Part I - Empires, Nations, and Revolutions

1 Memory, Tradition, and the History of “Vietnam”

Liam C. Kelley

Introduction

On February 1, 1942, revolutionary leader Hồ Chí Minh published a short article entitled “Our History Must be Studied” (Nên học sử ta). The article appeared in a newspaper that Hồ Chí Minh had established the previous year called Việt Nam độc lập, or Independent Vietnam. This newspaper was published in the northern province of Cao Bằng, where Hồ Chí Minh resided for a time in 1941 and 1942 after crossing the border from southern China to organize a united front against French rule and Japanese occupation known as the Việt Minh. Published three times a month with a run of 400 copies, Independent Vietnam’s reach was probably quite limited. However, the interpretation of the past that Hồ Chí Minh presented in this brief essay would be repeated countless times in the thirty years of revolution and war from 1945 to 1975, and it serves today as a key element in Vietnamese nationalism and identity.¹

The gist of Hồ Chí Minh’s view of Vietnamese history was summarized in the following two sentences that appeared at the end of the article: “Whenever our people unite as one, our country is independent and free. By contrast, whenever our people do not unite, we are invaded by foreign countries.”² The same issue of Independent Vietnam contained a list of “Ten Musts” (10 Điều nên) that was also penned by Hồ Chí Minh. These were ten acts that Hồ Chí Minh declared members of the Việt Minh must carry out: they must maintain the secrecy of the Việt Minh, they must be completely loyal to the Việt Minh, they must disseminate the aims of the Việt Minh, they must do their utmost to find new members for the Việt Minh, they must do their utmost to work for the Việt Minh, they must pay their dues on time, they must help each other, they must strive to study, they must read the books and newspaper of the Việt Minh, and they must support the newspaper of the Việt Minh.³

Although Hồ Chí Minh argued in 1942 that the key lesson to learn from the Vietnamese past was that Vietnamese needed to unite to maintain the country’s independence, we can see today that what Hồ Chí Minh was attempting to unite in Independent Vietnam in 1942 was history and revolutionary politics. While one could argue that historical writings in Vietnam had always been political, earlier works had supported other types of politics, such as dynastic politics, and later, colonial politics. As such, to tell the story of the production of historical knowledge about Vietnam, as I will do in this essay, is to tell the story of the political history of Vietnam, and how the two processes have closely mirrored each other.

That said, the aim of this essay is not simply to point out how writings about Vietnamese history have been influenced by politics. Instead, its goal is to provide an historical background that will enable readers to better understand the articles in this Cambridge History of the Vietnam War. There are many ideas about Vietnamese history in the chapters following this one that are new. They are new not only because scholars have conducted new research and made new findings but also because there has been a movement away from certain “truths” that previously dominated writings on the history of Vietnam. In this essay, we will examine where those “truths” came from, and how they came to be adopted by scholars writing in English.

From Traditional to Modern Histories

The first histories produced by Vietnamese were dynastic histories. The two most important of these written prior to 1900 were the fifteenth-century Complete Book of the Historical Records of Dai Viet (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư; hereafter Complete Book) and the nineteenth-century Imperially Commissioned Itemized Summaries of the Comprehensive Mirror of Viet History (Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục; hereafter Comprehensive Mirror). These works were composed in classical Chinese, a language that only a small percentage of the population could understand. Each provided historical examples of good and bad governance, in the hopes that current dynastic officials would learn from the past.

Until the nineteenth century, Vietnamese history was thus a topic that was largely restricted to the world of court officials and the tiny literate elite aspiring to enter government service. While some Western missionaries and travelers learned what they could from local interlocutors, gaining access to actual historical texts proved to be difficult. That situation changed, however, with the French conquest of Vietnam. The extension of French control over Vietnam was a decades-long process but it began with treaties in the 1860s in which the ruling Nguyễn Dynasty granted the French direct control over the southern third of Vietnam, or what they called Cochinchine (Cochinchina). During this period, a French missionary by the name of Théophile Marie Legrand de la Liraye wrote the first history of Vietnam in French. While this work was based on Vietnamese sources, it nonetheless began a process of the “Westernization” of Vietnamese history in that Legrand de la Liraye employed European concepts to explain the past.

Whereas the Complete Book and Comprehensive Mirror documented a political genealogy from one ruling house to another, the purpose of Legrand de la Liraye’s work was to educate readers about the history of a people, or what he called the “Annamite nation.”⁴ To do this, Legrand de la Liraye attempted to determine what race the Annamites belonged to so that his European readers could understand who these people were in relation to other racial groups in the region. These two concepts of nation and race were Western concepts, and they had never been previously applied to the history of Vietnam.

Another important idea that Legrand de la Liraye introduced to the writing of Vietnamese history was the concept of “independence.” There was a period in the early fifteenth century when the Chinese Ming Dynasty controlled the areas of what is now northern and north-central Vietnam. That brief period was brought to an end by a man named Lê Lợi, the founder of the Lê Dynasty. The Complete Book simply stated that Lê Lợi had “wiped out the Ming bandits” (tước bình Minh tặc 削平明賊).⁵ By contrast, Legrand de la Liraye depicted that same historical event as a “war of independence” (guerre de l’indépendance). This was another new concept. Hence, when Hồ Chí Minh declared in 1942 that Vietnamese history was a timeless story of the Vietnamese people (dân tộc) uniting (đoàn kết) to maintain the independence (độc lập) and freedom (tự do) of the country, his interpretation of the past was filled with words and concepts that his ancestors would not have understood. That Hồ Chí Minh understood these words and concepts was because they all became part of the Vietnamese worldview during the years of French colonial rule.

Such ideas were adopted first in Cochinchina. There, the French established a new educational system, and in 1875, Trương Vĩnh Ký, a Vietnamese Catholic polymath, produced a history of Vietnam in French for the Vietnamese students there.⁶ By 1906, a Vietnamese translation of a similar French-language history of Vietnam was published in Cochinchina, called a Brief History of the Country of Dai Nam (Đại Nam quốc lược sử).⁷ In that same year, educational reforms were implemented in the center and north of Vietnam that sought to modernize the curriculum for the traditional civil-service examinations. In the late nineteenth century, the central and northern regions of Vietnam had both become protectorates of France.⁸ Known as Annam and Tonkin, respectively, these regions were still governed by Nguyễn Dynasty officials, albeit under the guidance of French advisors. Proficient in classical Chinese, some of those officials learned a great deal about the West at that time through the writings of Chinese reformist intellectuals, and they transformed the educational curriculum in accordance with these new ideas.

A clear example of this is a work that was produced in 1906 and employed in the reformed curriculum in Annam and Tonkin by a scholar named Hoàng Đạo Thành entitled the Complete Compilation of the New Convention of Việt History (Việt sử tân ước toàn biên).⁹ Hoàng Đạo Thành’s text was the first history created by a Vietnamese that was structured around the concept of the nation. It explicitly aimed to inculcate readers with a sense of pride in the nation. Whereas the Complete Book and the Comprehensive Mirror were designed to teach government officials about morally upright rule and the need to be loyal (trung) to the monarch, Hoàng Đạo Thành’s history was designed to teach students to be patriotic (ái quốc). This term for “patriotism” literally means “cherish the country.” It was a Western concept introduced to Vietnamese scholars through the writings of Chinese reformers, and it was a term that Hồ Chí Minh took as part of his revolutionary name, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, not long after Hoàng Đạo Thành produced his new account of the Vietnamese past.

Although Hoàng Đạo Thành’s history was a pioneering work, it was written at a time when classical Chinese started to lose its position of prominence in Vietnam. In 1909, colonial officials Charles Maybon and Henri Russier produced another new history of Vietnam in French for the revised civil-service exam curriculum. Entitled Ideas about the History of Annam (Notions d’histoire d’Annam), this work deliberately sought to present history following “European methods” of explaining the past and its importance rather than following what they criticized as the “Chinese model” of chronicling events.¹⁰ They also sought to instill in their Vietnamese readers a sense of gratitude toward the French, rather than pride in the nation. While they acknowledged that there had been a “tendency towards unity” in the past, they nonetheless argued that true unity and independence only arrived in the nineteenth century as the French assisted Gia Long, the first emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty, in establishing his rule over the entirety of Vietnam, and as the French forced the Qing Dynasty to terminate Vietnam’s status as a tributary state.¹¹

Such a view of the past was rife with contradictions, but this view was the norm from the 1910s through the 1930s. Although the civil-service exams were abolished in 1919, a system of Franco-Annamite schools with instruction in Vietnamese and French was established at that time, and an updated version of Maybon and Russier’s history continued to be employed in the curriculum for these schools. Also popular was a conservative rendering of the past by Vietnamese scholar Trần Trọng Kim, An Outline of the History of Vietnam (Việt Nam sử lược).¹²

One could argue that by the 1930s there was a certain degree of stasis in the knowledge about the Vietnamese past. That intellectual stasis was a mirror image of the stability that had been established in colonial Vietnam and was supported by the individuals, both Vietnamese and French, who maintained the colonial order. However, in the 1940s, that colonial order was challenged, and as that happened, Vietnamese historical knowledge came to life.

Historical Writings of the 1940s

In the summer of 1940, France was occupied by Nazi Germany and a collaborationist government known as Vichy France was established. The Japanese took advantage of this political transition to move troops into French Indochina to block war supplies from reaching Republican China through the Hanoi–Kunming railway, as well as to prepare for their eventual occupation of the rest of Southeast Asia. Even as Vichy officials allowed what essentially became a Japanese military occupation, they attempted to challenge Japanese wartime propaganda that called for Asians to unite in opposition to the West. Vichy French colonial officials did this by promoting Vietnamese nationalism.¹³

Certain Vietnamese intellectuals embraced this opportunity to express ideas that had previously been prohibited. With regard to historical scholarship, a journal called Trí Tân (New Knowledge) was established in 1941, and in the more than 200 issues that were published over the following four years, writers made initial steps toward moving historical knowledge out of the patterns into which it had fallen in the previous decades. In the very first issue, for instance, Ứng Hòe Nguyễn Vӑn Tố, a researcher at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), a research institute established by the French in the early twentieth century, wrote an essay that encouraged people to not use the term “Annam” to refer to the country. He produced historical evidence to argue that this was a term that the Chinese had created for Vietnam when it was under their control and that it had submissive connotations. Instead of using the term “Annam,” Nguyễn Vӑn Tố argued that historically the term that made the most sense to use was “Đại Nam,” meaning the “Great South,” a name that Nguyễn Dynasty emperor Minh Mạng had officially introduced in 1838.¹⁴

That Nguyễn Vӑn Tố did not suggest using the term “Vietnam” demonstrates how inchoate certain ideas about the nation and its past still were at that time. It is in this context that Hồ Chí Minh penned his article “Our History Must be Studied” the following year. He also wrote and published a poem at that time called “The History of Our Country” (Lịch sử nước ta) that summarized key events over the previous two millennia.¹⁵ As in his article, Hồ Chí Minh emphasized the importance of unity and concluded the poem with an appeal for people to unify under the Việt Minh. In other words, Hồ Chí Minh attempted to identify a key element of the past – unity – and to declare that the Việt Minh had the mandate to realize that goal (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Hồ Chí Minh at his writing desk, probably in Tonkin c. 1950. A picture of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin hangs on the wall behind him.

