CHAPTER 5
ON 1 JANUARY 1929, the leader of the Constitutionalist Party and leading French ally since the First World War, Bui Quang Chieu, stepped up to the podium in Calcutta to address the closing session of the Indian Congress Party. Jawaharlal Nehru, the future prime minister of independent India and then General Secretary of the Indian National Congress, had invited Chieu and his fellow Constitutionalist, Duong Van Giao, to attend this event (Nehru knew Giao through family connections and earlier meetings in Europe). As Chieu adjusted the microphone, the Indian audience welcomed the head of the Constitutionalist Party with hails of ‘Indochinese! Indochinese!’ Chieu assured his ‘frenetic’ audience that ‘the Annamese are with you entirely in your struggle against imperialism’. ‘Your liberty is not only an Indian affair,’ he continued, ‘it is the concern of all of humanity because you represent a third of the human race [. . .] We bring to you, messieurs, the most ardent wishes of the Annamese people for the victory of your noble efforts. Long Live India! Long Live Liberty!’ Chieu even enjoyed a brief meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, who expressed his support of the Annamese people.
Upon returning to Saigon, Bui Quang Chieu wrote glowingly of his Calcutta trip in a series of travel notes. He praised the Indian National Congress, the success of colonial democracy in British India, and the model it could provide to republican-minded Vietnamese like him. But Chieu’s sudden interest in India and Gandhi’s non-cooperation with the British struck more than one reader as hypocritical. After all, this was one of France’s most faithful followers, a longtime believer in Sarraut’s policy of ‘Franco-Annamese collaboration’. A naturalized French citizen, Chieu served as vice president of the Cochinchinese Colonial Council, but had done little to turn it into a more representative Indochinese congress.
Chieu disingenuously claimed that he had known nothing about India before leaving Indochina, though his paper, La Tribune indochinoise, had long covered British reformism and the question of ‘dominion status’ for India and others. Other Vietnamese most certainly followed events in India attentively too. In 1926, Phan Boi Chau wrote admiringly of Gandhi’s non-cooperation and held it up as a model for the Vietnamese to emulate. Vietnam’s most prominent republican, Nguyen An Ninh, saw in Gandhi’s non-cooperation proof that colonial rule, whether British or French, was untenable without the participation of the people. French readers meanwhile recoiled at Chieu’s praise of British colonial democracy, attacking Chieu for even suggesting that the British could be better colonizers than they. But for Vietnamese republicans, the Indian example served as a counter-example to Sarraut’s much touted, but, in the end, empty policy of Franco-Annamese collaboration. Without the institutional reforms on which the Indian Congress turned, it was nothing more than a bluff. Bui Quang Chieu knew it, but even after his India trip he remained on course, unwilling to challenge the French on their failed republicanism, scared, no doubt, to lose his privileges. But this decision would cost him his life in 1945, as Vietnamese nationalists, radicalized by decades of failed colonial reformism as much as international communism, went after and destroyed moderates whom they did not trust. The irony is that many powerful French administrators had themselves never trusted their most faithful ‘collaborators’, not Bui Quang Chieu, not even their own colonial emperor Bao Dai. There was no equivalent to Nehru in Vietnam in 1945. There was no Indochinese version of the Indian Congress. There was little real trust within the politics of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration.1
THE LIMITS OF COLONIAL DEMOCRACY: ACT 1. THE CONSTITUTIONALISTS2
Things could have been different. Albert Sarraut’s 1919 promise of a republican-minded contract with the Vietnamese raised the hopes of many that reform was finally going to happen. This was of particular interest to the members of an emerging Vietnamese bourgeois class in Cochinchina. This included landowners, entrepreneurs, upward-moving civil servants, and highly educated professionals (doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists). As their economic power and social status grew, so too did their demands for a greater role in decision-making. Most resided in the bustling urban center of Saigon-Cholon. They spoke French, embraced Western culture, sent their children to French high schools, and some enjoyed metropolitan citizenship. Having grown up in Cochinchina, they had no direct experience of the Confucian examination system or the mandarinate still operating in Annam and Tonkin. In fact, they wanted to abolish what remained of it in the southern countryside in order to introduce a French-style direct administration which was judged to be more modern.
These assimilationist practices were not always crass efforts to mimic the colonizer. Holding metropolitan citizenship allowed these members of the elite to skirt around, via the law, a colonial system which made them second-class citizens in their own country (despite the fact that they were as ‘civilized’ and as ‘intelligent’ as the European settlers they crossed in the streets and competed with in placement tests). As in Algeria and Madagascar, French citizenship allowed the ‘natives’ to participate more effectively in colonial institutions dominated by the miniscule French population. Thanks to metropolitan citizenship, those Vietnamese in Cochinchina could own newspapers and avoid censorship more easily. Naturalization could also protect them from arbitrary arrest, unlawful prosecution, and special commissions, as Gilbert Chieu’s recent trial had demonstrated. He had supported the anticolonialist, Phan Boi Chau, but avoided jail thanks to his French citizenship.
The rise of a bourgeois class is an important milestone in the history of modern Vietnam. This new social group was increasingly interested in capital accumulation and real estate acquisition, the expansion of trade and industry, upward social mobility, and the leisure accompanying it. Few, by the 1920s, had any interest in reviving the monarchy, despite the Nguyen dynasty’s southern roots. Representative politics and expanded access to colonial decision-making attracted them most. Who were they? Some of the best-known names of those in this new and more confident class included Bui Quang Chieu, Nguyen Phu Khai, Nguyen Phan Long, and Duong Van Giao. A protégé of Pierre Loti, Nguyen Phu Khai had studied in France. A rich landowner, he created the first Vietnamese-owned rice mill in 1915, helped organize a boycott against Chinese traders in 1919, and, as part of this burgeoning economic nationalism, joined in the creation of the country’s first ‘Vietnamese bank’. Thanks to Sarraut’s support, Khai established the Tribune indigène in 1917, thereby providing a voice to these southerners determined to work with the French to remake the country, economically and politically.
A French citizen, Bui Quang Chieu trained abroad as an agricultural engineer. Upon his return, he rose rapidly in the Indochinese civil service, joined the staff of the Tribune indigène, and wrote prolifically in favor of republican reformism and the need to accord the Cochinchinese elite a greater role in colonial governance. Nguyen Phan Long did much the same in his paper, the Echo annamite (Annamese News), while Duong Van Giao had studied law in France and pushed for increased native representation in colonial institutions. This was not an exclusively southern affair, however. One of modern Vietnam’s first capitalists heralded from the north. The indefatigable Bach Thai Buoi rose from rags to riches at the turn of the century, thanks to his shipping and mining businesses. He, too, challenged pre-existing Chinese commercial interests, as an emerging Vietnamese business class affirmed itself.
