan. Chieu personally travelled to Hong Kong in 1907 to discuss ways of modernizing the country and funding study abroad. Meanwhile, to attract students, Prince Cuong De drew upon latent royalist sympathies among southern families that had supported his grandfather’s victory of 1802. In all, between 1906 and 1909, around 300 Vietnamese studied in Japanese schools and military academies. For the first time since the late 1850s, Viet elites from all three areas of former Dai Nam met to study and rethink their country, not in Paris, but in Tokyo. Indeed, more Vietnamese were studying abroad in Japan than in France at this time.8
Time in exile also allowed older men like Phan Boi Chau to rethink Vietnam without fear of arrest or censorship. Besides taking care of students and getting Prince Cuong De to Japan, one of the most important things Chau did was to write texts to ‘awaken the people’. Taking Liang’s advice to heart, he put pen to paper to provide some of the foundational texts of modern Vietnamese nationalism. This meant closely reading Japanese, Chinese, and Western materials in search of models, styles, and comparisons. Tokyo libraries and bookshops and his numerous encounters in East Asia provided him with a gold mine of information. One of the most important things he realized was that in order to explain the sad state of his country in the present and imagine a new future, he had to return to, indeed rethink, the past. The result was the publication in 1905 of The History of the Loss of Vietnam. In it, Chau lambasted the Nguyen for losing the country and failing to implement reforms in time. He celebrated the Can Vuong heroes who had resisted valiantly and condemned those who had collaborated. He focused on the evils of French colonialism, detailing the terrible effects of Doumer’s tax and labor demands on the common people. To communicate his ‘awakening’ message more effectively, Chau dropped much of the flowery style and arcane allusions of the Confucian tradition to write in direct, hard-hitting prose. Although he was still writing in characters, he and others realized that in order to communicate their message to a wider audience, they had to recalibrate their prose and their own ways of thinking. In the last section, Chau turned to his ‘Future Vietnam’, insisting that all of the people had to join hands to save the country, regardless of class, religion, or race. Liang Qichao published the book and distributed copies among the overseas Chinese. In fact, Chau’s history of Vietnam ended up stirring Chinese patriots as much as Vietnamese ones. Sun Yat-sen was so alarmed by what he read that he warned his compatriots in southern China to beware of the dangers that could befall them as Doumer laid train tracks for Kunming. Chau took fifty copies of his book home, where they were recopied, increasingly translated into quoc ngu, always circulated clandestinely, and sometimes read out loud to interested villagers.9
In short, Phan Boi Chau’s exile in Japan allowed him to rethink Vietnamese history in increasingly national forms. In his ‘Letter from Abroad Written in Blood’, he focused again on the evils of French colonialism and urged his readers to wake up before it was too late. He criticized the monarchy and the mandarinate for failing to save the country and to help the people in their hour of greatest need. He argued that a new type of community was in order: a national one by which the pre-existing bond between ‘emperor’ and ‘subject’ would be replaced by one associating the ‘people’ with the ‘nation’. It was at this point that Chau and others began to use new Atlantic revolutionary terms to communicate ideas based on Meiji models and Japanese loan-words, such as ‘revolution’ (cach mang), ‘nation’ (quoc gia), and ‘citizen’ (dan quoc). ‘Why was our country lost?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘First, the monarch knew nothing of popular affairs; second, the mandarins cared nothing for the people; and third, the people knew only of themselves.’ And yet the people had built the ‘the foundations of our country’. The conclusion was obvious: ‘The people are in fact the country, the country is the people’s.’ He repeated the same mantra in another national history of Vietnam and undoubtedly in hundreds of conversations. He also reminded readers that the Viet had themselves once been great colonizers, the conquerors of Champa. Now, he lamented, the tables had been turned. They were the colonized, who could disappear as the Cham had under Vietnamese rule.10
In the end, the Go East and Vietnam Modernization Society movements were short-lived. In 1907, the French and the Japanese concluded a treaty by which Tokyo recognized French sovereignty over Indochina in exchange for France’s recognition of Japan’s imperial interests further north. The outbreak of tax revolts less than a year later led the French to increase pressure on Tokyo to expel the Vietnamese, and the Japanese complied. In March 1909, Phan Boi Chau left Japan to regroup among a group of overseas Vietnamese based in Thailand. A year later, the Japanese transformed Korea into a colony. Bitterly disappointed, Chau understood that Japan was as colonial-minded as the Western powers and would be of no further help. However, by providing Vietnamese émigrés with a safe haven to reside, to access new information, and to study, write, and interact with a range of Asian reformers, the Japanese had contributed to the Modernization Society’s ability to rethink the past, make better sense of the tumultuous present, and start to imagine a new future. This vision of a ‘Future Vietnam’ only existed in the imagination at that point, and it meant different things to different people. It was nonetheless an important turning point in the making of modern Vietnam.