Source: Pictures from History/ Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

This new interpretation of the past was one that many other Vietnamese shared. However, not all of them agreed with Hồ Chí Minh about the need to unify under the aegis of the Việt Minh. In March 1945, the Japanese took full control of French Indochina by imprisoning Vichy officials and ordering Nguyễn Dynasty Emperor Bảo Đại to declare Vietnam’s independence. A government was quickly formed with historian Trần Trọng Kim serving as prime minister. While Trần Trọng Kim’s own history of Vietnam was conservative in its approach, a certain Nguyễn Duy Phương quickly produced a new history of Vietnam to mark the establishment of this new government and the country’s nominal independence. Entitled The History of the Independence of Vietnam, Nguyễn Duy Phương sought to place the Trần Trọng Kim administration at the end of a long line of historical struggles for independence.¹⁶ That said, at only twenty-six pages, and undoubtedly written in a hurry, Nguyễn Duy Phương’s history offered cursory and uneven coverage of the past. It began with a discussion of the Trưng Sisters’ struggle against Han Dynasty rule in the first century CE and then discussed other instances of resistance during the millennium of Chinese rule. This was followed by a detailed discussion of Lê Lời’s struggle against the Ming in the early fifteenth century. The text concluded with some brief comments about the colonial period.

Trần Trọng Kim’s government did not last long, but the model for writing about the Vietnamese past that first emerged in the 1940s with the brief writings of Hồ Chí Minh and Nguyễn Duy Phương did. In August 1945 Japan surrendered and the Việt Minh declared Vietnam to be independent under its authority. This of course was challenged by the French and the French Indochina War began late the following year. While some intellectuals joined the Việt Minh, others remained in French-controlled territory. One such person, Phạm Vӑn Sơn, took this time to write a more comprehensive history of Vietnam than either Hồ Chí Minh or Nguyễn Duy Phương had been able to produce. Entitled A History of Vietnamese Struggles, Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s work likewise focused on the topic of struggles for independence and resistance to foreign attacks. It began with a discussion of the Trưng Sisters, whom Phạm Vӑn Sơn referred to as “the two Joan of Arcs of Vietnam.” He devoted chapters to wars with the Chinese and the Cham and detailed the various “independence movements” (vận động độc lập) that arose between 1861 and 1945. The various revolutionary parties that sought to bring about independence in the first half of the twentieth century were also discussed, as was the August Revolution of 1945. Uncertain which direction Vietnam would take in the future, Phạm Vӑn Sơn provided chapters in his book on Emperor Bảo Đại, who had just agreed to work with the French to establish the State of Vietnam, and Hồ Chí Minh, who was fighting the French.¹⁷

Historical Scholarship in South Vietnam

Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s A History of Vietnamese Struggles was first published in Hanoi in 1949. When the French Indochina War ended in 1954, Phạm Vӑn Sơn followed hundreds of thousands of other people in migrating to the South. His text was subsequently republished numerous times in Saigon. Meanwhile, Phạm Vӑn Sơn continued to write new works, including a multivolume survey of Vietnamese history entitled A New Compilation of Việt History that began to appear in 1956.¹⁸ As such, Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s scholarship can be seen as representing a continuation in South Vietnam of an approach to writing about the past that had ties to earlier periods, as it perpetuated certain ideas that had been produced by historians during the colonial era, under the Trần Trọng Kim administration and the State of Vietnam. In this way, Phạm Vӑn Sơn’s writings were not unlike the government of South Vietnam, which built on the expertise of men who had served in earlier regimes.

At the same time, however, historians in South Vietnam, like their government counterparts, also contributed to the process of decolonization. While they built on, and cited, the work of colonial-era scholars, South Vietnamese historians also sought to produce new historical scholarship that could help create a national spirit (tinh thần dân tộc) for their young nation. The University of Hue, established in 1957, set this process in motion. It employed an historian from Taiwan who had spent time at the EFEO in the 1940s, Chen Jinghe, to lead a group of scholars to start cataloging and translating Nguyễn Dynasty documents. It also produced a journal called University (Đại học) that published articles on topics ranging from French philosophy to Vietnamese linguistics and history. One of the early issues included an article by a young historian who had recently returned from graduate school in Belgium, Trương Bửu Lâm, that called for a new national history curriculum.¹⁹

The University of Huế was supported not only by the South Vietnamese government but also by foreign organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, The Asia Foundation, the Committee of the American Sponsors of the University of Huế, and the American Friends of Vietnam. It was part of a Cold War effort to build a democratic and prosperous South Vietnam. That effort started to falter, however, as the university became embroiled in the tumultuous events of 1963 that led to the assassination of President Ngô Đình Diệm in November of that year. The university’s Catholic rector, Cao Vӑn Luận, was dismissed by President Diệm for supporting the Buddhists, and although he was briefly reinstated after Diệm’s assassination, the times had changed. University ceased publication and the Nguyễn Dynasty historical sources project was discontinued.

This was not, however, the end for historical scholarship in South Vietnam. On the contrary, professors and students at Saigon Normal University collaborated to start publishing a journal in 1965 called History and Geography (Lịch Sử và Địa lý). This journal was published continuously until 1975 and it featured the work of historians who had come of age during the colonial era, such as Phạm Vӑn Sơn, Hoàng Xuân Hãn, Hồ Hữu Tường, and Phan Khoang, as well as a new generation of South Vietnamese historians, such as Tạ Chí Đài Trường and Nguyễn Thế Anh. In an effort to create a sense of a national spirit, albeit one with a southern emphasis, these historians published articles on famous figures in Vietnamese history, such as Trương Công Định, a Nguyễn Dynasty official who led a resistance war against the French in Cochinchina in the 1860s, Phan Thanh Giản, a Nguyễn Dynasty official who committed suicide in 1867 for failing to prevent the French from gaining control of Cochinchina, and Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the Tây Sơn Rebellion.²⁰

Historical Scholarship in North Vietnam

Like their counterparts in South Vietnam, Historians in North Vietnam were eager to produce historical writings to educate the population under their control. However, whereas South Vietnamese historians built on the work of colonial-era scholars, the historians in North Vietnam sought to make a deliberate break with the world of colonial scholarship. They criticized the “colonial mindset” of EFEO scholars and strove to produce scholarship that was free of colonial influence. Ironically, North Vietnamese historians attempted to do this by closely following another foreign model of knowledge production, Marxist historiography, which they learned from Chinese and Soviet writings.

This process formally began in 1953, when the French Indochina War was still underway, with the establishment of the Institute of History. Scholars affiliated with this institute set about discussing various issues that their Chinese and Soviet counterparts were debating, such as how to periodize Vietnamese history following Marxist stages of development, and how to determine when the Vietnamese nation was first formed, using Stalin’s definition of a nation. The various viewpoints that scholars proposed were published in a journal called Literature, History and Geography (Vӑn sử địa).²¹

Some historians also worked on producing surveys of Vietnamese history. The first to do so was a man who wrote under the name of Minh Tranh (Khuất Duy Tiễn). In 1936 Minh Tranh became a communist, and during the French Indochina War he served as a propagandist, journalist, and editor for the Việt Minh. He was also a committee member of the Central Department of Literary, Historical and Geographical Research (Uỷ viên Ban Nghiên cứu Vӑn Sử Địa Trung ương). In 1954 Minh Tranh published a book entitled a Draft Brief History of Vietnam (Sơ thảo lược sử Việt Nam) that was meant to serve as a history textbook for schools in North Vietnam. This work closely followed Marxist theory. It divided Vietnamese history into periods of primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, etc., and highlighted peasant rebellions as examples of the struggle of the working class against the oppression of the feudal elite.

Two years later, in 1956, historian Đào Duy Anh published another survey entitled the History of Vietnam (Lịch sử Việt Nam). Đào Duy Anh saw value in the Marxist approach to history; however, he felt that Marxist theory had to be adapted to the Vietnamese context rather than rigidly imposed, and this survey was essentially devoid of Marxist theory. Further, in an interview published that same year in the journal Humanities (Nhân Vӑn), Đào Duy Anh criticized the restrictions being placed on scholars at that time.

This journal was one of two journals (the other being Giai Phẩm, or Masterpieces) that critiqued government restrictions on artistic and intellectual life following the French Indochina War. The North Vietnamese government cracked down on this critique, an event that is known as the Nhân vӑn–Giai phẩm Affair. In 1958 Đào Duy Anh’s scholarship was denounced, and Minh Tranh’s Draft Brief History of Vietnam was upheld as an ideal model for the writing of Vietnamese history. However, that honor did not last long – Minh Tranh was demoted in 1963 for his “revisionist” view against expanding the war in the South.²²

Both these men were in their fifties when they were demoted, and a new generation of historians in their twenties emerged to take their place. In the early 1960s, for instance, archaeologist Hà Vӑn Tấn and historian Trần Quốc Vượng published a volume on early history called the History of the System of Primitive Communism in Vietnam (Lịch sử chế độ cộng sản nguyên thủy ở Việt-Nam) and contributed a volume on early history to a three-volume history entitled the History of the Vietnamese Feudal System (Lịch sử ch́e độ phong kiến Việt Nam).²³ The second volume in this series, on premodern history, was authored by historian Phan Huy Lê. Meanwhile, the final volume, on modern history, was written by Phan Huy Lê, Chu Thiên, Vương Hoàng Tuyên, and Đinh Xuân Lâm.²⁴ Four of these men – Hà Vӑn Tấn, Trần Quốc Vượng, Phan Huy Lê, and Đinh Xuân Lâm – would continue to produce historical writings for decades to come and came to be known as the “Four Pillars of the Field of History” (Tứ trụ sử học).

Although the titles of these works indicate an effort to follow the ideas of Marxist historiography, with the expansion of the war in 1963 historians in North Vietnam abandoned the strict adherence to Marxist theory that Minh Tranh had promoted in the 1950s in favor of a more nationalistic approach to the past. North Vietnamese historians ceased writing about class divisions and conflicts and focused instead on unity. Further, the Sino-Soviet Split, the Cultural Revolution, and Nixon’s visit to China were all events that gradually introduced an anti-China element in historical writings. This topic was broached in subtle terms in the mid-1960s as historians began to write about a history of “resistance to foreign invasion” to mobilize the population, but it eventually reached extreme levels during and after the 1979 border war with China.

An additional important development in this period was an intense focus on ancient history. A series of conferences were held in Hanoi in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which scholars from various fields sought to prove that the earliest rulers in the Red River Delta, the mythical Hùng kings, had truly existed. Here the work of North Vietnamese archaeologists was particularly important as they tried to find material evidence for the existence of these rulers that could make up for the absence of solid textual information. In the end, archaeologists did find many artifacts, but nothing that could unquestionably prove the existence of the Hùng kings. As such, while scholars initially sought to verify that these kings had existed, they ended up declaring that “the period of” the Hùng kings had existed. Nonetheless, that was sufficient to serve the nationalist need of the moment to rally people behind the war effort by pointing to the supposed antiquity of the Vietnamese nation with its heartland in the Red River Plain.