These bourgeois elites built on Phan Chu Trinh’s reformist project. This included attaining greater freedoms of association, press, and travel; the establishment of the rule of law through judicial reform; and the ending of the colonizers’ monopolies upon alcohol and opium. In addition to promoting Western education and commercial modernization, they also sought to expand white-collar careers in the civil service beyond interpreting jobs, to liberalize the requirements for acquiring metropolitan citizenship, and to transform the Nguyen villages’ own administrative bodies into elected municipalities along French lines. Thanks to more liberal laws afforded by Cochinchina’s status as a colony and backed by Sarraut’s team, these men created the Indochinese Constitutionalist Party in 1923, the first of its kind in Vietnam. Given their considerable financial support of France during the First World War (through fund-raising for it or loans made to it), these southerners trusted Sarraut to go forward as Minister of the Colonies in the elaboration of an Indochinese constitution or congress which would guarantee expanded colonial democracy. No one had forgotten the governor-general’s historic promise of 1919: ‘We must increase native representation in the existing local assemblies, create native representation in assemblies where it does not yet exist, and enlarge the native electoral body that will designate its representatives in such a way that the native representatives are increasingly the direct emanation of the population and no longer the administration’s delegates.’ This was the foundation of a colonial democracy that many, not just the Constitutionalists, could accept.3
In the southern colony, this meant obtaining increased representation in local municipalities and on the Cochinchinese Colonial Council in particular. The road leading to such an expansion of political participation, however, was lined with obstacles, not least of all the European settler community. As in Algeria, the French in Indochina were largely opposed to according metropolitan citizenship to members of the native elite or to broadening the native electorate. In the settlers’ eyes, the extension of even limited voting rights to the most ‘civilized’ Vietnamese raised the specter of the ‘native masses’ running the Europeans out of the colony—legally. The Europeans interpreted any concession to the colonized as a loss. Republican governors certainly pushed through reforms over the heads of such opposition, and a variety of native commissions and representative chambers emerged in Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin. However, colonial authorities refused the native elite any real decision-making power. The French nominated the so-called ‘native delegates’, who only were allowed to hold consultative or advisory roles. They could not vote on budgets or establish quotas for the payment of the corvée, even though the non-European population provided the overwhelming bulk of the tax revenue and labor. In Annam, the monarchy often objected to introducing representative politics, reluctant to lose what little power it still possessed. And when peasants revolted against onerous taxes and corvée requirements, as they had done in 1908, the French backtracked on expanding native representation.
The French were not all to blame, however. The Constitutionalists never endorsed universal suffrage. In fact, they wanted to limit the native right to vote and French naturalizations to a small social group of elite members like themselves. When the question arose of granting French citizenship to thousands of largely illiterate Vietnamese who had served in France as workers and soldiers during the war, Bui Quang Chieu objected. In fact, the Sarraut-inspired decree of 1922 expanding the Cochinchinese electorate from 1,500 to 20,000 individuals went beyond what the Constitutionalists had initially requested. They certainly welcomed this reform as well as its expansion in the number of native seats on the Cochinchinese Colonial Council from six to ten. They threw themselves into local politics, mobilized their papers, and increased the number of Constitutionalists on the council. However, they never sought to enfranchise the entire population. They denied the right to vote to women, even those of their own class.
On the whole, the Cochinchinese Constitutionalists remained bourgeois reformers, operating from the urban centers and focused primarily on promoting the interests of their class in a delicate balancing act with the settler population and the colonial authorities. Depending on the issues coming before the council and local municipalities on which they sat, the Constitutionalists could oppose or support local French politicians. In 1919, for example, many supported Ernest Outrey, a trade-oriented settler politician, in his bid to remain Cochinchina’s deputy to the French national assembly. Several European traders, editors, and politicians also took sides with the Constitutionalists during the boycott of the Chinese. And, depending on the issues, French and Constitutionalists might clash when it came to debating important economic matters such as the Saigon port authority, colonial monopolies, and infrastructure development. However, by defining their interests narrowly in urban and class terms and by betting on French goodwill to implement their desired reforms, the Constitutionalists found themselves in the difficult position of having to prove their faithfulness to the French, and even siding with them in times of trouble, for fear of being treated as anti-français or nationalists. They feared that both labels would undermine their socio-economic status and reformist project.
They did. French settler politicians and journalists did their best to keep these Vietnamese in their place and to prevent Sarraut’s promises from ever coming to fruition. While Sarraut and his successors in Indochina were hardly pro-settler, their failure to implement real reforms undermined the Constitutionalists and others betting on colonial republicanism. Fearful of losing control, a string of leftist governors in the 1920s imposed strict regulations on the opening of new secondary schools, closed the faculty of law at the University of Hanoi, cracked down on private schools of a modern kind in Annam and Tonkin, and maintained strict censorship, and limits on freedom of travel, assembly, and thought. When one of their strongest allies, Pham Quynh, tried to form a political party in Tonkin in 1926, the French refused him the permission to do so.
Even the advent of a left-dominated government, the Cartel des Gauches (or ‘Cartel of the Left’, 1924–6), in France and the dispatch of the socialist Alexandre Varenne to run Indochina did little to expand representative politics. Varenne created the Chamber of People’s Representatives (Chambres des représentants de l’Annam et du Tonkin) for Annam and Tonkin, as well as the Grand Council of Economic Interests (Grand Conseil des Intérêts économiques). While each allowed its members to voice their opinions and to debate local, mainly economic, issues, both remained strictly advisory bodies and their members could not set their own agendas. Bui Quang Chieu travelled to France at this time, confident that change was finally in the making. But he returned home disappointed, especially when he saw what the British were doing in India. This disillusionment was widespread. In 1928, Huynh Thuc Khang, a pro-French reformer who had gone to jail with Phan Chu Trinh during the 1908 peasant revolts, became the president of the Chamber of People’s Representatives for Annam. At the outset, he was hopeful that the introduction of colonial democracy to the countryside would bring badly needed change by providing the rural poor with a voice in decision-making and allowing local leaders to bypass the moribund monarchy. In a bitter speech in 1928, he criticized the French for failing to address seriously any of the major pleas coming from the ‘people’s chamber’:
Entrusted with the confidence of my constituents, I have assumed, thanks to the civilizing policy of the government, the responsibility of a people’s representative for the past two years [. . .] Yet, during the last two years the government has not once given heed to any of our requests, failing thereby to reassure the people that this new institution is different from the absolute rule they had experienced in the past. The people, consequently, have lost their confidence in us. Neither do they believe any longer in the government. We ourselves have often heard uttered by our constituants comments such as the following: ‘The name does make use of the words, “representatives of the people”, but the reality simply yields a new mandarinate’.4
Irritated, the Commissioner of Annam shot back that all was fine, insisting that ‘the people are busily working in total peace’. Khang resigned, humiliated and distrustful. In 1946, he would become the president of postcolonial Vietnam’s first National Assembly.