A Colonial ‘J’accuse’? Phan Chu Trinh and a Republican Contract
Phan Chu Trinh was as fascinated by Japan as was Phan Boi Chau. In 1906, the two toured Tokyo together, meeting with Japanese officials and urging young Vietnamese to study hard. Each agreed that the introduction of Western-style education à la Meiji was indispensable to the country’s renaissance. Both enthusiastically cited Fukuzawa Yukichi’s educational reforms as a model to emulate. Beyond the quest for modernity, however, the two Phans differed greatly in their approaches. Trinh did not share his counterpart’s desire to seek Japanese military assistance. He recoiled at Chau’s increasing talk of achieving national liberation through violent means, and he saw little need to work with royalty like Cuong De. Trinh chose instead to cooperate with the French to remake Vietnam.11
Besides his differences with Chau, Trinh had other reasons for making this choice. He saw in a colonial alliance the best way to achieve the reforms the Nguyen had botched in the nineteenth century. By conquering Dai Nam, Trinh reasoned, the French had changed power relations, to the detriment of the monarchy, not necessarily a bad thing since he considered the throne to be the single greatest obstacle to change. Moreover, France seemed to offer a model for reform as promising as the Japanese one. Like their Meiji counterparts, French republicans were equally determined to create a new France, a modern nation-state, complete with a mass education system, national military service, and an infrastructure capable of turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. And where Chau found inspiration in Japanese-centered Pan-Asianism, Trinh was enthralled by French-championed republicanism, the universal rights of man, the idea of representative government, and welcomed the mission civilisatrice which promised to extend such progress to the Republic’s empire. Lastly, unlike Meiji’s resurrection of its long-dormant monarchy, the French had done away with their monarchy in favor of a constitutional democracy.12
Phan Chu Trinh’s republicanism owed a great deal to two young French friends and dedicated republicans in Hanoi, the journalist Ernest Babut and the captain Jules Roux. Both were members of the Hanoi branch of the League of Human Rights (Ligue des droits de l’homme) established in 1903. Roux spoke Vietnamese well and advocated the development of quoc ngu and modern education in Indochina. In 1905, Babut launched the first quoc ngu newspaper in Hanoi, the Dai Viet Tan Bao (Modern Dai Viet Times), in which Trinh’s earliest writings appeared. Babut was also a member of the French socialist party and a Freemason (Phan Chu Trinh later became one). While the League of Human Rights, Freemasons, and socialists hardly embraced decolonization, they advocated colonial reform and representative politics, and firmly believed in France’s mission civilistrice.13
Phan Chu Trinh also sought to use this conjuncture and the colonizers to reform on his terms. This included his well-known goals of introducing Western studies, a mass educational system, instruction in French and quoc ngu, industry and commerce, and representative forms of government. However, Trinh wanted more than just a ‘colonial Meiji’. Though he could never say it publicly, he wanted to use the French to help him accomplish a colonial revolution—the overturning of the monarchy. It is unclear where Trinh’s visceral hate of the monarchy originated, but it was real. In his memoirs, Phan Boi Chau wrote that during their travels together in East Asia in 1906, they argued repeatedly over which came first: relying on the French to reform Vietnam or driving them out of it. For Trinh, the emperor had to go, and if the French could help on that score, then the choice was clear. As Chau recalled later:
He and I kept company in Kwangtung [Guangdong] for more than ten days. Every day when we talked about the affairs of our country, he singled out for bitter reproach the wicked conduct of the monarchs, the enemies of the people. He ground his teeth when talking about the ruler of the day, who was bringing calamity to the country and disaster to the people; as much as to say that if the system of monarchical autocracy were not abolished, simply restoring the country’s independence would bring no happiness.14
In place of the monarchy, Chau wrote, Trinh argued in favor of republicanism: ‘Once popular rights have been achieved, then we can think about other things.’ Trinh’s collaboration with the French thus turned on his desire to use the French to push a very Vietnamese revolution, the overthrow of the monarchy and the creation of a colonial republic.
Rather than trying to wake up Chau’s trustworthy mandarins or locate the nation in the past, Trinh realized that the only way his plan would ever work was by stirring the republican conscience of his colonial rulers. This meant painting the autocratic mandarinate in the worst possible light, deploring everyday French brutalities against the Vietnamese, and then holding the highest authorities to the implementation of an indigenous policy based on their republican ideals. This is exactly what Trinh did in early 1907, when the scholarly journal, the Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, ran his open letter to the Governor General of Indochina, Paul Beau (1902–8). In this historic document, Trinh explained to Beau that he had travelled the country from north to south and what he saw was heart-wrenching—the regression of the Vietnamese into a state of barbarity and their near racial extinction. He had no choice, he explained, but to inform authorities of the terrible suffering of the people and the need for immediate and real reform on their part.15
For Trinh the corrupt and despotic mandarin class ruling the countryside with impunity was at the core of this suffering. By disemboweling the monarchy but leaving it in place, the French had effectively removed any sort of institutional control over these ‘parasites’. They were now free to enrich themselves and exploit the population. Theoretically, he agreed, the protectorate had dispatched French delegates to keep them in line. In practice, however, these immoral beings did whatever they pleased. Ignorant of the Vietnamese language, customs, and village politics, French commissioners were either unaware or unwilling to intervene as long as the taxes and corvée arrived on time. They needed these bad mandarins.
Secondly, Trinh continued, French insensitivity and brutality toward the overworked peasants, including the beating of many to death, hardly reflected well on lofty republican ideals and colonial humanism. Verbal insults and daily acts of violence against the indigenous were legion, he said (and they were). Peasants ran for cover when they saw a Frenchman coming, he pointed out. And it wasn’t just the European settlers who were to blame. Haughty colonial officials often humiliated good mandarins and, in so doing, dissuaded them from reporting abuses or suggesting solutions. Meanwhile, the corrupt ones continued to ingratiate themselves, always bearing good news to the colonizers. The situation in the countryside was, Trinh concluded, dire. And by entrusting these corrupt bureaucrats with collecting onerous taxes and corvée, the French were responsible for the hate and suffering ‘piling up’ across the land.
This was strong language. No Vietnamese elite had ever dared to address the colonizer in such terms. And yet Trinh wrote to Beau because he had no other means to make himself or his people heard. There was no colonial parliament. The press remained in its infancy and heavily censored. He also made his move at this time because he knew that the governor general was involved in developing colonial reforms based on the principle of ‘association’. This was not the word Trinh wanted to hear, for indirect rule would leave his hated mandarins in power: ‘And you still want to increase the power of these men by confiding to them the realization of the reforms for which our salvation depends! Don’t you understand they will never apply them, except to make money.’
A former literati himself, Trinh knew perfectly well that not all mandarins were ‘bad’, nor were they as anti-modern as he had portrayed them in his missive to Beau. But his goal in crafting this letter was not to present an objective study of the mandarinate or rural conditions. He wanted above all to jolt the French into action by convincing the republican governor general that his emerging ‘native policy’ (‘politique indigène’) had to extend basic human rights to the colonized and deal with the problem of a corrupt monarchy. Much like Ferhat Abbas in Algeria, who denied the reality of Algerian nationalism in favor of egalitarian republican assimilation, Trinh believed that a similar colonial contract could work in Vietnam, but only if the French made good on their own republicanism. Then, he concluded, ‘the only thing the Annamese would fear would be seeing the French leave Annam to its own devices’. It was an extraordinary gamble designed in large part to bring down the pre-existing Vietnamese monarchy. Like Chau’s Pan Asianism, Trinh’s colonial alliance with the French was riddled with contradictions and not a little naiveté; but, then again, collaboration was as important as anticolonialism in the making of modern Vietnam. And colonial collaboration often carried within it revolutionary indigenous projects.