In the 1970s, these developments culminated in what we can consider the orthodox history of Vietnam as it is known in Vietnam today. This view of the past argues that there was a unified and culturally and linguistically distinct group of people who lived in the Red River Delta long before the Chinese Qin and Han dynasties extended their control into the region at the end of the first millennium BCE. This group of people endured a thousand years of Chinese domination, but emerged again as an independent nation, and that nation has been fighting off successive efforts by foreigners to encroach on their land ever since. Finally, in the twentieth century, this Vietnamese orthodox history argues, the task of resisting foreign invasion was led by the Communist Party.

This is the interpretation of the past that Hồ Chí Minh argued in 1942 the Vietnamese needed to know. By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the inhabitants of half of what is now Vietnam had been taught this version of history for a good twenty years. In the years that followed, the other half of Vietnam was introduced to this interpretation of the past. To launch this effort, in 1976, the Institute of History in Hanoi published a book entitled The Country of Vietnam is One, the People of Vietnam are One (Nước Việt Nam là một, dân tộc Việt Nam là một). In it, the anonymous collective authors argued for the historical unity of Vietnam, and highlighted the Communist Party’s role in unifying the country.²⁵

Anglophone Histories of Vietnam

As the above discussion should make clear, the version of Vietnamese history that gained prominence in Vietnam after 1975 has its own long, complex history. By contrast, writings about the Vietnamese past in English have a shorter history. However, in the years following the end of the Vietnam War, these writings likewise culminated in a kind of “official” version of the Vietnamese past, one that mirrored the official version in Vietnam in significant ways.

When the US government first intervened in Vietnamese affairs in the 1950s, there was very little information available in English about Vietnamese history. Over the subsequent two decades, various writers and scholars tried to fill this gap. Lacking knowledge of the Vietnamese language, the earliest English-language writers relied heavily on the work of a very limited number of scholars writing in French, such as Lê Thành Khôi, an expatriate Vietnamese in Paris, and Paul Mus, a French scholar and colonial official.

The first survey of Vietnamese history in English was Joseph Buttinger’s The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam.²⁶ Buttinger was an Austrian-born socialist politician who fled his home country in 1938, first for France and then the United States. During World War II, Buttinger started working for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organization that aided refugees. In 1954 the IRC sent Buttinger to South Vietnam to assist the government in settling the hundreds of thousands of refugees who moved south of the 17th parallel under the Geneva Accords. This was Buttinger’s first exposure to Vietnam, and he was so impressed by the country and its people that he spent the next four years reading everything he could find in Western languages on Vietnam and writing a survey on Vietnamese history.

In researching and writing this book, Buttinger was particularly influenced by a survey of Vietnamese history published in 1955, Lê Thành Khôi’s Vietnam: History and Civilization, the Environment and History.²⁷ Lê Thành Khôi was born and raised in Hanoi but then went to study in Europe where he received a Ph.D. in economics in Paris in 1949 and then went on to study international law at the Hague. Vietnam: History and Civilization was his first work of history. Influenced to some extent by Marxist theory, Lê Thành Khôi argued that French colonization had led to the emergence of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, but a sense of romanticism for the past led him to play down the existence of any class antagonisms in the precolonial period. He was similarly positive about a future under a “Marxist democracy” in “the new Vietnam,” the topic of his brief concluding chapter.

Buttinger did not reproduce Lê Thành Khôi’s views, but he did rely heavily on Vietnam: History and Civilization to create a basic narrative of the Vietnamese past. Buttinger’s work also mirrored that of Lê Thành Khôi in that it focused primarily on premodern history, and in fact, only provided a chronology of events for the twentieth century. In a footnote, Buttinger blamed French scholars for an imbalance in historical information about Vietnam, as he argued that the French, “in accordance with French colonial policy,” had “consistently ignored the reality of Vietnamese nationalism” and the many developments that led to its rise. “In short,” he noted, “they ignored the development of the forces that they had to fight after 1945.”²⁸

When war did break out after 1945, there was one French scholar who did seek to understand the forces that the French faced in Vietnam: Paul Mus. Born in France but raised in Hanoi, Mus became an expert on early India and Southeast Asia and was employed by the EFEO. He then fought in various capacities in World War II, served as a political advisor for the high commissioner for Indochina in the immediate postwar years, and finally returned to academia, teaching both in France and at Yale University. Warfare and the August Revolution of 1945 had a transformative effect on Mus’s ideas.²⁹ Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mus took Vietnamese nationalist aspirations seriously and even came to empathize with the Vietnamese.³⁰ At the same time, however, his positive views of the Vietnamese and their anticolonial struggle were still framed in Orientalist terms that explained to his Occidental readers how these, albeit dynamic, Oriental people thought.³¹

As the Vietnam War got underway, Mus’s description of the Vietnamese struck a chord with his students in the United States, particularly Frances FitzGerald who visited Vietnam in 1966 as a journalist and went on to publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Vietnam War and its historical background, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.³² This book begins with a chapter entitled “States of Mind,” and following Mus, to whom the book is dedicated, Fitzgerald describes the Vietnamese world as one that functions based on a different logic. With numerous references to texts and ideas in the Sinitic cultural tradition, from the Yijing, or Classic of Changes, to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, Fitzgerald describes a world of thought and action that is completely alien to the American experience.

Ultimately what FitzGerald and many others who followed argued is that Vietnam was a country that Americans simply did not understand, and that once they did understand Vietnam better they would see that it was a foe the United States could not take lightly. This latter point was highlighted in an extremely influential work by George Kahin and John Lewis entitled The United States in Vietnam. Although the authors did not know Vietnamese, their depiction of Vietnamese history was strikingly similar to the interpretation that Hồ Chí Minh in 1942 argued that his compatriots must adopt. Like Hồ Chí Minh, Kahin and Lewis viewed Vietnamese history as a long story of efforts to resist foreign intrusions and to maintain the independence of the country, arguing that “for many centuries a basic and constant theme of [Vietnamese] nationalism was freedom from China’s domination,” and that with the end of colonial rule, “this theme reasserted itself with traditional vigor.”³³ One difference with the past, according to Kahin and Lewis, was that now nationalism had “fused” with communism.³⁴ Their message was thus that the Americans were facing a foe that for millennia had fought off previous attempts by foreigners to control their land.

This vision of the Vietnamese past became extremely popular among members of the antiwar movement, and over time, it made its way into countless publications, two of the most influential being Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, a History and Marilyn Young’s The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990.³⁵ Such works were often produced by authors who did not know Vietnamese. Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 1980s there were scholars proficient in the language who produced more grounded studies of the Vietnamese past. Nonetheless, many of these studies focused on gaining a better understanding of the communist side, and in so doing perpetuated Hồ Chí Minh’s interpretation of the past that placed the communists at the center of Vietnamese history.

Since the 1990s, there has been a new wave of Anglophone scholarship on Vietnamese history. Produced by scholars who write in English but who read Vietnamese and who have conducted extensive archival research, this body of scholarship has moved away from the essentialized renderings of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese history that were produced in and outside of Vietnam in the twentieth century. This work has eschewed the depiction of the Vietnamese past as a perpetual struggle against foreign domination; it has also challenged the habit of depicting the communists as the primary drivers and central actors in twentieth-century Vietnamese history. In these accounts, modern Vietnamese history appears as a much more complex tale of multiple efforts to build Vietnam based on competing visions of the future. This scholarship, in turn, has opened up new perspectives on the history of the Indochina Wars – including the “Vietnam War” that began in the late 1950s and continued until 1975. In the chapters that follow, readers will find many instances of these new perspectives and the historical insights that can be gleaned from them. These new perspectives and insights are undoubtedly very different from what Hồ Chí Minh had in mind when he declared in 1942 that “our history must be studied.” But they are no less a part of the still-unfolding tradition of seeking to understand Vietnam through its vibrant and fascinating history.

2 The Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

Scholars have long viewed the history of the Vietnam War as deeply entwined with the history of the Vietnamese Revolution. But what was this revolution, when and how did it begin, and what were its defining features? While some have depicted the revolution as the culmination of a centuries-long process of national formation, many more have depicted it as a reaction to colonial rule and the creation of French Indochina during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Recently, however, postcolonial scholars have critiqued the view of the Vietnamese Revolution as nothing more than a “response” to European conquest. This chapter does not seek to identify a singular moment of revolutionary origins, nor does it depict Vietnam’s revolution as a necessary or inevitable response to “foreign invasion.” Instead, I chart the complex political, economic, and cultural changes that transformed Indochina between the 1860s and the 1920s, paying particular attention to the strikingly different effects that these changes produced in the five regions (pays) of France’s colonial empire. By 1930, many Vietnamese had embraced revolution, but the implications and direction of the country’s revolutionary politics – and the fate of colonial rule in Indochina – appeared more uncertain than ever.

Vietnam on the Eve of French Conquest

Contrary to what some later observers supposed, the colonial-era division of Vietnam into the three regions of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina was not a French innovation. It replicated the administrative structure devised by Emperor Gia Long when he established the Nguyễn Dynasty in 1802. Gia Long’s newly unified empire was much larger than the realm that his ancestors had established in the coastal region below the 18th parallel two centuries earlier, when they separated from the northern Viet kingdom based at Hanoi. While Gia Long’s court, now located in Huế, ruled the central region directly, one viceroy was appointed for the North and another for the South. The position of northern viceroy was abolished in 1817 but that of southern viceroy lasted until 1832. By the time the Nguyễn kingdom first came under French attack in 1858, the empire had been administratively unified for only twenty-four years. Still, the memories of this unity would nourish nationalist sentiments in the twentieth century.

Despite its heavy reliance on revenues from mining in the Northern Highlands,¹ the Nguyễn Dynasty idealized the village-based agrarian society of the Red River Delta. In northern villages, distrust of outsiders accompanied communal solidarity. Rural trade was hampered by geography and seen mostly as a remedy for poverty.² For ordinary residents, the path out of both village and poverty was through education and bureaucratic appointment. But in the central region with its long coast and lack of arable land, the Nguyễn ancestors to the nineteenth-century emperors had maintained the Cham tradition of long-distance maritime trade. Meanwhile, since the late seventeenth century, an influx of Chinese immigrants made possible the expansion of Nguyễn rule southward, into the fertile Mekong Delta. In response to demand for rice in Southeast Asia, canals were dug to drain swamps, bring new land into cultivation, and facilitate the transport of rice to Saigon for export.³ In this ever-changing landscape, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Khmer peasants were constantly on the move. Unlike their northern and central counterparts, southern villages were open but lacked the former’s communitarian ethos. A scarcity of imperial officials and Confucian educators hampered the court’s efforts at administrative control and ideological conformity. Economic success rather than educational achievements and bureaucratic appointment was the chief means of social advancement. French colonial policies would exacerbate these pre-existing regional differences.

French Cochinchina Before 1885

The ill-defended southern region was the first to fall to French conquest. In 1862, the Treaty of Saigon ceded the region’s three eastern and most populous provinces to the French. In 1867, having already installed a protectorate in Cambodia in 1864, the French seized the remaining three provinces of the west. The flight of Vietnamese officials to the still-independent northern and central regions contributed to turning the Vietnamese south into the colony of French Cochinchina.