Significantly, the French never considered expanding their single most important democratic institution in the colony—the Cochinchinese Colonial Council—northward to establish a pan-Vietnamese or an Indochinesewide colonial parliament or congress. Until 1949, French Vietnam thus remained a hodgepodge of colonies, protectorates, and military territories. Pham Quynh asked in 1930 whether the French wanted to turn ‘Vietnam’ into a fully assimilated colony, like Algeria, or maintain it as a protectorate by allowing an autonomous Vietnamese state to exist within the French empire, as they did in Morocco. The French never provided a clear answer, but they systematically refused any attempt to unify Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin into one administrative ‘Vietnamese’ body. Sarraut and his successors certainly spoke of creating an Indochinese federation whenever trouble was in the air, but it never occurred before the Second World War in reality.5
As Bui Quang Chieu pointed out in his travel notes of 1929, this was in stark contrast to the Indian National Congress created by the British in 1885. During the interwar years in particular, the British had increasingly allowed Indian elites to organize electoral campaigns, participate in provincial elections, and increasingly partake in colonial decision-making. Some in Indochina may have mocked Gandhi’s pacifism, but many Vietnamese understood that this ascetic man and his trusted ally, Nehru, were transforming the Congress from an elitist, bourgeois urban party into a mass-based rural organization with provincial committees. Of course, reformism, whether British or French in design, sought to avoid decolonization. However, by failing to develop or allow institutions and mass parties capable of reaching into the countryside, the French left the field open to others while hemming in their most faithful partners all the time. When large-scale revolts broke out again in 1930–31, organized religious, nationalist, and communist parties mobilized along mass lines, while French republicans repressed the indigenous people, reversed reforms, and desperately tried to revive the very monarchy in which so few Vietnamese believed. And by their own refusal to widen politics to the working and peasant classes, the Constitutionalists, including Bui Quang Chieu, missed a golden opportunity to create a mass party like the Indian nationalists. To young nationalist eyes, the Constitutionalists now started to pass for colonial collaborators of the worst kind. Modern bourgeois Vietnamese republicanism was stillborn.6
THE POLITICIZATION OF A NEW ELITE: THE YOUNG
The French, the Constitutionalists, and the monarchists alienated another segment of the population, an increasingly politicized and nationalist-minded one by the 1920s—that of the educated young. This new generation heralded overwhelmingly from urban centers, not just Saigon, but also Hanoi, Vinh, Haiphong, and a host of growing provincial and district towns. A few could claim working-class and peasant backgrounds, but most were the privileged sons and daughters of mandarins, civil servants, professionals, and entrepreneurs. Pham Van Dong and Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, future communist leaders, as well as the novelist and nationalist Nhat Linh, all heralded from mandarin families. This younger generation was also the first to experience the Franco-Indigenous school system. Many graduated from the much-admired French high schools in Saigon (Chasseloup-Laubat) and Hanoi (Albert Sarraut). By 1925, this French-trained, urban intelligentsia counted around 5,000 individuals, doubling to 10,000 a decade later. They worked in the civil service and liberal professions. Many were teachers and journalists. Nguyen Thai Hoc, the founder of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party in 1927, was a schoolteacher, as was Vo Nguyen Giap (who led the Vietnamese to victory in battle over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954).7
A two-pronged linguistic revolution also marked the emergence of this generation as a political force. For the first time in centuries, an entire group of young elite members no longer formally studied Chinese characters, but was now speaking, reading, and writing quite fluently in a new foreign language—French. Unlike the two ‘Phans’, young Vietnamese graduates now read Rousseau in the original and discovered and easily understood an array of global ideas in French translation. However, the colonial classrooms also reinforced this generation’s mastery of a secondwritten language—their own. From the start, the French pushed the Romanized writing system for Vietnamese in the civil service, schools, and colonial barracks. On the eve of the Second World War, 10 percent of the Vietnamese population of almost twenty million people could read newspapers in quoc ngu.
Further facilitating the politicization of this new intelligentsia was the introduction of state-of-the-art printing presses, a renaissance in print culture, and improved means of transportation and communications. The number of French and quoc ngu newspapers, pamphlets, and books in circulation during the interwar period exploded. Despite their efforts to censor quoc ngu papers and control ideas, the French realized that there was little they could do to put the genie back in the bottle. Sarraut may have promoted French and quoc ngu in the 1910s in order to sever Vietnam membership from China’s civilizational orbit, but little did he realize that, within a decade, this script would become a powerful tool for shaping a wide range of local opinions and identities—national, religious, and cultural (see chapter 12).8
A fiery young man who had returned from Paris led the charge. His name was Nguyen An Ninh. Born in Cochinchina in 1900, Ninh was a product of the colonial education system. A graduate of Chasseloup-Laubat, he spoke French beautifully and wrote it elegantly. He translated Rousseau’s Social Contract into quoc ngu. He obtained his undergraduate degree in law in Paris in 1921. He travelled widely in France and Europe and developed a keen interest in politics, nationalism, journalism, philosophy, and religion. Although he fraternized with Phan Chu Trinh in Paris, Ninh shared little of Phan’s faith in colonial collaboration.9
Nguyen An Ninh began to express his doubts publicly upon returning to Saigon in 1922. Armed with a French-language newspaper like none other before it—La Cloche fêlée (The Cracked Bell), he wrote a string of hard-hitting articles and incisive essays designed to wake up his generation and to lay bare the glaring contradictions of republican colonial rule and its twisted discourse for all to see. In 1923, he penned ‘The Ideal of the Annamese Youth’, in which he argued that the redemption of the country now depended on the young, both individually and collectively. Most importantly, he insisted, the youth had to act. ‘Life is action’, he wrote. ‘To say action is to say effort. To say effort is to say obstacles. And they are many, the obstacles to our ambitions, the greatest of them being ourselves.’ If the youth could create a new set of ideals, ‘their ideals’, then they could create a new culture, a new Vietnam, free of colonial domination and the weight of the past. Sarraut’s Franco-Vietnamese collaboration and reformist talk was a bluff, he insisted. And the mission civilisatrice upon which it rested? A colonial myth designed to legitimate and perpetuate indefinitely foreign rule, for the French would always cast the Vietnamese as children, necessarily incapable of ruling themselves.10
For Ninh and others like him, the liberation of Vietnam from foreign domination went hand in hand with the unshackling of the individual from what was judged to be a suffocating Confucian tradition. By 1930, young Vietnamese intellectuals were attacking ‘Confucianism’ and ‘tradition’ for stifling individual freedoms and thought. As one of Ninh’s contemporaries wrote: ‘It is Confucianism which in the past elevated Vietnam to the rank of civilized nations. It is also Confucianism which has brought Vietnam to the brink of perdition’. In other texts, Ninh focused on collective action and the need to develop a national culture in opposition to the colonial one. He zeroed in on the brutality of French conquest, objecting to the dismemberment of the country into three parts. He reminded his young readers that the Vietnamese had never lacked heroes. Individual men and women had stood up in the past to resist a thousand years of Chinese occupation; they could do it again. He resurrected the Trung sisters and their resistance against the Chinese in the first century CE and recast them as heroines to emulate in the present. In place of colonial myths, Ninh (and others) wanted national ones. In a 1925 text called ‘The French in Indochina’, Ninh produced a long list of revolts, from that of the Trung sisters to the most recent one—the attempt by Pham Hong Thai to assassinate the governor general during the latter’s visit to Guangzhou. Although Pham Hong Thai failed, drowning while trying to escape, Ninh held him up as proof of a young Vietnamese who had acted on an ideal, driven by a deep-seated resistance culture, and, though Ninh did not say it, capable of serving as a martyr to emulate, individually, collectively, and, above all, now. In short, nationalism and anticolonialism were spreading rapidly among this young urban class that Ninh embodied so well; another turning point in the making of modern Vietnam.11