Mandarin Reformism and Colonial Fear
The two Phans were not alone in their quest for change; and all mandarins were not corrupt, conservative, or anti-modern. Nor were the French or the Japanese the first to introduce notions of modernity or reform to Vietnamese elites. A large number of officials working for the Nguyen dynasty on the inside had long been interested in good government, reform, and modernization. The fifteenth–sixteenth century Le dynasty is a case in point. And as harsh as they often were, Minh Mang’s reforms had sought to rationalize and modernize Vietnam. In the late 1860s, the Catholic adviser to Emperor Tu Duc, Nguyen Truong To, pleaded for far-reaching economic, social, and even political reforms along Western lines. These included sending students abroad for Western studies, expanding the education system, revamping financial, judicial, and administrative institutions, developing modern science, agriculture, and commerce, and even creating a national writing system based on chu nom: ‘Have we not talented persons able to devise a script which will transcribe our national language?’ he asked.16
Nguyen Truong To failed to convince the last emperor of the need to reform, but that does not mean that reformist debates within the mandarinate necessarily disappeared under French rule. Another of Tu Duc’s reformminded advisors, Dang Xuan Bang, kept making the case for change. By the early 1900s, he and others had begun establishing private schools and organizing informal seminars in their spare time to teach modern ideas and practices to young and old. Classes offered instruction in French, Chinese, and quoc ngu, as well as in mathematics, physics, and geography. These officials had access to Western and Asian reformist writings in Chinese translation (some of which appeared in the civil service exams in Hue). Other mandarins received authorization from colonial authorities to study abroad in France. The French created the Colonial Academy in Paris in the late nineteenth century to train Indochinese elites in modern ways. That the future Ho Chi Minh applied (unsuccessfully) to study there is hardly surprising. And although colonial exhibitions in France (in 1907, 1922, 1930–31) certainly pushed a political and Orientalist agenda, they also allowed a range of elite Vietnamese to ‘go West’ to study European ways, procure information, and make new contacts. Vietnamese reformism at the turn of the century thus encompassed a wide range of sources, choices, ideas, models, and people. There were never two, one-way roads leading straight to ‘modern Vietnam’—one ‘Asian/Phan Boi Chau’ (‘Dong Du’), the other ‘Western/Phan Chu Trinh’ (‘Di Tay’). Rather, different trajectories intersected, recalibrated, and shifted over time and space. Some had already developed inside Vietnam before the French had arrived; others connected to the outside world whether the French liked it or not.17
Nowhere is this more evident than in the creation in early 1907 of the Tonkin Public School (the Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc). In fact, twentieth-century Vietnam’s first modern school was neither a colonial nor an anticolonialist creation. The two Phans did not make it. Nor did the French. This Western studies school was a northern-based, mandarin initiative modeled on Fukuzawa Yukichi’s educational policies mentioned above. The term ‘Nghia Thuc’ is the Vietnamese translation of the Japanese term, ‘Keio Gijuku’, which refers to a non-fee-paying private school established and paid for from public donations. Knowledge of it came from Go East travellers to Japan and reformist writings circulating in Chinese. But it drew, too, upon a centuries-old Sino-Vietnamese tradition of creating private schools for teaching classical studies. Within months, this school attracted some four hundred students, young and old alike. The dapper French-trained civil servant and interpreter, Nguyen Van Vinh, was there in full Western attire, as were local mandarins sporting their Confucian garb, but nonetheless keenly aware of what was at stake.18
Uniting them all was a burning desire to learn and discuss new ideas and necessary reforms. Dong Kinh classrooms offered conferences on and instruction in mathematics, geography, and science (a particularly hot subject). Students studied French and quoc ngu. Most (not all) agreed that Chinese characters no longer sufficed. Reformists building this school wanted a written language designed less to associate the elite with an East Asian civilizational sphere operating in characters than to educate and associate the masses inside the country with new forms of social organization via the spoken language they all shared. The Romanized script increasingly appeared as a powerful tool of modernization and socialization. As one Dong Kinh slogan read: ‘Quoc ngu is the saving spirit in our country, we must take it out among our people’. More literati also began to study French. History lectures attracted large gatherings as speakers sought to distance the Vietnamese past from its civilizational association with China in favor of crafting a distinct history, a unique set of heroes, indeed a separate cultural identity. Phan Boi Chau’s writings from abroad circulated in Nghia Thuc circles, while Phan Chu Trinh was a popular guest speaker. And there is no reason not to think that Chau drew many of his nationalist ideas from texts being produced inside Vietnam.19
As elsewhere in Asia, much effort went into promoting social and cultural change along Western lines. This is evident in the titles of many of the texts the Nghia Thuc produced, such as Civilization and New Learning or The Indictment of Corrupt Customs. The former called upon young Vietnamese to break with the Confucian past and embrace the modern world. Several teachers argued that the East had become stagnant while the West was now the most dynamic part of the world. And it wasn’t long before many began to see Confucianism as an obstacle to the modernization and Westernization of the country. In another major shift, women entered the classrooms for the first time as traditional social relations loosened. Change even manifested itself corporally as part of the ‘Haircutting Chant’ shows, recited by Nghia Thuc adepts:
Comb in the left hand,
Scissors in the right,
Snip, snip, clip, clip!
Watch out, be careful,
Drop stupid practices.
Dump childish things,
Speak openly and frankly,
Study Western customs,
Don’t cheat or bluff,
Don’t lie.
Today we clip.