Under French rule, Cochinchina was first divided into thirteen then eventually twenty provinces. Each was governed by a French administrator. Below him were other French officials; Vietnamese were only allowed to perform clerical duties or to hold purely honorific titles. At first, the colony was governed by an admiral. In 1879, after Jules Ferry became French prime minister, a civilian governor was appointed by Paris and an elected Colonial Council was created to make the governance of the colony more democratic. Only six of the Council’s fourteen (eventually eighteen) members were Vietnamese and these were elected by a restricted pool of property-owning electors. The Colonial Council sent one delegate to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. When France decided to resume expansion in Vietnam, the settlers objected to using the Cochinchinese budget to fund the Tonkin campaign of 1883–5. Paris reacted by replacing the colony’s first civilian governor, le Myre de Vilers, with a more compliant one.⁴

Colonialism’s economic impact on the economy of Cochinchina was immediate and long-lasting. From the outset, the French had systematically seized lands whose owners had fled the conquest or who had stayed to oppose them. Once the western provinces of the Mekong Delta were annexed, agricultural settlements that had been opened to bring more land under cultivation were also confiscated on the grounds that their ownership had been transferred from the Court to the new authorities. The pre-existing network of canals was greatly expanded.⁵ To hasten large-scale export-oriented agriculture, lands, either confiscated or newly brought into cultivation, were auctioned off as lots whose size and price put them out of the reach of ordinary Vietnamese. Many small cultivators lacked proper titles for the lands they had reclaimed and lost them to unscrupulous speculators and corrupt officials. Scandals associated with land grabbing were a recurring theme of southern politics throughout the colonial period. The growth of large landholdings encouraged the twin phenomena of landlessness and absentee landlordism.⁶

Other far-reaching changes came in the realm of culture. The system of Confucian education, culminating in bureaucratic employment, held little attraction for the southern peasants and merchants. It was thus easy to jettison the traditional curriculum. The earliest French-affiliated institution of new learning, the Catholic Collège d’Adran, was founded in 1861 even before the Treaty of Saigon was signed. By 1869, Cochinchina counted 126 public schools where Vietnamese students were taught in the Romanized script (quốc ngữ). After the third grade, students could transfer to more advanced schools in which the language of instruction was French, though few did. The first such school, the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat, opened in Saigon in 1874. In 1879, the Collège de Mỹ Tho was established on the prior foundation of a primary school to serve the needs of students from the Mekong Delta. In 1882, Jules Ferry mandated universal education in France and pushed for opening more public (and secular) schools in the colonies.⁷ New Franco-Annamite schools were thus opened throughout Cochinchina – though they catered mainly to the children of wealthy Vietnamese and Chinese (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 The governor-general of French Indochina, Albert Sarraut, with Emperor Khai Dinh of Annam (April 1918).

Source: Branger / Contributor / Roger Viollet / Getty Images.

In 1865, the Vietnamese Catholic polymath known as Petrus Trương Vĩnh Ký began publishing Gia Định Báo (Gia Dinh Journal). Printed in quốc ngữ, it functioned as an unofficial journal of record. Besides official notices and legal documents, the weekly journal, which ran until 1897, published articles on agriculture and culture.⁸ Beginning in 1879, all official documents were issued in French and quốc ngữ, thereby cementing the latter’s use as the script for communicating with and among Vietnamese. By the time French colonial conquest resumed in the rest of the country in 1882, the Vietnamese south had already experienced profound political, economic, and cultural transformations that magnified previous differences with the rest of the country.

The Conquest of Tonkin and Annam

After the French annexation of the southern provinces, the rest of the country fell prey to economic difficulties, rebellions, and factionalism among court officials. Owing to the chronic indecisiveness of Emperor Tự Đức (1847–83), his court failed to take advantage of the hiatus in France’s colonial expansion between its defeat in the war with Prussia of 1870 and Jules Ferry’s assumption of the premiership in 1879. Although the Vietnamese court had previously sought assistance from China in vain, in 1883, a new appeal found a favorable response among conservative Qing officials, leading to war between France and China. But the Sino–French war ended badly for Vietnam. The Treaty of Tianjin of June 1885 affirmed the French annexation of the remaining Vietnamese territory and its division into the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam in the North and center respectively.

The following month, several attempts to restore the Nguyễn monarchy to power, known collectively as the Aid the King Movement (Cần Vương), were launched.⁹ Imperial regents whisked the twelve-year-old emperor Hàm Nghi to the hills of central Vietnam to lead the struggle, but his absence from the court gave the French a pretext to enthrone his elder half-brother Đồng Khánh. From Đồng Khánh onward, Vietnamese emperors ruled in name only, with effective power residing in the hands of French officials.

In 1887, the colony of Cochinchina and the three protectorates of Cambodia (since 1864) and of Tonkin and Annam (since 1885) were brought together in a new entity, the Indochinese Union, to which Laos was added in 1893. A governor-general was appointed at the head of the Union, above the governor of Cochinchina and the French résidents supérieurs of the four protectorates. Although the governor-generals initially resided in Saigon’s Norodom Palace (later Independence Palace), the capital of the Union was moved to Hanoi in 1902.

Although the traditional imperial bureaucracy was preserved in both Tonkin and Annam, each protectorate had its own political and administrative regime that was headed by a French résident supérieur. In Tonkin, each province remained nominally administered by a Vietnamese governor (tổng đốc), but actual power was exercised by a French résident, the equivalent of a Cochinchinese administrator. The résident supérieur governed with the assistance of an advisory council that, unlike the Cochinchinese Colonial Council, was neither elected nor endowed with the power of the purse. In Annam, the seat of the Nguyễn court, there was no French administrator below the résident supérieur. But that official had total, if indirect, control over the Nguyễn court bureaucracy. He presided over meetings of the imperial cabinet and set their agenda. Vietnamese ministers were barred from introducing any new item for discussion and were especially prohibited from discussing matters of personnel or taxes, including their amount, collection, or distribution.

During these decades, few Vietnamese living in Tonkin or Annam ever saw a French official or settler. They experienced colonialism indirectly as Vietnamese prefects and magistrates continued to discharge their functions as before, albeit while taking their orders from the colonial rather than imperial state.¹⁰ While Vietnamese officials were subservient to the French authorities, many abused the power they wielded within their local jurisdictions. As a result, in the two protectorates, traditional governance – and the Confucian ideology on which it was supposedly based – became indelibly and negatively associated with colonial rule.

When the Aid the King Movement ended in 1895, the Indochinese government switched from pacification to economic exploitation. In 1897, a new governor-general, Paul Doumer, set about reforming the Indochinese budget, which depended heavily on subsidies from the metropole. He introduced new taxes, including monopolies of opium and salt. Later, alcohol was added to these two sources of revenue (although policing them turned out to be quite costly).¹¹ A new bureaucratic apparatus, the general services, was created to administer projects that transcended state borders, but also to solidify the position of the governor-general over the heads of the five states of Indochina, in particular the governor of Cochinchina. The colony contributed 40% of the Union’s budget; consequently, the Cochinchinese settlers and their representatives in both Saigon and Paris exerted enormous power over the affairs of the Indochinese Union. The general services enabled the governor-general to siphon off revenues from Cochinchina, mitigate the influence of the settlers, and restrict the power of the governor of Cochinchina.

In Tonkin and Annam, land plots tended to be small and property registers were better kept than in the developing Mekong Delta and thus did not attract land speculators. The socioeconomic landscape changed more gradually than in Cochinchina, but the new taxes weighed more heavily on their inhabitants than on those of the South, where greater social (and geographical) mobility accompanied rapid development. Although the colonial administrators stopped above the village level, French rule had a profound impact on rural life in both regions. Peasants in Tonkin and Annam existed at subsistence level, their crops often mortgaged before they had ripened, in order to pay their taxes. In the early 1880s, the colonial authority introduced a series of measures to increase tax revenues. First, the census, which determined the amount of taxes owed by each village, was no longer conducted by village councils but by agents of the state. It was no longer possible for the councils to minimize their villages’ tax liability by underreporting population figures. The traditional distinction between registered peasants who had the right of citizenship in their village and those who were nominally exempted from taxes because of their supposedly transient status (a situation that could persist over three generations) was gradually eliminated; every villager was now a taxpayer. Furthermore, a new tax was introduced as replacement for the traditional corvée, which was usually performed by villagers in the offseason and close to home. As the large-scale projects undertaken by the general services required year-round manpower, coerced labor details known as corvée remained a hated feature of rural life until the end of the colonial period. Under the new system, peasants were forcibly recruited, even kidnapped, to work on projects far from home for long periods and were severely punished for breaking contracts.¹²

While they no longer conducted the census, village councils remained responsible for collecting taxes and remitting them in full. The introduction in 1897 of tax receipts as forms of identification opened villagers to new exploitation by village councilmen. Having previously served as buffers against the imperial state, they now became reviled as rapacious agents of the colonial regime. In 1927, the colonial regime introduced a measure to shore up the representativeness of village councils in Tonkin, but their prestige continued to decline. Throughout the 1920s, the northern Vietnamese press routinely called for reforming village government.

Reform and Collaboration

The end of the Aid the King Movement coincided with Japan’s victory over China in 1895. These two events convinced the traditionally trained scholars who made up the leadership of the movement to abandon its purely restorationist objectives and to embrace cultural reform as a prerequisite for independence. Inspired by Chinese reformers such as Liang Qichao, they jettisoned the ideal of social harmony as the organizing principle for society and replaced it with Social Darwinian notions of racial competition. They accepted that Vietnam had fallen to colonial conquest because its civilization had become stagnant and unable to compete against a more vigorous West.

The first advocate of reform was Phan Bội Châu (1867–1940). After the end of the Aid the King Movement in which he had played a minor role, he concentrated on his studies and obtained a degree in the regional examinations of 1900. In 1903, he penned the first of his appeals for reform. This was A New Letter from Ryukyu Written in Blood and Tears (Lưu Cầu Huyết Lệ Tân Thư). In it, he drew parallels between the loss of Ryukyu’s annexation by Japan in 1879 with Vietnam’s own loss of independence to the French. He echoed Chinese reformers’ calls for immediately developing the people’s intellect and cultivating the people’s strength. The following year, he created the Reform Society (Duy Tân Hội) whose main activity was the Eastern Travel Movement (phong trào Đông Du), aimed at bringing young Vietnamese to Japan to acquire a more modern education than was available in Vietnam. The most noteworthy of these students was Prince Cường Để (1882–1951), a direct descendant of the Nguyễn dynastic founder. But while the aim was to send students abroad from the two protectorates, most of the Vietnamese who joined the Eastern Travel Movement came from the more prosperous South. This pattern of southern support for Phan Bội Châu would continue throughout the first decades of the twentieth century and shape his politics. Not long after his arrival in Japan, Phan Bội Châu wrote another pamphlet, A History of the Loss of Vietnam (Việt Nam Vong Quốc Sử) for which Liang Qichao wrote a preface. Liang also had it printed and distributed as far as Korea. Both the New Letter from Ryukyu Written in Blood and Tears and the History of the Loss of Vietnam were written in classical Chinese, the language in which Phan Bội Châu had been educated. Although an ardent advocate of quốc ngữ, he never learned it.