The increasing radicalization of the young interacted with the sinking of colonial reformism. Ninh’s initial hope that the French would help the youth dissipated completely as the leftwing government in the Cartel des Gauches and Alexander Varenne in particular failed to make good on Sarraut’s political promises and transform ‘association’ into something more than a never ending word game to mask unchanging colonial rule, and the use of fear as its weapon. At some time in 1925, Ninh concluded that the French were hostile to any form of substantial reform. His generation had no choice but to act to free itself and the country. On 30 November 1925, he issued a call to arms:
Liberty is to be taken; it is not to be granted. To wrest it away from an organized power, we need to oppose to that power an organized force [. . .] When we ask for reforms, we acknowledge the authority of the established regime. But if they are refused to us, let us know how to organize ourselves. Let us not put any faith in the policy of association that is much talked about these days. To associate, at least there must be two sides, and only equals. Let us say to the government to wait until we have the same liberty and the same rights as those with which it wants us to associate.12
The Governor of Cochinchina, Dr Cognacq, had already summoned the young man to his office and warned him: ‘There must not be intellectuals in this country. The country is too simple. If you want intellectuals, go to Moscow. Be assured that the seeds you are trying to sow will never bear fruit’. It is doubtful that the governor believed everything he said, for his own intelligence services were reporting that those sympathetic to Ninh’s cause included not just ‘intellectuals’, but also peasants, traders, rural teachers, paramedics, colonial civil servants, and students. What French authority figures like Cognacq failed to grasp was that the elite young were fast losing faith in colonial republicanism and reformism. Hardly an accident, in late 1925 Nguyen An Ninh and his new co-editor, Phan Van Truong, changed the motto appearing at top of each issue of La Cloche fêléefrom its designation as the ‘Medium of Propaganda for French Ideas’ to a subversive quote from Mencius: ‘The people are everything; the state has but a secondary importance; the prince is nothing’. This came as Sarraut and Pasquier did their best to fashion a new colonial emperor in the person of Bao Dai. The disconnect spoke volumes about the poverty of French colonial policy and their inaction at this critical juncture.13
In the end, Ninh remained an ideas man more than an organizer of the masses. He often dreamed of being a Vietnamese Gandhi, but was always content to play the part of the gadfly in the end. His fearless critique of French injustices landed him repeatedly in jail. He did, however, get to relish his role in catalyzing the young into a political force for the first time in the history of Vietnam. This began in 1926 when a series of events converged to spur thousands of young people to defy the French. The arrest and trial of Phan Boi Chau in late 1925 became a cause célèbre for this generation, as had Phan Chu Trinh’s return from France. Despite briefly falling for Sarraut’s policy of collaboration, Chau remained a hero for the young, one of the rare individuals to have stood up, resisted, and sacrificed so much individually for the collective cause. When Varenne realized that he was making a martyr out of the man by putting him on trial in 1926, the governor quickly commuted Chau’s harsh sentence and shuttled the aging revolutionary off to Hue to live out the rest of his days in solitude. Meanwhile, the police arrested Nguyen An Ninh, closed his newspaper, and, in so doing, further enraged his disciples.
Little wonder that the death (from natural causes) of Phan Chu Trinh in March 1926 brought students into the streets. In Saigon alone, around 100,000 people took part in Trinh’s funeral cortège, arguably the largest public manifestation to have ever occurred in Vietnam to that date. Wearing black armbands, the youth used this occasion of public mourning to vent their anger and air their political grievances. Workers’ strikes also occurred in Saigon and elsewhere over the next year. When the French sanctioned many who had demonstrated, schools rapidly became politicized sites as scores of students boycotted their classes. In Cochinchina alone, the colonial authorities expelled over a thousand students as Constitutionalists like Bui Quang Chieu and monarchists like Pham Quynh looked on apprehensively, refusing to make the nationalist leap of faith. Many of these burgeoning radicals would not forget this.
From this point onward, the lines were quickly being drawn in the sand. Not all students went on strike or risked expulsion; but those who did suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the law and often at odds with their parents, many of whom thought that they had lost their Confucian minds. Colonial authorities certainly agreed, not least the new governor general in 1928, Pierre Pasquier. A longtime administrator and dedicated monarchist, this conservative man disdained these young déracinés as much as Cognacq. He prided himself on his deep knowledge of Vietnam and of the Vietnamese. Pasquier immediately implemented educational policies designed to re-root the young in their true ‘Confucian culture’ and ‘moral order’. His erudite history L’Annam d’autrefois (Ancient Annam) reappeared in print at the very moment that this young generation began to rethink Vietnam in new ways.14
One of the most important lessons these young elites learned was that opposition to colonial power required the creation of political parties that could operate clandestinely and take the national message to the countryside—to the ‘people’, as Ninh’s slogan put it. In 1927, a group of nationalist-minded teachers, students, journalists, civil servants, and merchants in the north tried to do just that when they established the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, known by its acronym, VNQDD (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang). While it shared the same name as the Chinese Nationalist Party (the GMD), the VNQDD was a very Vietnamese affair. Nguyen Thai Hoc and Pham Tuan Tai, both schoolteachers, and Nguyen Khac Nhu, an older, reformist-minded mandarin scholar, formed the core of the party. Initially, VNQDD leaders called on the French to make good on Sarraut’s reformism and to recognize the Vietnamese people’s basic human rights. While the party certainly relied on Leninist organizational principles (as did the GMD), the Vietnamese Nationalist Party was a non-communist nationalist movement. Its main goals were national independence and territorial unification (Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina), economic development of a socialist kind, and the creation of republican government based on popular sovereignty and the rule of law.15
The VNQDD’s members also had a penchant for brash and violent action. Many were convinced that the socio-economic suffering in the countryside was such that the masses would easily be made to follow them. A spark was all that was needed. The assassination of a notorious French labor recruiter in early 1929 was intended to do that. But instead of triggering an uprising, the killing of this man set off a spiral of colonial repression that pushed the leadership into further, ultimately fatal action. On the night of 9 February 1930, as the police moved in, Vietnamese Nationalist Party leaders organized a daring attack on the French garrison in Yen Bay in Tonkin. It was a miserable failure; there was no peasant uprising. Instead, the French arrested scores of members of the VNQDD, including Nguyen Thai Hoc. Those who escaped fled to southern China, where they would largely remain under the tutelage of the Chinese Nationalist Party until returning to Vietnam in 1945.16