Tomorrow we shave!20
However, this early attempt at modern education and socio-cultural change on Vietnamese terms did not last long. When a revolt broke out in February 1908 against excessive corvée demands—just as Phan Chu Trinh had warned—the French did the only thing they knew how to do: they cracked down violently as it spread. The discovery of a plot to poison French troops a few months later only led to more repression as scared European settlers demanded swift and decisive action. Rather than reflecting on the socio-economic causes of this discontent and devising appropriate policy measures, fear got the better of the French, and not just among the small settler community. A special criminal commission set up on Paul Beau’s watch sentenced thirteen Vietnamese plotters to death and many more to long prison terms. Phan Chu Trinh—the Third Republic’s most sincere indigenous collaborator—was soon breaking rocks on the prison island of Poulo Condor. Vietnam’s dedicated republican remained in the ‘colonial Bastille’ until 1911, when the French shipped him off to France. Colonial authorities quickly closed the Nghia Thuc school for good.21
The Imperial Trajectories of Vietnamese Reformism, Exile, and Labor
Phan Chu Trinh was not the only person the French wanted to get out of Indochina. Early on, the French dispatched tens of thousands of Vietnamese laborers to work on commercial plantations, mines, and in colonial offices in New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Polynesia, and Reunion Island. Others followed imperial itineraries taking them to French North Africa and South America. Moving in parallel to these workers were several thousand Vietnamese political prisoners, whom the French banished to colonial prisons and penal colonies as far away as Guyana and Guadeloupe. The French exiled their rebellious emperors, most notably Ham Nghi, Thanh Thai, and Duy Tan, to Algeria and Reunion Island, while promising elite members, mandarins, and wealthy students pursued advanced studies in the metropolis.
These imperial-wide movements gave rise to some interesting encounters. First stationed in Algeria at the turn of the twentieth century as an agricultural specialist trained in France, the future Constitutionalist, Bui Quang Chieu, met the deposed emperor, Ham Nghi, in Algiers and maintained a long correspondence with him on how best to modernize Vietnam. Ky Dong, a brilliant Vietnamese young man who was undertaking his secondary studies in Algiers, also befriended Ham Nghi when he was there. Ky Dong’s return to Vietnam in 1896 did not last long, however. When the French connected him to anticolonialist rebels, they exiled him to Polynesia, where he took up art and became a good friend to the artist Paul Gauguin. Many of these exiles were transformed by their experience and returned home to play a role in the making of a new Vietnam in 1945. This was the case for Dong Sy Hua, a colonial plantation worker in the French Pacific, who joined the resistance. Another exiled emperor, Duy Tan, died in a plane crash in 1945 in central Africa, trying to make it home to reclaim his throne. Ex-political prisoners from Guyana returned in 1963, as did 50,000 Vietnamese from northeast Thailand.22
A small, maritime, and increasingly politicized Vietnamese working class also emerged, as French and international shipping companies employed more and more sailors, deckhands, cooks, and laundry boys to handle the goods and passengers crossing the Indian Ocean. The Merchant Shipping Company (Compagnies des Messageries maritimes) and the United Shipping Company (Compagnies des Chargeurs réunis) probably employed annually one thousand Vietnamese sailors, who sailed the world from Saigon to Shanghai, Osaka to Singapore, and then on to the Atlantic through Djibouti, Aden, and the Suez Canal. Cochinchinese, Annamese, and especially Tonkinese worked on the ships’ decks together. They also joined hands with Chinese workers. Not all of them became revolutionaries; most worked to feed themselves and their families. But a handful encountered new ideas, people, and associations, including notions of organized labor, as they moved from one port city to another. It was a motley crew, to be sure, but it was where revolutionaries like Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh would go to gather information, avoid police detection, and think about Vietnam in different ways. A future communist leader, Ton Duc Thang, came from this maritime working class. A Trotskyist debarking in Marseille in the 1920s left a lively description of the men who helped him make all the right connections. He was most impressed by a certain Hon, a colonial sailor turned drug trafficker who was running opium from one side of the Mediterranean to the other: ‘Hon is cunning at getting things in under the noses of customs officials’.23
The First World War globalized imperial movements and demands for political reforms in unprecedented ways. Although the French were at first reluctant to bring any Vietnamese soldiers to the metropolis in the light of repeated revolts and defiant emperors, the intensification and entrenchment of the conflict left them no choice. They badly needed men to help supply and fight on the Western Front as well as to work in munitions factories to provide the massive amounts of weapons this industrial conflagration required—artillery shells, guns, bullets, and uniforms. In all, the French recruited and dispatched 90,000 Vietnamese to France, where 50,000 worked in local factories and the other 40,000 proceeded to the front. Many served in combat positions. The Vietnamese were part of a larger mobilization bringing almost a million colonial subjects to France, including British subjects from India. Joining them, too, were tens of thousands of workers from Spain, Italy, and especially China.24
This gave rise to a fascinating wartime situation in which non-French male workers joined a very feminized French workforce on the factory floors. Although French authorities carefully organized and disciplined the workplace in order to meet wartime needs, fraternization and even mixed unions emerged from this multi-ethnic labor mobilization. Racist attitudes of hostility toward foreigners, and above all fears of colonial men mixing with French women while Frenchmen fought at the front, were real. So were class fears in French unions like the CGT that this colonial labor force would take working-class jobs. But there was no denying the transformative impact of this wartime mobilization as almost a hundred thousand Vietnamese veterans returned to Indochina hoping to start a new life. Some wanted French citizenship; most expected good jobs and upward social mobility. Several hoped to modernize Vietnam along Western lines, despite the barbarity they had just witnessed in Europe.25
Most Vietnamese reformists supported the war effort in the hope that the colonizers would now have to make good on their promises of political and social reform. They had a debt to pay. Cultural luminaries like Nguyen Van Vinh, Duong Van Giao, and Phan Van Truong dusted off their initial training as interpreters and served as intermediaries for administering the Vietnamese troops and laborers in France. Phan Chu Trinh lent his personal support to colonial efforts to recruit Vietnamese men for the war effort, and this despite the fact that the French had thrown him in jail in September 1914 for six months on trumped-up charges of colluding with Prince Cuong De and the Germans. Vietnamese administrators, some of them sharing Trinh’s reformist dreams, but most acting on French orders, mobilized the local administration in the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin to provide the majority of recruits the French needed in record time.