The other towering figure of the reformist movement, Phan Châu Trinh, likewise wrote in Chinese. Born in 1872, Phan Châu Trinh had been too young to participate in the Aid the King Movement. His father had, however, been assassinated by fellow insurgents. Unlike Phan Bội Châu who was willing to resort to violence in the pursuit of independence, Phan Châu Trinh renounced it entirely. Blaming the monarchy for his father’s assassination, he became an ardent advocate of republicanism. And while Phan Bội Châu saw cultural reform in purely utilitarian terms as a useful instrument for political action, Phan Châu Trinh believed that independence could only be sustained after a thorough process of cultural change that might last decades. To the dismay of Phan Bội Châu, whom he met in both Japan and China, he distrusted Japan and was willing to learn from the French.¹³ In 1907, Phan Châu Trinh became involved in the Tonkin Free School Movement (Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục) which advocated the spread of quốc ngữ as a bridge between the elite and ordinary Vietnamese. The Tonkin Free School operated impromptu classes that not only taught quốc ngữ but also introduced new ideas from East Asia and Europe. Several of its leaders were graduates of the School of Interpreters that had opened in Hanoi in 1886 to train intermediaries between the French authorities and imperial officials. The school’s curriculum combined a smattering of Chinese, quốc ngữ, and French with new subjects of study, so its graduates became known as scholars of New Learning. Some members of the Tonkin Free School also opened businesses, both to provide financial support for its operations and to elevate the status of trade and traders.¹⁴

The reforms advocated by the Tonkin Free School aimed to replicate developments in Cochinchina, where the use of quốc ngữ was widespread and commerce and entrepreneurship had always enjoyed popularity. Gia Định Báo had ceased publication in 1897, but some of its mission was resumed in 1901 with the launching of a new journal, Nông Cổ Mín Đàm (Forum for Agriculture and Commerce). Like Gia Định Báo, it was written entirely in quốc ngữ. It had few paid subscribers but a wider readership. As its title indicated, it aimed to promote the interests of Vietnamese farmers and businesspeople. It provided regular information about the price of rice for export and advice on agricultural matters, but it also devoted columns to cultural issues. It published translations of Chinese historical novels such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and short stories from Chinese, French, or English, as well as original poems; it also reproduced news from European newspapers. Fully two pages were taken up by advertisements. There was nothing like it in Tonkin or Annam.¹⁵

The reformers’ educational enterprise included a significant innovation. Women had traditionally been barred from taking the civil service exams; their education had been limited and haphazard, focusing mainly on moral prescriptions and domestic advice. It turned out that women, who were not tied to a Chinese-language education, were quicker learners of the Romanized script than the men. Thus, when he found out that his daughter was already fluent in the new script, Lương Vӑn Can put her in charge of the women’s section of the Tonkin Free School.¹⁶

A Collège du Protectorat (colloquially known as Trường Bưởi) was established in 1908 in Hanoi to cater to Vietnamese students. In Huế, the Imperial Academy (Quốc Học) was founded in 1896, but it began actual operations only in 1909. The limited availability of Franco-Annamite education in Tonkin and Annam was due not only to their protectorate status but also to the persistence of the traditional civil service exam system as the means of staffing the imperial bureaucracy. The system continued to function for an entire decade after its abolition in China. The last regional exams were held in the North in 1915; but only in 1919 was the last metropolitan exam held in Huế.

In addition to building new institutions, the reformers also sought to transform Vietnamese mores. They encouraged their peers to cut their hair and nails short and embrace Western-style modernity. Paradoxically, in the South, where all the measures advocated by northern reformers had long taken hold, some chose to express their patriotism by clinging to traditional hair and clothing styles and to profess allegiance to the Vietnamese monarchy that no longer reigned over the colony.

For all the publicity it generated then and later, the Tonkin Free School Movement lasted only one year. In 1908, the last significant armed revolt against French conquest ended after a plot to poison the colonial garrison in Hanoi was uncovered and its mastermind, Đề Thám, was captured. The same year, peasants in Annam staged protests against the corvée and against the introduction of a new currency that severely disadvantaged them. Leaders of the Tonkin Free School lent their support by writing poems and songs that the colonial authorities deemed subversive. Phan Châu Trinh and other supporters of the protests were arrested and the classes of the Tonkin Free School were shut down. The University of Hanoi (actually School of Medicine), which had opened in 1902 to address Vietnamese calls for educational reforms, was also shut down and did not reopen until 1917. Scholars of New Learning such as Nguyễn Vӑn Vĩnh and Phạm Duy Tốn, who had enthusiastically embraced the Movement because it vindicated their own educational trajectory, took fright. While many continued to pursue cultural endeavors, they largely ceased to be involved in what might be deemed political activism.¹⁷

Meanwhile, in 1909 Phan Bội Châu was expelled from Japan at the behest of the French colonial authorities. After wandering in Siam (where many former participants in the Aid the King Movement had taken refuge) and Hong Kong, Phan Bội Châu settled in South China. He quickly immersed himself in the political activities of the Vietnamese émigrés there as well as in Chinese politics. An enthusiastic supporter of the 1911 Revolution that ended Manchu rule over China, in 1913, he tried to form an anticolonial movement that drew its inspiration from Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenhui). However, its proposed republican platform encountered opposition from his southern supporters who furnished him with the bulk of his funds. To placate them, he placed prince Cường Để at the head of the League for the Restoration of Vietnam (Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội). Seeking to publicize the new organization, he encouraged a bomb plot in the Saigon–Cholon area. This was carried out through the intermediary of the clandestine Heaven and Earth Society. The Society, which originated in China, had replaced its anti-Manchu slogan (“Fight the Qing, Restore the Ming”) with an anticolonial one (“Fight the French, Restore Vietnam”). Phan Xích Long, the local mastermind of the bomb plots, was arrested before the plot could be carried out while Phan Bội Châu was sentenced to death in abstentia.¹⁸ The French authorities were able to convince the governor of Guangdong to arrest him, but not to deport him back to Vietnam. Phan Bội Châu spent the next four years in a Chinese prison.¹⁹

These waves of anticolonial activity made it difficult for the new governor-general, Albert Sarraut (Figure 2.2), who arrived in Indochina in 1911, to implement his program of economic development (mise en valeur) of the colonies. Sarraut’s plan relied on mollifying native populations with concessions to promote social stability. But it soon ran afoul of the French settlers’ belief that social unrest should be met with severe reprisals. By the time ill-health forced Sarraut to return to France in 1913, he had not been able to accomplish much in the way of reforms, though he succeeded in releasing Phan Châu Trinh from prison. Phan Châu Trinh left for Paris and was even given a subsidy (it was withdrawn when World War I broke out).

Figure 2.2 A Franco-Annamite school in Đồng Khê (Upper Tonkin) in 1902.

Source: LL / Contributor / Roger Viollet / Getty Images.

French Indochina initially refused to become involved in the metropole’s war with Germany but changed course in 1915. The government immediately set about rounding up “volunteers” to serve on the front or relieve French workers in factories. Eventually, 94,000 such volunteers, the overwhelming majority coming from Vietnam, went to France during the Great War.²⁰ Although they were supposed to go of their own free will, in fact, most were conscripted, sometimes even kidnapped. Riots broke out throughout the country. In Cochinchina, anticonscription protests merged with an attempt by members of the Heaven and Earth Society to spring Phan Xích Long out of the Central Prison of Saigon in 1916. Eventually, thirty-eight men involved in that failed attempt were publicly executed. In Annam, too, political unrest was rife. The sixteen-year-old Emperor Duy Tân was persuaded by a Taoist scholar, Trần Cao Vân, to plot an attack on French military installations in Annam. When the scheme was discovered, Duy Tân was sent into exile together with his father Thành Thái, whom the French had deposed in 1907 after he called on the French to restore prerogatives that by treaty were supposed to be reserved for the court.

In August 1917, a revolt took place among colonial troops stationed in Thái Nguyên in the north. The insurgents made common cause with some of the political prisoners detained in the prison, notably Lương Ngọc Quyến, the son of the reformist scholar Lương Vӑn Can. The authorities dealt with the uprising with ferocious intensity, mobilizing 500 troops who, in the space of five days, razed the town that had given shelter to the insurgents.²¹ The French authorities and settlers usually described incidents of unrest as either expressions of opposition to colonialism (as would Vietnamese historians later) or as purely local disturbances caused by dissatisfaction with specific policies. In the case of the Thái Nguyên uprising, there was ample reason to lay the blame on the French résident, Darles, who mistreated both prisoners and colonial troops equally. At the same time, the presence of political prisoners also suggested that the uprising had been inspired in part by anticolonial sentiments. Albert Sarraut, who had arrived back in Indochina in January 1917, chose to interpret the uprising as a purely local affair. It is likely that his choice was motivated by his desire to implement the program of “Franco-Annamite collaboration” he had proposed prior to the war (Figure 2.2).

The New Journalism: Politics vs. Culture

The post–World War I situation made Sarraut’s program of collaboration seem more necessary and more possible. Even after Governor-General Paul Doumer had tried to put the finances of Indochina on a sounder footing, the colony had continued to depend on subsidies from the metropole. Given the parlous state of the postwar French economy, reducing Indochina’s financial dependence on Paris was imperative. Sarraut proposed to institute a constitution that would give Indochina greater independence from Paris in return for becoming financially self-sufficient. The colonial state also faced a dearth of European personnel, due to the staggering casualties sustained on the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme.²² This meant appointing Vietnamese to positions hitherto reserved for French people. It also spurred educational reforms that greatly increased the number of schools in Cochinchina and extended the system of Franco-Annamite education to Tonkin. In Annam, where the last traditional metropolitan exam was held in 1919, the classical curriculum was reformed to purge it of anticolonial elements. In a bow to girls’ education, the Đống Khánh School opened in Huế in July 1917.²³

To advance his program, and to counter the opposition of the French settlers that was even more virulent than in 1913, Sarraut courted the Vietnamese elites of Cochinchina and Tonkin with notable success. In Cochinchina, the rising middle class had achieved political visibility by enthusiastically voicing its patriotism toward “the mother country” (mẫu quốc) of Great France (Đại Pháp) and buying war bonds. Sarraut’s main supporter was Bùi Quang Chiêu, whose biography suggests the educational gulf that existed between Cochinchina on the one hand and Tonkin and Annam on the other. Bùi Quang Chiêu was born in Bến Tre in 1867, the same year as Phan Châu Trinh. But while Phan Châu Trinh in Quảng Nam received a traditional education culminating in a degree in 1902, Bùi Quang Chiêu went to Algeria in 1894 and graduated three years later with a degree in agronomic engineering. Back in Vietnam, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the reform movement, particularly of the Tonkin Free School. Albert Sarraut tapped him to become the editor-in-chief of the French-language newspaper La Tribune Indigène for which the colonial regime provided generous subsidies (paid for by villages, which were required to purchase the newspaper though their residents were largely illiterate even in their own language). In 1919, the newspaper announced that it was the organ of the Constitutionalist Party and openly supported Sarraut’s attempt to forge an Indochinese constitution. The newspaper benefited from the policy of relative press freedom that allowed French-language newspapers to discuss economic and political matters. La Tribune Indigène advanced the interests of Vietnamese landowners and businessmen against both the French settlers who had their own mouthpieces in several newspapers and against the Chinese businessmen who dominated the economic sector, especially the rice trade. In 1919, the newspaper spearheaded a boycott of Chinese businesses. Bùi Quang Chiêu had another target: the poor and uneducated. He had become a believer in Social Darwinism as an explanation for personal success or failure. He used his newspaper to campaign for greater Vietnamese representation on the Cochinchinese Colonial Council but feared that the illiterate peasants who had gone to France as “volunteers” would be rewarded for their war service with the right to vote when they returned. Their sheer numbers would dwarf those of the Vietnamese businessmen and landowners who were eligible to vote on the basis of their education and wealth. The Constitutionalist Party was never a mass organization.²⁴