The Vietnamese Nationalist Party’s daring action shook the colonial state. Fear once again guided colonial policy as Pasquier unleashed his security services. Unlike the violent conquest of the nineteenth century or the crackdown of the 1908 revolts, French repression in 1930 triggered anti-colonial demonstrations in the metropolis for the first time. This occurred at the same time that the republic was trying to sell the empire to the French people by bringing it to them at the colonial exhibition outside Paris in 1931. Metropolitan journalists also began covering colonial affairs more closely and critically. Louis Roubaud’s ‘Viet-Nam: la tragédie indo-chinoise’ provided a riveting, even subversive, account of the VNQDD. Roubaud met with colonial authorities, interviewed Vietnamese Nationalist Party prisoners, and, in the company of Indochina’s top policeman, Paul Arnoux, witnessed the execution of Nguyen Thai Hoc. Roubaud was so moved by what he saw that day that he included the word ‘Viet-Nam’ on the cover of his book, one of the first times it had ever appeared in French: ‘Viet-Nam! Viet-Nam! Viet-Nam! Thirteen times, I heard that scream before the guillotine at Yen Bay’. Nguyen Thai Hoc’s fiancée, Nguyen Thi Giang, committed suicide a few weeks later, leaving a double suicide note, one for her lover, the other for her country.17
Roubaud understood that these men and women were not ‘pirates’ or, despite the colonial spin, ‘communists’. He pointed out in fact that these nationalists were a lot like the French. When he asked a high-ranking Vietnamese Nationalist Party leader if he were a communist, the young man scornfully shot back: ‘I’m a republican just like you. What I wish for my country is that which you have obtained for yours: a democratic government, universal suffrage, liberty of the press, the recognition of human rights and those of the citizen, and, for starters, independence’. Backed by a special commission, the republic guillotined him a few days later. Days before his own execution, Nguyen Thai Hoc had addressed a letter to the French National Assembly, in which he explained that Varenne’s failure to move on any reforms had led him to act. There was no reason not to take him at his word. With these executions, the French had effectively crushed yet another manifestation of Vietnamese republicanism, the non-communist one. Seventy years after taking Saigon, colonial legitimacy remained as fragile as ever and Sarraut’s policy of Franco-Annamese collaboration of 1919 was little more than an empty shell. But by failing to work with moderate nationalists, even anticommunist ones, the French pushed them in radical directions.18
HO CHI MINH AND GLOBAL COMMUNISM19
Ho Chi Minh was no exception to this rule. His birth name was Nguyen Tat Thanh, ‘he who is sure to succeed’. Ho was certainly not ‘born Red’. He was born into a Confucian-minded family in Annam in 1890. He had one foot in the world of the two Phans and the other in that of Nguyen An Ninh and Nguyen Thai Hoc. The son of a high-ranking mandarin, he was set to follow in his father’s footsteps. Like so many others in the protectorates, he diligently studied Chinese characters and the Confucian classics in preparation for the civil service exams. His father’s transfer to Hue also meant that Ho came of age in the royal capital. He entered the prestigious National College (Quoc Hoc) there, created to train modern civil servants for the imperial government. He learned the basics of quoc ngu, picked up some French, and may have experienced the newly introduced Franco-Indigenous curriculum. His studies ended abruptly in 1909, however, when, in a drunken rage, his father’s beating of a subject ended in the poor man’s death. Ho’s father lost his job and with it Ho’s own chances of becoming a mandarin.
On his own, the young man left for Saigon. While we do not know what was driving him southward, Ho was hardly apolitical. As an important mandarin, Ho’s father had crossed paths with a variety of Vietnamese luminaries. And from his location in Hue, Ho must have witnessed the peasant revolts of 1908. A spy later told the French that Ho ‘claims that with his own eyes he saw the Vietnamese coming empty-handed to the Commissioner for Annam’s office to protest against the heavy labor contribution [. . .] and that the crowd was fired on to disperse it’. That the authorities at the National College reprimanded him for criticizing such repression suggests that Ho, like so many others, wanted to do something. Whatever it was, he had clearly concluded that the answers lay abroad. In Saigon, he landed a job as a cook on a French liner, the Admiral Latouche-Tréville, as it steamed westward across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, and into the Mediterranean. Upon arriving in Marseille in 1911, he applied to the Ecole Coloniale, but his father’s sins blocked again his access to the civil service. Undeterred, Ho kept his job on the Latouche, traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, even working as a housekeeper in New York to make ends meet.20
Ho’s international movements were hardly unique at the time. By the turn of the century, people and information were moving across the planet in unprecedented ways and with greater alacrity as globalization intensified. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the expansion of more shipping lines between the East and the West, the laying of transoceanic communication cables, and the spread of wireless telegraphy had all increasingly connected the world. The demand for labor had also increased as colonial states across the globe expanded and industrialization spread further. This, in turn, facilitated the movements of massive numbers of people and of Asians in particular. Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1940, two and a half million Chinese moved to British Singapore and Malaya. Most were laborers working on colonial plantations. Tens of thousands migrated to the Pacific islands, the Caribbean, and the Americas. European wars also accelerated Asian movements westward. As we saw in chapter 4, almost 100,000 Vietnamese served in wartime France. Several thousands stayed on after the war while more Chinese and Vietnamese workers would arrive in the 1920s, marking the takeoff of the Chinese and Vietnamese diasporas in France. Meanwhile, French shipping lines, such as the Compagnies des messageries maritimes and the Compagnies des chargeurs réunis, moved thousands of Vietnamese sailors around the world. Associations popped up in port towns on both sides of the Atlantic, serving as meeting places and relays for exchanging information, mail, people, and ideas. Like so many other revolutionaries, Ho relied on sailors for information, contacts, and transportation.21
Having closed Phan Boi Chau’s Go East program to study abroad in Japan in 1909, the French also sought to channel the movement of the young elite toward the Indochinese University in Hanoi and establishments in France. When Ho landed in Marseille, he found that there were a dozen young Vietnamese studying in the metropole. Phan Chu Trinh was there, keeping company with Phan Van Truong and Nguyen The Truyen. Phan Van Truong was the first Vietnamese to obtain a law degree at the Sorbonne. When he wasn’t teaching Vietnamese to colonial administrators in Paris, he penned articles for various papers. He was a fierce republican and advocate of colonial reform whose activities landed him in prison on several occasions. He created with Phan Chu Trinh the Fraternity of Compatriots (Fraternité des compatriots) in 1912, then the Annamese Patriots Group (Groupe des Patriotes annamite) in 1919. A member of the French Socialist Party, Nguyen The Truyen joined the others in calling on the French to make good on their reformist promises. And although he did not settle down in Paris until mid-1919 (he had preferred to reside in New York and London), Ho Chi Minh stopped over regularly in France. He followed the course of the First World War closely and worked with Phan Van Truong, Nguyen The Truyen, and Phan Chu Trinh. These men helped Ho to make the right connections, widened his perspectives, challenged his ideas, and helped him prepare his first articles in French.