Vietnamese elite members like Phan Chu Trinh were also aware of a parallel reformist trend that had developed at the highest levels of the French army in the person of General Théophile Pennequin. Having served throughout the empire and with such well-known colonial conquerors as Lyautey, Galliéni, and Pavie, Pennequin rose to the top of the army and head of colonial troops in Indochina in 1911. A devout republican, he was also a man born in the 1840s who could have served in one of Napoleon III’s Arab Offices in Algeria, such was his belief in association and the respect of local cultures. He was also a fine observer of colonial policies in other empires, notably that of the Americans in the Philippines. He worried that trouble in China could spill into Indochina. And if the French did not give more of a voice to Vietnamese elite members in actually running the colony, including the army, then they should not count on them to help keep Indochina French in times of trouble. Close to Jules Roux, himself a friend of Phan Chu Trinh, Pennequin had followed Vietnamese reformism and witnessed the violent revolts that had ended in so many executions in 1908 and Trinh’s exile. He cringed at the French settler disdain for the Vietnamese.
Whereas his counterpart, General Charles Mangin, advocated a Force noire (‘black army’), using mainly Senegalese troops to help France fight in the event of war, Pennequin asked for the creation of a mainly Vietnamese Armée jaune (‘yellow army’). Not only would it defend Indochina and France in times of need, but it would also promote some Vietnamese to positions of command and provide the French with loyal partners with whom they could build a new and, eventually, independent Indochinese state. The general’s ideas enthralled Vietnamese reformers. Trinh threw his full support behind the general at the same time as the French settler community vehemently denounced him for arming the ‘barbarians’ from the inside. The French government would study Pennequin’s plans. But when the First World War broke out, the leadership in Paris and Hanoi insisted that the Vietnamese had not ‘evolved’ sufficiently to adopt Pennequin’s project. Rather than sending the Armée jaune to fight on the Western Front, the French preferred sending the bulk of Vietnamese as factory workers and logistical supply hands.
It is hard to underestimate the significance of the Great War for Vietnamese reformists. In exchange for their defense of France, Vietnamese of all political colors expected the French to make good on their promises of change. It is no accident that Duong Van Giao’s remarkable history of the Indochinese during the First World War called on the French to adopt a new ‘native policy’. This is precisely what the authors of the Revendications du peuple annamite—Phan Chu Trinh, Phan Van Truong, and Ho Chi Minh—requested in 1919; not independence, but republican reformism. But instead of sending Pennequin to Hanoi to build a new Indochinese state in collaboration with reformist members of the elite and thousands of returning veterans, the French sent Albert Sarraut. His answer to the Revendications was a policy of enlightened Franco-Vietnamese collaboration and colonial monarchy.26
SARRAUT AND THE MAKING OF AN INDOCHINESE STATE
The Policy of Franco-Vietnamese Collaboration
As Pennequin’s Armée jaune project shows, the French were no more monolithic in their reformist thinking and state-building plans than the Vietnamese. Nor did colonial policy in Indochina operate independently of the center, other parts of the empire, or without connection to neighboring colonial states. Caught off guard by the revolts of 1908 and troubled by the heavy-handed repression used to stop them, a remarkable debate ensued among metropolitan leaders. For the first time, important parliamentarians and colonial policy-makers realized that it was not enough to conquer, exploit, and punish. Paul Bert and Paul Doumer may have created a more centralized administration and extricated the revenue and labor needed to do so, but it had come at a great cost for the colonized. Four decades after the admirals had first landed in Cochinchina, the events of 1908 made it clear to many in Paris that the French colonial presence in Indochina still lacked legitimacy among peasants and elite alike.
Why did metropolitan leaders take particular notice of events in Indochina at this time? Ideology was one reason. The Dreyfus affair (1894–1906) and the rise of French socialism under Jean Jaurès were energizing republicanism, as was the advent of a modern, activist press in the Third Republic. Disgusted by the repressive measures used in 1908, the socialist Francis de Pressensé and vice-president of the newly created League of Human Rights in France (1898) asked how the republic could use extra-judicial means in Indochina to execute Vietnamese and still remain true to its principles at home. Though the Vietnamese were colonial subjects, they were humans too, he and others insisted. Like-minded deputies deplored a long list of colonial abuses. Maurice Viollette, a Freemason and colonial reformer, stated that the French could not claim to be ‘a superior race’ by committing rape, murder, and battery in Indochina. Deputies also criticized onerous taxation, oppressive monopolies, and excessive labor coercion as unworthy of the republic. In a series of debates between 1908 and 1911, many in Paris came to agree with Phan Chu Trinh’s message: ‘French policy will fail unless it is a pro-indigenous one.’ And the only way republicans could remain true to their core values was by implementing a workable policy of association with the Vietnamese, including legal guarantees of their individual rights.27
The result was the decision to dispatch Albert Sarraut to serve as Governor General of Indochina with a mandate to implement far-reaching reforms. Born in 1872, Sarraut heralded from a powerful republican newspaper family. His father was a Freemason and militant republican. A member of the Radical Socialist Party (which was the name of the republican party in France at that time) himself, Sarraut’s ascension in French politics had been meteoric. He voted for the law of 1905 separating Church and State and was a committed Dreyfusard (he carried a wound from a duel to prove it!). That he had no colonial experience was irrelevant (nor had Doumer). Also shocked by the events of 1908, the Minister of Colonies, Adolphe Messimy, wanted change. So much so that Messimy and Sarraut apparently met with Phan Chu Trinh in Paris to discuss the latter’s colonial ‘J’accuse’ of 1907 discussed above.
Like many of his socialist counterparts at the time (and this well into the twentieth century), Sarraut believed deeply in republican exceptionalism and its colonial mission, convinced that a unique humanism distinguished French colonialism from other (inferior) types in the past and present. But, like his backers in Paris, Sarraut was also a pragmatist. He knew that reform was essential to preventing revolution and preserving the empire. And he was an astute observer of geopolitics. His arrival in Indochina coincided with the rise of Japan and the fall of the Qing in China in late 1911. He closely followed the creation of the Republic of China under Sun Yat-sen. Intelligence reports apprised him of the Asian context in which Vietnamese anticolonialism and reformism had been circulating. He knew that Phan Boi Chau had recently moved to southern China, where he actively sought Chinese republican support for his Go East study-abroad program for young Vietnamese to travel to Japan. Sarraut was astonished to learn that mandarins inside and outside the colony were still conceptualizing reform in East Asian, not French, terms.