In Tonkin, the elite was still dominated by graduates of the civil service exam system and the press operated under a far stricter regime than in Cochinchina. It was prohibited from discussing political matters (interpreted broadly to include economic affairs as well). Sarraut entrusted a new journal, Southern Wind (Nam Phong), to Phạm Quỳnh (1892–1945), a graduate of the Lycée du Protectorat who had begun working at the EFEO at the age of sixteen years old. Nam Phong was launched in July 1917. Nam Phong originally had three sections: a summary in French, a short section in Chinese, and a longer one in the Romanized script. Gradually, the Chinese section shrank as the quốc ngữ section grew. Unlike the southern press, which openly debated economic and political issues and showed little interest in questions of culture, Nam Phong concentrated on cultural issues. Phạm Quỳnh was a proponent of innovation in literature and especially of fiction as more than a vehicle for entertainment. The journal was also a platform for discussing the question of women in debates that pitted modernity against tradition, patriarchy against youth. While Southerners did journalistic battle with hard-line settlers, Chinese traders, corrupt politicians, and land speculators, Nam Phong was the mouthpiece of the emerging generation of graduates of the Franco-Annamite schools in the North who sought to supplant the classically trained scholars as the new elite. The closest that Nam Phong came to political debates was on the topic of reforming village councils. But these were also couched in the language of cultural reform, villages having become, in the eyes of their modernizing detractors, repositories of outmoded and oppressive customs.²⁵ Sarraut made no effort to win over the even more conservative elite of Annam. It was only in 1927 that the newspaper Tiếng Dân (The People’s Voice) was launched by Huỳnh Thúc Kháng, a classical scholar who had taken part in the Reform movement of 1908.

By the time Sarraut left for France in 1923, he had not succeeded in implementing an Indochinese constitution, but he had profoundly altered the terms of political discourse among Vietnamese. In Cochinchina, La Tribune Indigène became the dominant voice of the Vietnamese who espoused Franco-Annamite collaboration though few went as far as Bùi Quang Chiêu in calling for total assimilation. While Bùi Quang Chiêu enthusiastically supported landowners and businessmen, Nguyễn Phan Long, his successor as editor-in-chief of the newspaper, championed the interests of Vietnamese civil servants and other professionals whose numbers had risen in the aftermath of World War I. In the constantly developing south, La Tribune Indigène took for granted the profound changes in the social structures and culture of the region. The opposite was true of Southern Wind which, forced to eschew political and economic matters, concentrated on discussing and even advocating cultural reforms.

Radicals on the Rise

Not every Vietnamese subscribed to Sarraut’s paternalistic view that they were not yet ready for self-rule. New kinds of anticolonial activists were emerging in France and China, as well as in Vietnam. In France, sometime during World War I, the exiled Phan Châu Trinh met up with Phan Vӑn Trường, a lawyer married to a Frenchwoman. In 1917, they were joined by Nguyễn Tất Thành (soon to be better known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc and later as Hồ Chí Minh) who had arrived in Paris from London. Nguyễn Tất Thành had left Vietnam in 1911 at the age of twenty-one (according to his official biography) and worked as a sailor then as a cook in hotels in various countries. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, the three men drafted a document entitled “Revendications du Peuple Annamite” that they signed with the collective name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Nguyễn the Patriot?). They sent this document, which called for home rule for Vietnam, to all the senior Allied leaders at the Versailles Conference in 1919. None responded. On behalf of the trio, Nguyễn Tất Thành took copies of the document to all the Paris newspapers. Only that of the Socialist Party, L’Humanité, agreed to publish the text of the Revendications. Nguyến Tất Thành was also warmly welcomed into the Socialist Party by Jean Longuet, a grandson of Karl Marx. From then on, the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc was exclusively attached to him.

At the Congress of the French Socialist Party held in Tours in July 1920, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, who had been invited to attend despite not being a French citizen or subject (he was born in Nghệ An, Annam), decided to join the breakaway Communist Party because it seemed more interested in colonial problems than the socialists. He read Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Question,” in which Lenin connected imperialism to capitalism but also predicted that colonies, as the weak links of capitalism, would end the domination of colonial powers. Nguyễn Ái Quốc was assigned to edit the party’s paper Le Paria (The Pariah) but eventually became disenchanted with what he saw as the party’s indifference toward workers and colonial people. He left some time in 1923 for Moscow, re-emerging in late 1924 in Guangzhou.²⁶

Also in 1923, twenty-three-year-old Nguyễn An Ninh, the son and nephew of anticolonial activists, returned to Saigon from France with a law degree and a burning desire to inspire Vietnamese youth to action. He launched a French-language newspaper, La Cloche Fêlée, which took aim at the financial scandals that plagued French Cochinchina in the postwar years. But his main goal was to urge young Vietnamese to achieve their personal independence from family and tradition by working for the independence of the nation. Unlike Southern Wind, which was respectful toward Confucianism, Nguyễn An Ninh portrayed Confucianism as a straitjacket that prevented the Vietnamese from being creative and self-reliant. While his advocacy of change was ardent, his actual program of action was rather vague. But he became an object of adulation among young Vietnamese who passed his newspaper from hand to hand clandestinely. He also gained support not only in Saigon but also in rural areas, belying the limited number of copies his newspaper sold. Of the Saigon-based activists and journalists, he was nearly the only person who sought to mobilize workers.²⁷

In 1924, Phạm Hồng Thái, a native of Tonkin, tried to assassinate Governor-General Merlin during his visit to the French concession in Guangzhou. His attempt having failed, Phạm Hồng Thái committed suicide, but his deed resonated among the expatriate population in southern China. Soon thereafter Nguyễn Ái Quốc, newly trained in revolutionary strategy in Moscow, arrived in Guangzhou as a representative of the Comintern. He founded the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League (Việt Nam Thanh Niên Cách Mạng Đồng Chí Hội) with the aim of training patriotic young men and women in anticolonial activism. At the core of the League was a secret group that was meant to be the nucleus of an eventual communist movement.²⁸

In 1926, the Revolutionary Youth League received a sudden influx of recruits thanks to a fortuitous concatenation of events. In 1925, Phan Bội Châu was arrested in China and brought back to Hanoi for trial. The hard-line settlers scheduled his trial for 1926 to embarrass the new governor-general, Alexandre Varenne, who had a reputation as a liberal. Then in March of that year came news of the death of Phan Châu Trinh. He had been suffering ill health for several years but had not dared return to Vietnam until the death in 1925 of Emperor Khải Định, whom he had offended three years earlier by publishing a list of his “crimes.” Phan Châu Trinh never was in good enough health to return to his native Quảng Nam and died in Saigon. On the day his death was announced came news that Nguyễn An Ninh had been arrested for distributing inflammatory anti-French leaflets. The trigger for his action had been the deportation of a Vietnamese activist from Tonkin who had been agitating on behalf of workers.

The conjunction of these three events galvanized young Vietnamese, especially students at Franco-Annamite schools. They asked for permission to organize a state funeral for Phan Châu Trinh, taking as their inspiration the funerals for Sun Yat-sen in 1924 (themselves inspired by the funerals of Lenin in 1922). Denied permission to attend the funerals, they staged strikes or wore black armbands. These shows of patriotism, which spread from Cochinchina to Tonkin and Annam, and lasted through the following year, led to their expulsion from schools ranging from the Collège de Cần Thơ in the Mekong Delta to the Đồng Khánh School for girls in Huế and to vocational schools in Tonkin. Many of the expelled students joined underground organizations in Vietnam; others made their way to France or to China. In France, where the most Southerners went, newcomers had an array of organizations to choose from, including the French Communist Party and more moderate groups. Some went on to Moscow for training. France had emerged as the capital of international Trotskyism in the wake of Stalin’s purge of Trotsky and a few Vietnamese students became Trotskyists. From Tonkin and Annam, many went to South China where they joined the Revolutionary Youth League. After a few months, they returned home to recruit new members among their families and friends. This pattern of recruitment had a significant effect on the distribution of the League’s membership. Measures aimed at limiting travel between Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina failed to prevent determined Vietnamese from moving between the three regions, so the League was active in all three. But the relative freedom of the press, movement, and association allowed in Cochinchina enabled the League to operate there more or less openly; but it also made it easy for the French Sûreté (colonial security and police service) to follow activists and to plant informers in their midst. In Tonkin and Annam, all political activities had to be clandestine, a situation that encouraged underground organizing.

The student activism of 1926–7 and the press debates it generated promoted the emergence of a new political party in Tonkin. Founded by Nguyễn Thái Học, it represented the coming of age of a new generation of students formed in the Franco-Annamite schools that had been established since 1919. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng – VNQDĐ) shared some features with the Revolutionary Youth League since both had been inspired by the Guomindang before it split with the Chinese Communist Party in 1927. Unlike the League, the VNQDĐ was limited to Tonkin. Competition between these two groups was fierce. The VNQDĐ particularly targeted workers and colonial troops whose ill-treatment by French officers and officials had continued since the Thái Nguyên uprising of 1917. In the post–World War I period, speculators had flocked to Indochina, whose economy had sustained less damage than the French economy. New plantations were opened (often by dispossessing Vietnamese cultivators), especially after rubber began to be cultivated on a large scale. A Michelin plantation was opened in the Southern Highlands in 1925. That year, the Cochinchinese Council estimated that the colony needed an annual influx of 25,000 new workers to sustain economic growth. By 1928, 80,000 workers were employed in plantations; more than half came from Tonkin and had often been recruited under false representations and made to sign onerous labor contracts for multiple years.²⁹ Coolie recruiters had become a symbol of the cruel exploitation of workers and peasants.

The growth of new political parties – a departure from Vietnamese political tradition – masked the emergence in the South of a new movement that combined religion and politics: the Cao Đài. Begun by a group of spirit mediums in Saigon in 1925, it soon attracted members by the hundreds and even thousands among colonial civil servants, wealthy landowners, and ordinary peasants. Its growth was aided by the relative freedom of religion in the colony and it even managed to spread into Cambodia. But the colonial authorities hid behind the fiction of Vietnamese sovereignty in Tonkin and Annam to prevent it from spreading into the two protectorates. Cao Đài ideology did not distinguish between secular and religious matters and many of the teachings emanating from its oratories had an anticolonial flavor. Thus, while the Revolutionary Youth League and the VNQDĐ dominated underground anticolonial activities in Tonkin and Annam, in Cochinchina the political scene was more diverse as well as more overt.

Meanwhile, several members of the Revolutionary Youth League were secretly laying the groundwork for the transformation of the League into a communist party as had been envisaged by Nguyến Ái Quốc. But after the collapse of the United Front in China, he had fled from Guangzhou in April 1927, leaving secondary leaders to seek guidance from Moscow. The Comintern was in its ultra-left phase in which class struggle trumped mere patriotism. The several draft platforms that League members submitted were severely criticized. Tracked down in Siam, Nguyễn Ái Quốc rejected their pleas to resume the leadership of the League.