Ho’s travels also brought him into contact with a wider range of reformists and anticolonialists moving westward like him, not least of all Korean nationalists he met in the United States and Chinese ones in France, including Zhou Enlai. Thanks to his improving English, French, and ‘brush conversations’ in Chinese characters, Ho learned that the Koreans were lobbying President Woodrow Wilson to support their independence cause at the Versailles peace conference. The Chinese also hoped that Wilson’s talk of self-determination would apply to Asia. Korean nationalists submitted their petition to the conference on 12 May 1919. The Algerian nationalist Emir Khaled submitted one to Wilson on 23 May 1919. Inspired, Ho arrived in Paris in June and joined immediately with Phan Van Truong and Nguyen The Truyen to submit a Vietnamese petition. Ho Chi Minh did not write the famous ‘Revendications du peuple annamite’ (‘The Demands of the Annamese People’) in 1919 alone. They all did.22
Unlike the Koreans, these Vietnamese did not ask the French or the Americans for independence. Rather they asked the French to honor their reformist promises. In mid-1919, Ho still believed in republican reformism. He became a Freemason, a socialist, and a member of the Human Rights League. During a brief audience with Sarraut, he urged the governor to keep the promises he had made in Hanoi in April 1919. But like Truyen and Truong, Ho was increasingly exasperated by the contradictions in republican colonial policy and discourse. In a tense conversation with Phan Chu Trinh, Ho warned that if real reform did not come soon, then the Vietnamese would have to take their rights back by force: ‘We are men and we should be treated that way. All those who refuse to treat us as their equals are our enemies’. Trinh countered that the implications of his words were immense: ‘What do you want our unarmed countrymen to do against the Europeans and their weapons? Why should people die uselessly without any result?’ This was not the last time that this question would confront Vietnamese nationalists.23
Over the next year, Ho Chi Minh abandoned Phan Chu Trinh’s blind faith in colonial reformism. More than anything else, Ho’s discovery of the Russian Revolution, Marxism, and especially Lenin’s theses on colonialism provided him with a cogent explanation of his country’s plight and offered a way out. For Lenin, international capitalism not only exploited the working class in Europe, but it also attained its highest level of development in the form of global imperialism in the non-Western, unindustrialized world. Capitalist countries needed colonies as sources of cheap primary materials and as captured markets for their finished products. Capitalism’s oppression of the European working class and the Afro-Asian colonized were thus two sides of the same theoretical coin. To break their chains, Lenin said, workers and colonial peoples had to unite their forces against their common, two-headed enemy—international capitalism and imperialism. At a time when it was clear that Wilson was not going to push decolonization beyond Europe, the Soviets appeared to many (but not to all) as the only great power interested in the non-Western colonized. In 1919, Lenin created the Comintern (the Communist International organization) to direct and support the development of communist parties across the globe. In July 1920, the Comintern approved Lenin’s colonial theses; Ho learned of them from the pages of L’Humanité.
Others were making this leftward journey in France. Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan, and Deng Xiaoping from China, for example. Ho also collaborated with fellow colonial subjects from Madagascar, Dahomey, and Algeria. Together many of them published articles in the Le Paria (The Pariah) newspaper, condemning colonial abuses across the empire and calling for revolutionary change. What distinguished Ho from other Vietnamese radicals at the time was that he seized this moment of conjuncture and the favorable conditions in France to take the revolutionary high ground. His communist conversion, political activism, and personal determination were so successful that he attended the groundbreaking Tours Congress in December 1920 (when French socialists and communists went their separate ways). He fully approved of the communists’ decision to break with the ‘bourgeois’ Social-democrats (the SFIO, the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, widely referred to as the socialists) and to create the French Communist Party (FCP) under the auspices of the Comintern based in Moscow. Not only did Ho become a founding member of the French communist movement (like Nguyen The Truyen), but in so doing he was also betting heavily that the metropolitan FCP—backed by the Comintern—would now serve as a powerful motor in France for pushing revolutionary change throughout the empire. This was a key strategic linkage for Ho: In his address to the Tours congress, he implored the FCP leadership to support the anticolonial struggle in the French empire, not just among French workers.24
Ho also realized that communism offered an international network of support and training within which he and his plans for Vietnam could grow. In mid-1923, he travelled to Moscow, the newest locus of revolutionary interchange after Tokyo, Guangzhou, and Paris. In October, he spoke at the International Peasants Conference there and joined the Peasant International’s presidium, or permanent council. He enthusiastically embraced Nikolai Bukharin’s idea of relying on the peasantry as a massive revolutionary force in colonial and semi-colonial countries like Vietnam and China. He also agreed with the Comintern that the best way to proceed at this stage was to build national fronts with the revolutionary bourgeois class, just as Chinese communists were doing.
Vietnam differed from China, however, in that the Comintern considered Indochina to be part of the French imperial state and thus that it should be administered by the French Communist Party through the two organizations of the Intercolonial Union and the Committee for Colonial Studies in Paris. Ho knew this and had already joined both. The problem, as Ho had feared from the start, was that French communist support for colonial communism was lukewarm at best (Ho must have been aware of French leftist fears during the Great War of letting in too many ‘foreign workers’). Indeed, one of the main reasons he left for Moscow in 1923 was to lobby the Comintern to pressure the FCP to honor its anticolonialist pledge. Reassured by the Comintern’s growing interest in the peasantry and commitment to revolution in China (now that the chance of a workers’ revolution in Weimar Germany seemed increasingly remote), Ho focused his energies on getting to southern China. His wish was finally granted in 1924 when the Comintern allowed him to travel to Guangzhou and work in the offices of the Russian Telegraphic Agency (later TASS). However, Ho was not a bona fida Comintern agent and the Soviets were much more interested in China than Indochina. The Comintern had already presided over the creation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in 1921. But this was certainly not a bad thing, given Indochina’s location on China’s southern flank, connected by a series of maritime and overland routes. What counted most for Ho was reaching Guangzhou and staying on good terms with the Comintern, the CCP, and the Chinese Nationalist Party in order to get a Vietnamese communist party off the ground, with or without the French Communist Party.25
Southern China offered Ho a favorable revolutionary laboratory and recruiting ground. Since 1911, Guangzhou had become the capital of Phan Boi Chau’s ‘Vietnam abroad’. Southern China was also the area where French colonial influence extended furthest, as the French-operated Hanoi-Kunming railway attested. This colonial presence was such that 7,000 Vietnamese civil servants and workers moved to the Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, increasing the Vietnamese diaspora in southern China to around 10,000 individuals. Thanks to his father’s connections, Ho immediately entered into contact with Phan Boi Chau and recruited a number of his best disciples. One of them, Ho Hoc Lam, worked on Chiang Kai-shek’s general staff and helped Ho secretly build up his networks until he took power in 1945. Chiang Kai-shek had taken over the leadership of the Chinese Nationalist Party following Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1923 (and was to become the leader of the Republic of China between 1928 and 1949). Ho also renewed contact with Zhou Enlai, now teaching in the Whampoa Military Academy outside Guangzhou. Zhou helped Ho enroll dozens of young Vietnamese into Chinese Nationalist Party/Chinese Communist Party schools and military academies. Sun Yat-sen had presided over the creation of the first united front between the Chinese nationalists and communists in 1923. Few other Vietnamese organizations, except the Catholics, could match the communists in their global movements and connections at this point in time.
Ho lost no time in creating a new revolutionary party for Vietnam in Guangzhou. Following the Comintern’s model for China, he presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Youth League in 1925 and a newspaper of the same name. Picking up on his earlier work in Paris, he fine-tuned his quoc ngu style, penning easy-to-follow articles, essays, and pamphlets on a wide range of social, economic, political, and revolutionary topics. The politicization of the urban youth which Nguyen An Ninh had spearheaded since 1923 was a godsend. Between 1925 and 1927, dozens of young, well-educated Vietnamese found their way to Guangzhou, where Ho inducted them into the Youth League, enrolled some in the Whampoa academy, and dispatched others to Moscow for advanced studies. Pham Van Dong joined the Youth League; Le Hong Phong travelled to the Soviet Union. The future General Nguyen Son studied at Whampoa before making the Long March with the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, not all of them came under Ho’s wing. Another group made its way to Moscow via France, by-passing Ho’s control. And, just as importantly: separate proto-communist groups popped up inside Vietnam and gained traction with the rise of this nationalist-minded youth and the fall of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. The brilliant lexicographer and Marxist intellectual, Dao Duy Anh, is one notable example. The Trotskyists also became a real political force in Cochinchina during the 1930s.