Lastly, the international context also explains this surge in liberal reformism in the Third Republic. In particular, the rise of a colonial-minded Japan, Germany, Britain, and United States convinced Sarraut that the Vietnamese had choices. It was no accident that Prince Cuong De pointed out in his 1913 letter to Sarraut the specific cases of Canada and Australia as models of colonial reform. The French were but one possible partner among several suitors, and republicans never ceased to justify their continued presence in Indochina by insisting that things would be even worse if others took over. Sarraut’s worst nightmare was that a war in Europe would end with the Indochinese house in German hands.
Phan Boi Chau certainly hoped that another Franco-German conflagration in Europe would favorably change power relations in Indochina. Chau met often with German agents in Asia, while Cuong De travelled to Berlin, from where he wrote his letter to Sarraut. Indeed, the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 offered Phan Boi Chau and Cuong De hope. The royal family in Hue also took note. Indeed, in 1916, France’s latest colonial emperor, Duy Tan, tried to escape his glasshouse to join Chau’s ranks on the outside. Although the French caught him and exiled him promptly to Reunion Island, Duy Tan’s colonial treason made it clear that elite collaboration at the highest level of the protected state was hardly guaranteed. A year later, a prison uprising occurred in Thai Nguyen province and spread to the countryside. It took the French six months to re-establish order. Fear, both in official circles and among the settlers, continued to run high. Maurius Moutet, a feisty lawyer and the future Minister of Colonies, had to fight tooth and nail to get his friend, Phan Chu Trinh, out of French prison in 1914.28
It was in this context that Albert Sarraut began implementing a wide range of reforms during his two mandates, which dominated the second decade of the 1900s (1911–14, 1917–19). Although his overall goal was to preserve French rule, he was sincere in his desire to improve the relationship between the French and the Vietnamese. Upon his arrival, he studied a little Vietnamese under Roux, promoted the first Vietnamese into the European civil service ranks, tried (unsuccessfully) to require French administrators to learn Vietnamese, and made a point of listening to native elite members and treating them as humans. Many such Vietnamese saw reason for hope in Sarraut’s nomination and gestures. Most of the European settler community, however, worried that this new breed of republicans—especially these socialist, humanist, and reform-minded governors—would ‘go native’ on them as the admirals had (allegedly) done before them and Pennequin was doing now. A wall of white silence greeted Sarraut when he stepped off the boat in Saigon in 1911.
Three goals drove government-backed reforms for Indochina—the elaboration of an official policy of Franco-Annamese collaboration, the introduction of a series of indigenous reforms, and the further rationalization of the colonial state. There was nothing particularly new about any of this. Worried by the Meiji miracle and the rise of Japan, Governor General Paul Beau had promoted just such an indigenous policy during his mandate (1902–8). He had established a modern Franco-Indigenous school system, reformed the mandarinate, and liberalized the penal code. He introduced a system of consultative chambers in Tonkin for selecting provincial mandarins and created an Indochinese university to produce a French-trained elite class. However, the revolts of 1908 had reversed much of this, as colonial fears had rolled back liberal reform.
With strong government backing, Sarraut was determined to go forward with the creation of a functioning Indochinese state. He asserted tighter control over the budget, revamped administrative borders, and streamlined the civil service. He presided over the creation in 1917 of the powerful political police, the Sûreté générale, which was essential to policy formulation, social control, and repression. This went together with the establishment of a rejuvenated indigenous affairs bureau for formulating and applying his liberal native policy. A remarkable group of men, including the head of the political police, Louis Marty, served him faithfully as the governor tried to increase the power of the native elite class by expanding deliberative local councils in Annam-Tonkin and opening the Cochinchinese Colonial Council to more southern Vietnamese. Sarraut also promoted some judicial reforms favoring individual and indigenous rights, pushed through fiscal and cadastral changes to lighten the tax burden on the rural poor, and ended rampant concession grants to the European population. He restored the Indochinese university and promoted modern Franco-Indigenous education to re-situate elites within the French orbit. Nowhere was the break with the past more evident than in 1919 when Sarraut presided over the closing of the centuries-old, Confucian exam system.29
Charismatic and articulate, Sarraut was also a master of propaganda. His team promulgated new press laws and authorized the publication of more newspapers, books, and translations in order to promote colonial reform and a Franco-Vietnamese future devoid of its old East Asian ties. Worried by German attempts to turn Asian opinion against the French, Sarraut initiated what was for all intents and purposes the start of a concerted francophonie strategy. Modern photography, cinema, theater, and radio would help win over hearts and minds. However, Sarraut also wanted to make good on Phan Chu Trinh’s call for more freedom of expression by opening the press to trustworthy members of the indigenous elite. This would provide them with a modern instrument and public forum through which they could express their needs. The press would also allow the colonized to speak out against a settler community that had long dominated the press. Censorship certainly continued under Sarraut, but he was often aghast at European behavior and language toward the colonized. Inadvertently, by expanding the colonial press, Sarraut also allowed a wide range of colonized subjects—Chinese, Indians, Cambodians, Lao, and Vietnamese—to engage each other in exchanges and shape colonial opinion in new and unforeseen ways.30
This was the context in which Sarraut’s team recruited a remarkable group of reform-minded Vietnamese allies and placed them at the head of major government-backed newspapers in southern, central, and northern Vietnam. They included such men as Pham Quynh, in charge of the Nam Phong (Southern Wind, in Tonkin); Nguyen Van Vinh at the Dong Duong Tap Chi (Indochina Review), Trung Bac Tan Van (Northern Central News), and L’Annam nouveau (New Annam, also in Tonkin); Bui Quang Chieu and Nguyen Phu Khai at the La Tribune indigène (Native Tribune, in Cochinchina); and later Huynh Thuc Khang at the Tieng Dan (Voice of the People, in Annam). Like Phan Chu Trinh, these reformers bet on colonial republicanism, reformism, humanism, and collaboration. Even Phan Boi Chau saw hope in Sarraut, leading him to write a pamphlet in 1917 he would later regret and one which nationalist historians would like to forget: ‘On Franco-Vietnamese Collaboration’.31