The assassination of a League member in Saigon in December 1928 gave the French Sûreté the opportunity to arrest not only members of the League but also of other groups operating in the South. Altogether, sixty people were arrested for the “Crime de la rue Barbier.” Among those arrested, two-thirds hailed from Nguyễn Ái Qủc’s home province of Nghệ An, where the League was strongest. Three men were executed in May 1931 for their role in that political assassination.³⁰

Competition between the Revolutionary Youth League and the VNQDĐ also produced upheavals in Tonkin. Although Nguyễn Thái Học had contemplated a merger with the League, in the event, he rejected it on the grounds that the League’s program was too extreme. Thereafter the two groups vied for the allegiance of the same segments of the population.³¹ In order to prove the VNQDĐ’s bona fide status to workers, in late 1928 one of its members, Nguyễn Vӑn Viên, proposed to assassinate a prominent coolie recruiter named Bazin. Although he was urged not to do so, Viên carried out the assassination of Bazin in February 1929. This provoked reprisals not only against the VNQDĐ but also against the northern branches of the Revolutionary Youth League at a time when its adherents were also being hunted by the Sûreté in Cochinchina.

Nguyễn Thái Hóc had envisaged a three-stage process for achieving independence through revolution, of which the last stage would be a general uprising combined with a general offensive. Faced with the coming destruction of the VNQDĐ, he decided to launch a general offensive in early 1930. But only the colonial garrison at Yên Bái and other scattered groups responded to his call to rise up. The colonial authorities responded by bombing the village of Cổ Am where Nguyễn Thái Học had taken refuge. On June 17, 1930, Học and twelve other leaders of the VNQDĐ went to the guillotine. Other leaders who had escaped arrest fled to South China. For the rest of the 1930s, the VNQDĐ ceased to be an active participant in anticolonial politics within the country.

On February 6, 1930, three days before Nguyến Thái Học launched his ill-fated general offensive, Nguyễn Ái Quốc finally emerged from his self-imposed exile to preside over the formation of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in Hong Kong. The disappearance from the scene of the VNQDĐ left the field clear for the new party to seize control of the emerging current of opposition to colonial rule in Annam. Only a few months later, protests against taxes erupted in Nghệ An and neighboring Hà Tĩnh. The ICP, implementing the ultra-left policies of the Comintern, targeted both the Vietnamese officials tasked with carrying out colonial policies and landowners, even patriotic ones. Frightened imperial ministers pleaded for the return from France of eighteen-year-old Emperor Bảo Đại to heal the social divisions engulfing Tonkin and Annam. In Cochinchina, reactions to colonial rule ranged from advocacy of Franco-Annamite collaboration to anticolonial activism both overt and covert. In the countryside, the Cao Đài movement, which was gathering followers by the tens of thousands, had been predicting the end of French rule and encouraging its members to stop paying taxes. The different types of social organizations prevailing in the South, their different programs of action and visions for the future, posed significant competition for the nascent ICP.

As the new decade began, the fate of Vietnam’s revolution seemed harder to predict than ever. Interest in revolution in Vietnam – especially among youth, students, intellectuals, and urban residents – was running high. But the surveillance and repression meted out by colonial police and security services meant that most of Vietnam’s revolutionary groups and activists faced an uncertain future at best. Indeed, in some respects, the colonial state seemed more powerful and more entrenched than before. It was also difficult to see how any of Vietnam’s several revolutionary parties or movements would be able to build broadbased popular support across all three of Vietnam’s regions, or to mobilize the rural farmers who made up the vast majority of the country’s population. For most Vietnamese, the era of revolutionary politics and upheaval still lay in the future, despite the many changes that the country had endured in the decades prior to 1930.

3 Hồ Chí Minh and the Rise of the Vietnamese Communist Party

Pierre Brocheux ^†

The first and greatest challenge that any biographer of Hồ Chí Minh must face is the enormous mythology that surrounds the man. Because Hồ Chí Minh had a personality that both his supporters and his adversaries found appealing, the outlines of this mythology appeared early in his life and career, even before his emergence on the global stage. In the decades after 1945, this mythology was transformed into an elaborate personality cult, fashioned by the Vietnamese Communist Party and by Hồ Chí Minh himself. It is striking that Hồ Chí Minh is primarily celebrated today as the “Father of the Vietnamese Nation” (Cha già của Dân tộc Việt Nam); his role as the founder of the party receives considerably less attention, and his status as an agent of the Comintern during the 1920s and 1930s is hardly discussed at all.¹

Since Hồ Chí Minh’s death in 1969, his standing as a cult figure has grown to supernatural dimensions. In Vietnam today, he is often revered as a “tutelary genius” (thần) and as a figure who continues to “protect and nurture the people” (cứu dân độ thế). In the era of religious revival that has prevailed in Vietnam since the Đổi mới reforms, the number of shrines and temples dedicated to “Uncle Ho” grows ever larger.² In both official and popular forms of commemoration, Hồ Chí Minh has been integrated into the national pantheon and the longue durée of Vietnamese history.

But this apotheosis was not inevitable. Although Hồ Chí Minh played a central role in the founding and early history of the Vietnamese Communist Party, he served as the party’s general secretary for only three years. Given the enormous power that is typically wielded by general secretaries – both in Vietnam and in other communist states – Hồ Chí Minh’s relatively brief tenure in this role is significant. The contrast with the career of Lê Duẩn, who was elevated to general secretary in 1960 and held the position until his death in 1986, is especially remarkable. Despite what his propagandists and acolytes continue to insist, the early life and career of Hồ Chí Minh was not foreordained to be a voie royale that would carry him from Moscow to Hanoi, or from aspiring revolutionary to the presidency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN).³

Anticolonialism, Socialism, and the Making of a Pragmatic Revolutionary

When the future Hồ Chí Minh was still a teenager living in his native province of Nghệ An, all of Asia and the world was stunned by the news of Japan’s victory over Imperial Russia (1904–5). For Vietnamese and other Asians living under European colonial rule, Japan became an inspiration and a model of autonomous modernization. It also briefly served as a haven for Vietnamese anticolonialists such as Prince Cường Để, pretender to the Nguyễn throne, and Phan Bội Châu, a self-proclaimed revolutionary who recruited patriotic Vietnamese youth to “go east” and join the prince in Japan. But this moment of anti-European solidarity was fleeting. In 1909, Tokyo acknowledged French dominion in Indochina and expelled the Vietnamese. This “betrayal” would linger in the minds of many independence-minded Vietnamese, who resolved to seek a different path to revolution.⁴

The crackdown on Phan Bội Châu’s movement coincided with new French efforts to win the support of modernization-minded Vietnamese elites who had remained in Indochina. Instead of calling for revolution and the overthrow of colonial rule, these elites advocated evolution and reform. After the reformer Phan Châu Trinh was freed from prison in Indochina and allowed to move to Paris, other Vietnamese activists joined him in “going west” to Europe. Among those who joined Phan in Paris in the late 1910s was Nguyễn Tất Thành, a young firebrand from Nghệ An province who would soon adopt the alias Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Nguyễn the Patriot). Nguyễn Ái Quốc became part of the “Five Dragons,” a reformist group that also included Phan Châu Trinh, Phan Vӑn Trương, Nguyễn Thế Truyền, and Nguyễn An Ninh. Although all five were critics of colonial rule, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was the only one drawn to more radical forms of socialism. In 1920, as a delegate at the 18th Congress of the French Socialist Party, he voted with the majority in favor of joining the Soviet-led Third International.⁵

Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s radicalization was prompted by his encounter with the works of Vladimir Lenin, not those of Karl Marx. (He once confessed that he tried to read Das Kapital, but ended up using it as a pillow.)⁶ Unlike Marx, Lenin identified imperialism as “the weakest link in international capitalism” and embraced anticolonial struggle through revolutionary means.⁷ By 1920, Nguyễn Ái Quốc had concluded that the reformist cause was hopeless and that the French would neither amend nor abolish colonialism. Revolution was the only route to national liberation. Phan Châu Trinh recognized that he and his young compatriot had the same ultimate aim, even though they diverged over how to pursue it. Phan Châu Trinh urged Nguyễn Ái Quốc to return home and continue the fight for independence.⁸

In the 1940s, Hồ Chí Minh explained his affinity for Marxism–Leninism to a sympathetic American: “First you must understand that to gain independence from a great power like France is a formidable task that cannot be achieved without some outside help, not necessarily in things like arms, but in the nature of advice and contacts. One doesn’t in fact gain independence by throwing bombs and such. That was the mistake the early revolutionaries all too often made. One must gain it through organization, propaganda, training and discipline. One also needs … a set of beliefs, a gospel, a practical analysis, you might even say a bible. Marxism–Leninism gave me that framework.”⁹ These comments reveal key features of Hồ Chí Minh’s personality. He was neither a theoretician nor an adventurer bent on violence. Instead, he was a pragmatist and temporizer who recognized that the surest path to revolutionary success would not be the shortest one, and that the risks of violent struggle sometimes outweighed the prospective gains.

The pragmatic and calculating aspects of Hồ Chí Minh’s personality revealed themselves at key moments throughout his career. He opposed his fellow communists’ plan for a 1940 uprising against France on the grounds that it was premature.¹⁰ In 1945 and 1946, he temporarily accommodated the demands of two rival anticommunist parties, the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (VNQDĐ) and Đông Minh Hội, until he had negotiated the withdrawal of an occupying Chinese Nationalist Army. He also chose the path of negotiation with the French government in the hope of avoiding war in 1946, even though colonial troops had already attacked DRVN forces in southern Vietnam. That same year, on the eve of the great anticolonial insurrection in Madagascar, two Malagasy delegates asked Hồ Chí Minh what they should do. He urged them to eschew violence and to stay in Paris, saying “There is salvation for all of us in the French Union.”¹¹ In 1954, in perhaps his most famously pragmatic act, he made peace with France at Geneva. Despite the DRVN’s stunning victory at Điện Biên Phủ, he accepted the partition of Vietnam into northern and southern zones, as well as a promise of nationwide elections in 1956. For Hồ Chí Minh, a compromise peace agreement was preferable to continued war and to the possibility of direct US military intervention in Indochina.¹²

Hồ Chí Minh’s pragmatic approach to revolution was forged through his involvement in the politics of international communism during the 1920s and 1930s. His career as a Comintern agent and the early history of the Vietnamese Communist Party was deeply shaped by the tensions between two lignes de force: an emphasis on national unity for the sake of anticolonial liberation, and an emphasis on class struggle for the sake of international socialist solidarity. As a result, Hồ Chí Minh’s fortunes and those of the party – which was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1930 – were deeply tied to events in Asia, Europe, and the Soviet Union, and to the debates and personal rivalries that shaped the constantly shifting Comintern line. For Hồ Chí Minh, the most pressing choices he faced did not involve the primacy of the “national question” over the “social question” (or vice versa), but the difficulty of waging revolution during an era of global economic turmoil, war, and ideological polarization.