All the while Ho kept lobbying the Comintern to let him create a communist party in Vietnam. The French Communist Party wanted to do this in Paris and had begun creating nationalist front parties there like the Etoile Nord Africaine under the Algerian Messali Hadj and the Annamese Independence Party under Nguyen The Truyen. Ho disagreed and probably still doubted the FCP’s commitment to revolutionary change within the empire. For him, communism could not remain a purely diasporic and metropolitan affair (which was a major difference between Vietnamese and Algerian communism). The outbreak of civil war between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party in southern China in 1927 delayed efforts to create a unified party as Ho and his disciples ran for cover. Ho returned to Moscow and then sailed for Thailand to live, work, and recruit followers again, this time among the 50,000 Vietnamese living along the Mekong there. He carried no clear directions from Moscow, however. As the Vietnamese Nationalist Party prepared to launch their attack on the French garrison at Yen Bay and the economic Great Depression bore down on Indochina, Ho seized the moment to create a unified communist party from among the different groups that had sprung up inside Indochina and among the Vietnamese of the diasporas running from Udon Thani in northeast Thailand to Guangzhou in southern China.
Complicating his task was the arrival of a parallel group of younger Vietnamese who had made their way to Moscow and joined the Comintern independently of Ho’s control. Most important among them was Tran Phu. He arrived in Moscow as Stalin consolidated his power and imposed a strict proletarian line on the international communist movement in 1928. Tran Phu received instructions to create a party for Indochina along those lines. The problem was that Ho was still operating as if the nationalist line of approach still applied. In February 1930, convinced he was doing the right thing, Ho organized a unification conference in Hong Kong from which the Vietnamese Communist Party emerged. Upon arriving in the British colony a few months later, Tran Phu criticized Ho’s action, accusing him of ignoring the Comintern’s proletarian line in favor of a narrow, nationalist one. Ho accepted, even recognized his error, but he was relieved above all that the Comintern finally stood behind the creation of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in October 1930. Less than a year later, the ICP became an official member of the Comintern, independent of the FCP. Ho then travelled to Thailand and Singapore to help build the Thai and Malayan parties, relying on his CCP and Comintern contacts to do so, as well as the growing Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant and working-class populations in the region. The mandarin’s son from Annam had become a truly global revolutionary, helping to spread communism not only to Indochina, but also to other parts of Asia.26
Like the Vietnamese Nationalist Party had done, the Indochinese Communist Party encountered stiff colonial surveillance inside and outside Indochina. And like their nationalist competitors, the communists also had a penchant for brash, violent action. Encouraged by the Chinese communist creation of revolutionary Soviets to the north and convinced that rural suffering was peaking under the Great Depression, the ICP helped organize peasant revolts in Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces, briefly establishing a dozen Soviets of their own. Revolts also broke out among workers on the Phu Rieng rubber plantation in Cochinchina and strikes occurred in urban centers in central and southern Vietnam. In all, the French counted 125 peasant demonstrations in thirteen of colonial Vietnam’s twenty-one provinces. The French cracked down brutally. In a sign of things to come, Pasquier authorized the air force to bomb protesters at the cost of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilian lives. In Nghe Tinh province alone, 3,000 peasants may have perished. And disgruntled First World War veterans were involved, too.27
In all, French repression in 1930–31 was such that it destroyed the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and effectively pushed the center of gravity of the nascent Vietnamese communist movement toward Cochinchina and its surrounding Asian bases. Massive colonial arrests also concentrated Vietnamese communists and nationalists in prisons, most notably on the island of Poulo Condor. Paradoxically, rather than disrupting communist ties, the French reinforced them by placing militants from all over the country in a national microcosm behind bars. Like Catholic missionaries imprisoned by the Nguyen, communist prisoners organized meticulous ideological training sessions, deepened their universal faith, and forged some of the most important bonds upon which the future communist party state would turn. It was also in colonial prisons that tensions between Vietnamese communists and nationalists turned violent for the first time. For the communists, internationalism and nationalism went together. For many in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, however, communism was a foreign ideology that had to be combatted as fiercely as colonialism. When communists stepped up their efforts to convert VNQDD leaders to this new faith, fistfights occurred in cellblocks, adumbrating civil wars to come and mirroring the one that was already ripping apart southern China. Vietnamese communism, anticommunism, and nationalism were to mix violently long before French colonialism collapsed. And again, by attempting to destroy anticommunist nationalism because of its anticolonialism, the French only strengthened the communist hand.
Unlike in 1908, the French republican reaction to the revolts of 1930–31 did not lead to any immediate liberalization of colonial policy. In fact, much the opposite occurred. In tandem with his repressive policies, Pasquier joined forces with Sarraut in Paris to return their colonial emperor, Bao Dai, to Hue as quickly as possible. (The French government had sent him to France in the 1920s for his formal education.) Rather than create an Indochinese congress to coopt anticolonialists as the British were doing in India, Pasquier and Sarraut sought to resurrect the monarchy. In a private letter to Pasquier in 1932, Sarraut insisted that the governor general had to mobilize the young emperor (and the mandate of heaven he incarnated) in order to rally the people against those who would turn the peasants against the French. ‘I tell you all this, my dear Pasquier, with considerable emotion, for I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that we might bungle the experience we are creating with him [Bao Dai . . .]. We must protect his person, we must protect his authority.’ No sooner had Bao Dai returned to Annam in September 1932 than Pasquier sent him on a series of carefully orchestrated imperial tours to areas recently shaken by strikes and revolts. Like Sarraut, Pasquier was convinced that the peasants in revolt remained innately conservative and deeply attached to their young emperor. By bringing him out of the palace and sending him toward the ‘people’, Pasquier and Sarraut were convinced that they, not their Vietnamese opponents, could maintain the support of the ‘masses’.28
The Minister of the Colonies, Paul Reynaud, backed the Bao Dai ‘experiment’. He agreed, too, that a carefully controlled rejuvenation of the monarchy would allow the French to win over the support of some of their most faithful collaborators calling for political change. In 1931, during Reynaud’s visit to Indochina, Pham Quynh implored the minister to grant the Vietnamese at least one reform: the right to create a ‘Vietnamese kingdom with a modern constitution within an Indochinese state endowed with an appropriate federal charter, under the guidance of France—that, [Your] Excellency, is a reform [. . .] which fully answers our intimate national demands’.29
No such federation emerged, but the French did agree to allow the reform-minded Bao Dai to head up a royalist government for Annam in 1933 in tandem with their trusted ally, Pham Quynh, and a young Catholic reformist governor from Phan Thiet named Ngo Dinh Diem. However, when Bao Dai and Diem pushed for some of the real reforms discussed above, including the elaboration of a constitution and the honoring of the protectorate treaty, meaning indirect rule, Pasquier refused. Diem resigned, understanding that the French would not even support an anticommunist Catholic reformist or the constitution-minded emperor if they appeared to call into question colonial rule in the minutest way. When Pasquier died in a plane crash in 1934, Diem focused on his religious activities while the emperor retreated into the forest on hunting trips rather than playing the walk-on part of a collaborator. The first Bao Dai solution was stillborn. The French trusted no one.30