The title of Chau’s essay is significant because one of the pillars of Sarraut’s mandate was his ardent desire to enshrine reform in an official policy of collaboration. The governor understood the Vietnamese desire to play a greater role in the administration of their affairs and the country the French had violently taken from them. He also knew that the Vietnamese had supported the French during the First World War and expected a liberal colonial policy in return. In 1919, he delivered a speech in Hanoi to 3,000 Vietnamese elite members before returning to France to become their Minister of Colonies and the Republic’s most important colonial thinker since Jules Ferry. In it, he reiterated the French commitment to reform and its unique colonial mission. But he went further, insisting that Indochina had to be more than just an administration. It had to become an operational state, acting for its own interests within the French empire. Decision-making had to be located in Indochina, not the metropole. Economic development had to benefit the colonized as much as the colonizer. Sarraut promised political change. He held out the promise of increased colonial democracy, an Indochinese charter, a federation to hold its different parts together, and eventual self-government. He was fond of repeating that the ‘colonies are states in the making’, adding quickly that only a genuine policy of Franco-Vietnamese cooperation could ensure this.32
Many Vietnamese took Sarraut seriously that day, translating and commenting at length on his speech. His plans for building an Indochinese federation with its own decision-making powers, shared with the Vietnamese, convinced many that there was finally a future in working with the French. The French certainly hoped so, as the exhausted Third Republic looked to its empire to help it recover economically from the Great War and remain a great power. It is no accident that Sarraut published his colonial treatise, ‘On the Development of the Colonies’ (‘La mise en valeur des colonies’), in 1923. To put it another way, colonial reformism, development, and federalism did not emerge from the Second World War, but rather in the wake of the 1908 revolts and the First World War. Sarraut’s vision of a Franco-Vietnamese Indochina was riddled with contradictions, a great deal of naiveté, and would fail miserably by the 1940s. But no one at the time knew this, and Indochina was an idea as much as a state with which all Vietnamese would have to contend.
Becoming Indochinese?
In fact, many Vietnamese took Sarraut so seriously that they came remarkably close to rethinking their political future in Indochinese terms. While few in modern Vietnam can imagine such a thing today, it was hardly a far-fetched idea at the time. After all, pre-French Vietnam was the product of centuries of colonial expansion itself. Le Thanh Tong and Minh Mang were not only remarkable modernizers and state-builders; they and their descendants had also been ambitious colonizers. Moreover, what the Third Republic offered in terms of a special relationship in Indochina was a largely Franco-Vietnamese partnership. The French never offered an alliance to Cambodia or Laos before the Second World War. Convinced that they had to offer something to the Vietnamese in order to obtain their collaboration and thwart Thai expansionism, the French intentionally pushed the Vietnamese elite to remember their own imperial past and to think in Indochinese terms in the present. In 1885, Jules Harmand, a leading proponent of association, laid out the premise for promoting a policy of dual colonialism in Indochina at the very moment when he demanded that the court in Hue surrender completely:
The day that this race understands that its historical ambitions can, thanks to us, come to fruition in ways that it never before imagined; when [the Annamese] sees our aid allows him to take vengeance for the humiliations and defeats that he has never forgiven his neighbors; when he feels definitely superior to them and sees his domination expand with ours, only then will we be able to consider that the future of French Indochina is truly assured.33
Lastly, there were practical reasons explaining the French decision to cast Indochina in Franco-Vietnamese terms. Simply put, the colonizers needed local partners to help them operate the Indochinese state on the ground. The Europeans never numbered more than 35,000 during the entire colonial period (unlike the one million living in Algeria by 1954) and the Europeans resided overwhelmingly in eastern Indochinese towns. The French had increased Chinese immigration, but most were from the rural poor of southern China, and the last thing the French wanted to do was to import a Chinese elite to help run their colonial state. The French thus trained tens of thousands of overwhelmingly ethnic Viet civil servants, housed them, paid them regularly and covered their travel costs between Hanoi and Vientiane and Saigon and Phnom Penh, where they worked in the Indochinese colonial administration. In Cambodia, new roads linking Cochinchina to Cambodia saw the Viet population grow there, from 79,050 in 1911 to 140,220 in 1921. Of the sixteen Indochinese bureaucrats working in the town hall of Phnom Penh in 1913, fourteen were Viet and two Khmer. For similar reasons, the ratio of Viet bureaucrats in Laos increased too. By the early 1930s, the Viet occupied 54 percent of the posts offered by the administration. This was in spite of the fact that by the late 1930s the non-Viet populations in Laos constituted 98 percent of the population. By 1937, this immigration was such that there were 10,200 Viet living in Vientiane, but only 9,000 Lao.34
Similar demographics characterized the emerging working class in colonial Indochina. Faced with over-population problems in Tonkin and northern Annam, the French began shipping Tonkinese and Annamese laborers to southern Indochina to clear the jungle and to labor on rubber plantations. In the mid-1920s, three new roads linking Laos to northern Annam allowed for the easier transportation of Annamese laborers to Thakhek and Savannakhet. The overwhelming majority of the workers on rubber plantations in Cambodia and mines in Laos were ethnic Viet. Far from stopping Vietnamese expansion westward, French colonialism often promoted it.35
The French colonial project thus carried within it a second, pre-existing Asian one. While the French may have disrupted the Nguyen civil service of the nineteenth century, they opened up new possibilities for young Vietnamese graduates in the western Indochinese bureaucracy in the twentieth. These young graduates did not take over the protected royal administration of the Cambodians, but helped run the Indochinese state at federal level as secretaries, customs and security agents, mailmen, clerks, and telegraph operators. Colonial Indochina thus became a functional territorial space, state, and identity for the Viet operating it on the ground. There was one important exception to this Viet occupation and administration and that was in the highlands where the French increasingly tried to avoid using them (see chapter 14).
The formation of the Indochinese Constitutionalist Party under the direction of Bui Quang Chieu was one of the first signs that things were running along colonial lines. As editor of the party’s official mouthpiece, La Tribune Indigène, and one of France’s best allies since Phan Chu Trinh, Chieu took Sarraut seriously when the latter talked of building an Indochinese federation. The Constitutionalists applauded the idea of giving greater ‘autonomy, decentralization and freedom of action’ to an Indochinese state and welcomed the privileged place they would occupy in the colonial alliance. They applauded Sarraut’s promise of creating ‘a constitutional charter’ with ‘all the structures needed for a modern state’. This transformation was necessary if the colony were to become an ‘autonomous country’ and if ‘its Annamese personnel [were to] become Indochinese citizens’. Others took the French Indochinese model and connected it to a colonial Vietnamese past in order to justify continued, indeed accelerated Vietnamese expansion—with the French—in the present. In 1921, the Indochinese Constitutionalist Party defended the concordance between Vietnam and Indochina in clear terms:
We do not deny these [non-Viet] races’ intrinsic qualities or the right to present their problems within the Indochinese Union. But given the overwhelming majority of the Annamese in this country and the importance of their population, the forces behind their expansion continue. Given the more advanced state of their civilization and, finally, their historic rights, they occupy clearly the most important place in the concerns of the protecting country [France] in her colonizing mission in Indochina. The Annamese [. . .] are thus first in line for historic, ethnographic and geographic reasons which would be childish to deny and against which it would be futile to argue. In Indochina [. . .], it’s the law of the majority that rules [. . .], within the French Indochinese Union our supremacy is the logical consequence, the very nature of things.36
By the 1930s, Vietnamese entrepreneurs and politicians pushed for increased immigration westward in order to take the population pressure off Annam and Tonkin. In an essay entitled ‘From the Annamese Nation to the Indochinese Federation’, budding capitalist Pham Le Bong wrote that ‘in studying the history of the Annamese nation, one also has the impression that [Annam] is the unachieved history of Indochina’. Even leading intellectuals and politicians of the time, not least of all Pham Quynh and Nguyen Van Vinh, could think of themselves in remarkably Indochinese terms. Part of this shift was designed to force the French to do away with indirect methods of rule, including the monarchy, in order to implement truly republican institutions of an assimilationist kind, even if it meant doing so in Indochinese terms. This is how nations begin to take form, in ways we may not expect today, but that did not seem so strange at the time. This is also why it is dangerous to assume that modern Vietnam has always existed in its current form. It could have been and indeed once had been something very different.37
Republican Monarchy? The Birth of the Bao Dai Solution
The French simultaneously pushed in other directions depending on the political stakes. For one, French republicans may have done away with kingship in France, but they had no intention of letting go of their colonial emperors in Hue. Indeed, French republicans considered Vietnamese kingship to be an important part of their policy of indirect rule and association. The French were so shaken by Duy Tan’s near escape from Hue in 1916 (not to mention his father’s earlier attempt in 1907) that they decided to mold their own colonial emperor in the form of a little boy named Bao Dai. That Albert Sarraut was the architect of this first ‘Bao Dai solution’ after the First World War should come as no surprise. The governor was only too aware of the dangers of anticolonialist attempts to turn the Vietnamese monarchy against the French. He was convinced, like his good friend, Commissioner to Annam, and specialist of ancient Vietnam, Pierre Pasquier, that the Nguyen royal family and mandarinate on which it rested continued to exercise great influence over the majority peasant population, thereby making it a powerful cultural instrument of colonial control and mass participation. Sarraut was no royalist, but like scores of republicans following in his footsteps, he made major ideological compromises within the republic’s empire in order to keep Vietnam French. And this is why Phan Chu Trinh’s dream of overturning the Nguyen monarchy with the help of the Third Republic discussed earlier would be an utter failure. In a letter to Sarraut in 1922, Pasquier privately ridiculed Trinh’s idea of creating an ‘Annamese republic’ in association with the French.38
Anti-communism also explains Sarraut and the French Republic’s willingness to think in monarchical terms. Since the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the creation of the Comintern two years later, Sarraut, now Minister of Colonies, carefully watched the Soviet Union’s revolutionary moves across the globe and into colonial Asia. Long before American Cold War warriors began speaking of the need to ‘contain’ Sino-Soviet communism, Sarraut had already called for the creation of a ‘holy colonial alliance’ to block the spread of communism into the Western imperial world.39
In the wake of the First World War, Sarraut and Pasquier went to work to shape a loyal colonial monarch. Knowing that Emperor Khai Dinh was terminally ill, they convinced him to allow his son to come to them for a modern upbringing. In 1922, Pasquier wrote detailed instructions concerning the raising and education of the young prince. This process had to begin in France, he said, but culminate in Annam. Bao Dai had to be modern (French) and traditional (Annamese) at the same time. To this end, Sarraut and Pasquier took Bao Dai from his family, entrusted him to a French one, and sent him to France, where he was raised and educated in the finest aristocratic fashion. Before sending him off to France, however, Pierre Pasquier reminded the future emperor of his colonial conception and guardianship: ‘Young prince, always remember the day on which you received the mark of your future destiny, on that day two grand figures looked down on you, to smile at you, to protect you: ancient Annam and the sweet and beautiful France, in all of her glory and radiance’.40
Bao Dai spent nearly a decade in France, where Sarraut watched over him. Before returning him to Vietnam to help deal with a new set of revolts, the French had refashioned Bao Dai for colonial purposes which extended far beyond his native Annam. In an extraordinary mise en scèneopening the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, the emperor is dressed in traditional royal dress and plays his traditional, exotic part in this well-studied ritual celebrating the empire. Bao Dai sits at the center of the inaugural ceremony of the colonial exhibition in the Permanent Colonial Museum (Musée permanent des colonies), built for the occasion and which one can still visit today in Vincennes. The young emperor shares the VIP section with the likes of Marshal Lyautey, while the president of the republic delivers the opening speech (see photos 9 and 10). No other colonial emperor or king experienced such an invitation or such a display. Not only did the Nguyen emperor embody the special colonial relationship between France and Vietnam, but at that time he symbolically represented the empire (through the visible intermediary of his person) for the Third Republic. Colonial monarchy is part of modern Vietnamese history, but it is also part of the history of modern France. Bao Dai was the French Third Republic’s colonial monarch. This was exactly what the reformists led by Phan Chu Trinh did not want.