THE LIMITS OF COLONIAL DEMOCRACY: ACT II. THE POPULAR FRONT
Colonial conservatism seemed to recede with Pasquier’s death in 1934 and the rise of another leftwing coalition government in France (1936–8), known as the Popular Front. Vietnamese nationalists ranging from the Constitutionalists to the communists felt that a ruling government of socialists, communists, and leftist republicans in France would finally push through the reforms so many had wanted since the turn of the century. The Popular Front’s leader, Léon Blum, reinforced such expectations when he presided over major reforms in France, including the right to collective bargaining, annual leave for workers, and the forty-hour working week. Blum’s nomination of Maurice Moutet to run the Ministry of Colonies provided hope that change just might happen. This was the man who had dared to defend Phan Chu Trinh.31
The far left in Cochinchina was particularly well placed to take advantage of the French Popular Front. The relaxation of colonial repression in Indochina under the Popular Front certainly helped radicals rebuild in all of Vietnam. But the French destruction of nationalist and communist networks in Annam and Tonkin in the early 1930s under Pasquier had shifted radicalism’s center of gravity firmly to the south. There, starting in 1934, a remarkably active group of French-trained Trotskyists and communists, allied with none other than Nguyen An Ninh, did the two things Cochinchinese law allowed them to do more easily than in the northern protectorates: establish political newspapers in French and run candidates for office in the Colonial Council of Cochinchina against the Constitutionalists. They did both things extremely well for the next five years. Ninh led the charge again by creating the landmark militant paper La Lutte (The Struggle). In it, he and his radical allies focused squarely on the plight of the urban poor, the workers, and peasant laborers. By this time, the Vietnamese working class numbered around one million underpaid laborers, concentrated in the south. Secondly, the La Lutte group successfully ran its candidates against the Constitutionalists and gained them places on the Colonial Council and in the Saigon municipal elections, determined to expand their influence through these institutions (and with the support of the urban working class). Lastly, the shift in the Comintern’s line to united-front tactics following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 condoned the Indochinese Communist Party’s participation in the French Popular Front, so much so that Stalinists and Trotskyists could not only operate legally in Indochina, but they were able, briefly, to join forces (unthinkable anywhere else in the communist world to my knowledge!) before later turning on each other violently.
The advent of the Popular Front in 1936 reinforced La Lutte’s reform program and encouraged the Vietnamese left to embrace colonial democracy, despite its limitations. The model rapidly spread northward as the Blum government loosened restrictions on publishing in the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin and released a large number of political prisoners, both communists and non-communists. Communists in particular (there were hardly any Trotskyists outside Cochinchina) created the newspaper Le Travail (Labor) in Hanoi, which soon attracted the participation of Vo Nguyen Giap and Truong Chinh, the Indochinese Communist Party’s future military commander and secretary general. Inspired by the Lutteurs, northerners organized for their own candidates to run in the municipal elections in Hanoi.
Non-communist republicans associated with Nhat Linh, Hoang Dao, and Khai Hung’s ‘Literary Self-strengthening Movement’ (Tu Luc Van Doan or TLVD [for more detail, see chapter 12]) also supported candidates for the Hanoi city council and the people’s chamber of Tonkin. Admirers of the legendary socialist Jean Jaurès, Nhat Linh and Khai Hung supported SFIO candidates, while the local branch run by Louis Caput opened its doors to Vietnamese members, like Hoang Minh Giam, for the first time. Vietnamese across the left (and not just communists) believed that the Popular Front coalition government in power in France would finally implement major social legislation and expand democratic institutions, including the freedom of the press and the extension of the Cochinchinese Colonial Council to all of Indochina (instead of the consultative people’s chambers in Annam and Tonkin). Vietnamese non-communists were probably also hoping that the transition to a democratic socialist-minded state would prevent the increasingly powerful communists from creating a potential dictatorship, as in the Soviet Union.
The Blum government seemed to be open to major reform when it announced the dispatch of a special Inspection Commission for the Colonies (Commission d’enquête dans les colonies). In response, the Lutteurs, Constitutionalists, those belonging to the Literary Self-strengthening Movement, the Indochinese Communist Party, and others formed an Indochinese Congress to investigate, organize, and eventually submit a wide range of reforms to the government. Initiated by the Lutteurs, the congress operated thanks to a collection of ‘action committees’ whose leaders dispersed across the colony to identify problems and propose cahiers de voeux, first draft reform proposals. While it was not a political party, the congress associated disparate social and political actors from all over Indochina for the first time. It also moved the thinking of the urban elite into the countryside.
During its short lifespan, the Popular Front introduced some major social reforms, including the approval of a labor code and an increase in workers’ salaries. But in the end, the Popular Front failed to implement any significant political reforms. It did not expand representative institutions or create the Indochinese federation promised by Sarraut and his acolytes. The question of further enfranchising the native population remained a dead letter, despite the fact that the Indian Congress had achieved one of its greatest victories in 1937 by running candidates successfully in provincial elections. That the French leftist ruling class was incapable of even moderate political reform was clear when Marius Moutet, Minister of Colonies, ordered the closing of the Indochinese Congress in September 1936 and, when that failed to slow things down, authorized the incarceration a year later of many of the very Vietnamese who had once welcomed his governor general, Jules Brévié, into power with fists clenched in the air as a sign of Leftist solidarity. The Third Republic had squandered its last chance to make good on colonial reformism along the lines used by the British or the Americans who had just promised Filipinos a ‘commonwealth’ as a better way of indirectly maintaining an empire. Already, in 1931, a well-informed French police inspector warned his superiors that they ‘no longer have anyone with us’.
The mandarins, to whom we have only ever given an insufficient moral and material position, serve us only out of prudence, and anyway cannot do very much. The bourgeoisie probably does not want communism, but it still considers that it could be—as in China—put to excellent use externally, even if it is worthless internally. The educated youth is entirely against us, as is the immense and miserable population of workers and peasants. Truly, something more than simple repression is needed here. It is undoubtedly necessary to reform the material order. But it is no less necessary and urgent to restore calm to people’s souls. For that, it is necessary to govern and not be content with shortsighted administration. The reforms needed must be carried out immediately.32
French decision-makers, whether conservatives like Cognacq and Pasquier, or liberal humanists like Sarraut and Moutet, clearly had excellent intelligence services and analysis at their disposal. The problem was not there. The problem was the inability of republican officials across the political spectrum to grasp the importance of implementing the moderate political reforms requested by Phan Chu Trinh in 1907, suggested by Théophile Pennequin in 1911, and promised by Albert Sarraut in 1919, if only to hold off decolonization or to allow it to proceed on terms favorable to the French. This closing of the French official mind—despite the fact that French public opinion showed little real interest in empire—would have disastrous consequences for the Vietnamese people during the rest of the twentieth century.33