From Moscow to Canton

Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s first engagement with international communism coincided with the collapse of leftist revolutionary movements in Germany, Hungary, and Poland during 1919–20. In the aftermath of these failures, the Comintern shifted its attention eastward. Nguyễn Ái Quốc traveled to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1923, where he became a recruit of the Comintern and encountered some of its top leaders such as Dmitry Manuilsky. In 1924, he was dispatched to Guangzhou in southern China to support the Comintern’s recently established alliance with Sun Yat-sen’s Republic of China. For the next three years, Nguyễn Ái Quốc forged close working relationships with senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He also recruited many fellow Vietnamese anticolonial activists who had fled French repression inside Indochina.

Southern China in the mid-1920s was a hotbed of revolutionary activism. The best-known Vietnamese militant was Phan Bội Châu, who had relocated to the area after his expulsion from Japan. In 1923, some of Phan Châu Trinh’s followers established the Association of Like Minds (Tâm Tâm Xã), a group dedicated to violent direct action against colonial rule. The following year, Phạm Hồng Thái tried to kill the governor-general of Indochina in a bomb attack; the attempt failed but Phạm Hồng Thái became a revolutionary martyr after he drowned himself to avoid capture.¹³ Revolutionary fervor among Vietnamese rose higher in 1925 when Phan Bội Châu was kidnapped by French operatives in Shanghai, spirited back to Indochina, and sentenced to death. The resulting popular outcry led French officials to commute his sentence to house arrest. The following year, Phan Châu Trinh died in Saigon shortly after returning from France. His funeral procession drew massive crowds and prompted vigils, demonstrations, and strikes across Indochina.

These events demonstrated the growing interest of young Vietnamese people – especially students – in both revolution and cultural transformation. For many Vietnamese youth, like their Chinese counterparts, the problem of foreign domination was part and parcel of a Vietnamese cultural crisis.¹⁴ To throw off foreign domination, they argued, Vietnam would have to abandon the stultifying traditional practices and values of their conservative elders.¹⁵ The rising radicalism of Vietnamese youth made many of them receptive to the appeals issued by Nguyễn Ái Quốc, whose recruitment efforts were now moving into high gear.

Thanh Niên: The Revolutionary Youth League

In June 1925, Nguyễn Ái Quốc (now operating under the Chinese alias Lý Thụy) opened a school in Guangzhou and began training a group of fifty aspiring activists. The most promising members of this group would later become known as the “Communist Youth group” (Thanh niên cộng sản đoàn). Five members of this hand-picked elite would subsequently go to Moscow to study at the University of the Toilers of the East, later known as the Stalin School.¹⁶

In building the membership and reach of the Revolutionary Youth League (Thanh Niên Cách Mạng Đồng Chí Hội), Nguyễn Ái Quốc deployed the full range of his organizational and pedagogical talents. He taught most of the courses and was practically the sole author of the journal Thanh Niên. He wrote also for other radical publications (Báo Công Nông, Lính Cách mạng, and Vietnam Tiên Phong). He expressed himself with simplicity and clarity – qualities that young people (especially those with little or no formal education) found appealing.

Nguyễn Ái Quốc/Lý Thụy presented his core ideas in a sixty-page booklet entitled The Revolutionary Path (Đướng Cách mệnh). He emphasized Lenin’s basic principle that there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. He also argued that the latter serves no purpose if there is no party to carry it out. He critiqued reformism, anarchism, Gandhism, and the three principles of Sun Yat-sen to point out their limitations. Unexpectedly, he affirmed the importance of Confucius as a source of wisdom and inspiration: “As far as we are concerned, we Annamites, let us perfect ourselves intellectually through the reading of Confucius, and revolutionarily through the works of Lenin.”¹⁷

During his time in Canton, Nguyễn Ái Quốc aimed to educate his readers about concepts such as revolution, the proletariat, workers’ unions, cooperatives, and so on. But his goals went far beyond teaching vocabulary. He was also working to establish a Vietnamese communist movement, if not a party. In addition to building a network of activists and disseminating ideas, he sought to initiate his young compatriots into a political culture that blended East Asian ethics with European ideas about modernity – a process that Huỳnh Kim Khánh called “grafting.” In the late 1920s, amid political turmoil and increased competition among radical groups, Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s work would lead to the emergence of a new communist party.¹⁸

The Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party

In 1927, Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek severed his alliance with Moscow and launched a viscious crackdown on the Chinese Communist Party. Several dozen Thanh Niên members and other Vietnamese who had studied at the Whampoa Academy escaped and joined the communists’ Red Army units at Hailufeng, Baise, and other base areas. Nguyễn Ái Quốc drew several important lessons from the failure of the communists’ united-front strategy and the subsequent struggle of the Chinese communist movement for survival. Chief among these was the idea that the Communist Party must play a hegemonic role in its dealings with allied groups and organizations.

In addition to advocating for an autonomous communist party in Indochina, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was now determined to connect the “national question” to the “social question” in ways that would ease the tension between the movement’s patriotic and communist goals. The communists needed a bow with two strings: “I am committed to making sure that in the future we will make the principles of Lenin and Sun Yatsen the guiding light of the Vietnamese revolution.”¹⁹ Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s experiences in China also convinced him of the paramount importance of mobilizing the peasantry and of its revolutionary potential – especially in countries in which industrial workers remained a tiny minority. On this matter, Nguyễn Ái Quốc agreed with Jacques Doriot, the French communist envoy, whom the Comintern sent to Canton in 1927.²⁰

Although Nguyễn Ái Quốc was circumspect about the ideological disputes that raged within the Bolshevik Party and in the Comintern during these years, it seems likely that he believed that these debates had weakened the Chinese Communist Party. Witnessing the “tragedy of the Chinese Revolution” during the 1920s made him skeptical about the value of theoretical polemics.²¹ His experiences in China thus strengthened his fundamental pragmatism.

In the aftermath of the nationalist crackdown in China, Nguyễn Ái Quốc continued to travel and work for the Comintern. He visited Moscow, Brussels, and Berlin, then returned to the “Nanyang” region (Southeast Asia) with missions to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Laos. The Malayan communist leader Chin Peng remembered Nguyễn Ái Quốc playing a central role in the 1930 founding of the Malayan Communist Party as a Comintern representative.²² Although he faithfully served as a Comintern missionary, he yearned to return home to participate in the revolutionary movement in Indochina.

As Nguyễn Ái Quốc continued his work overseas, the other members of Thanh Niên dispersed, with many of them slipping back into Vietnam. As the workers’ and farmers’ unions attracted new members, some activists wanted to reorganize the league into a formal communist party. In June 1927, Thanh Niên fractured into three groups known respectively as the Indochinese Communist Party, the Indochinese Communist League, and the Communist Party of Annam. All three groups were led mostly by well-to-do men with backgrounds as landlords, rich peasants, colonial functionaries, or merchants. Many had studied at Franco-Annamite schools.

During 1927–9, Tonkin and northern Annam were shaken by waves of strikes and protests by workers and farmers. Many of the ex-Thanh Niên activists advocated for proletarianization (vô sản hóa) of the movement, and for focusing on the world of industrial laborers. In doing do, they were following the political line laid down in 1928 at the Comintern’s 6th Congress, which called for a “class against class” approach. They may also have been compensating for their own social and cultural backgrounds.

In late 1929, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was called to Hong Kong from Thailand to fuse the feuding factions into a single communist party. Citing his status as representative of the Comintern, he executed this mission during the “Unity Conference” held in January and February 1930. Although the new party was christened the Vietnamese Communist Party, its founding program emphasized struggle against feudalism and capitalism as much as national liberation.²³

Although Hồ Chí Minh succeeded in unifying the squabbling factions, his tenure as head of the new party was short-lived. In October 1930, the organization was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and the Comintern assigned Trần Phú (a Thanh Niên recruit who had recently returned from training in Moscow) to write a new political platform that was more in keeping with the Comintern’s current emphasis on class struggle. The Comintern subsequently admitted the ICP as a party separate from the French Communist Party.

Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s influence within the ICP declined sharply after 1930. He complained that his comrades considered him no more than a “mailbox” and they no longer allowed him to participate in party decision-making. He was subsequently scapegoated for the failure of the Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh, a massive uprising in Central Vietnam during 1930–1 that was crushed by French security forces.²⁴

By mid-1931, the wave of revolutionary activism within Indochina had ebbed away, and Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. He would spend the next seven years in the political wilderness. Briefly jailed by British authorities in Hong Kong, Nguyễn Ái Quốc regained his freedom and made his way once again to Moscow. He remained there for four years, during Stalin’s purges. He survived, though how he managed to do so remains unclear.²⁵

Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s fall from grace was confirmed at the ICP’s March 1935 Congress, held in Macau. Hà Huy Tập, the new general secretary, dismissed him as “a petit bourgeois nationalist” and described how the party was eradicating the “remnants” of his misguided ideas. “This pitiless struggle against the old opportunist theories of Nguyễn Ái Quốc and Thanh Niên is indispensable,” Tập wrote. “We propose that comrade Line [Nguyễn Ái Quốc] himself write a brochure to criticize himself and his past failings.”²⁶ That summer, when the Comintern held its 7th International Congress in Moscow, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was not a member of the ICP delegation, serving instead in the minor role of translator for the group.

Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s Political Resurrection

Although 1935 was arguably the nadir of Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s revolutionary career, it also marked a turning point in the history of international communism – one that would eventually pave the way for Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s political comeback. At the 7th Congress, the Comintern abandoned its “class against class” line in favor of seeking a broad united front against fascism. This effectively overturned the policies endorsed by the ICP leadership earlier in the year at Macau. After the French Communist Party dutifully adopted the new Front populaire line, the ICP followed suit, calling for a “Indochinese democratic front” to oppose fascism and Japanese imperial expansion. By 1937, the ICP leadership was specifically warning its members to avoid fomenting class tensions. “It is not yet time to prepare anti-imperialist and agrarian revolution,” the Central Committee admonished its members. “[Instead,] it is time to actualise united popular front to get helpful reforms for all. Hence, we have to tell daily workers to restrain hostility against well-to-do as poor farmers …”²⁷ In another document, the leadership advised its cadres to “skillfully lead” the landlords and rich farmers to participate in anti-tax protests, and to defer any attempts to destroy their social power.²⁸

These policies marked a new willingness on the part of the Comintern to wrestle with the “national question.” Since the early 1930s, communist parties in colonized countries had often been obliged to suppress their nationalist feelings. But Comintern leaders remained aware of the tensions between the national and social questions. Indeed, this was far from the first time such concerns had been raised. As far back as 1930, Trotsky himself had warned his “Indochinese comrades” that rejecting the “national factor” out of hand was likely to backfire.²⁹

In Moscow, Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s escape from Stalinist terror hinged on the protection provided by the leaders of the Comintern Far Eastern branch, who believed he could still be useful to the movement.³⁰ In 1938, he departed Moscow for China, leaving on the same day that Stalin ended the reign of terror of Nikolaï Iegov, the head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodny komissariat vnutrennih del – NKVD). Nguyễn Ái Quốc spent most of the next three years in the recently established Chinese communist base areas in Guanxi, where he absorbed the innovative mass mobilization tactics that Mao Zedong was in the process of devising.³¹ Throughout this time, he continued to follow events in Indochina closely. His fidelity to the Comintern was on display in his denunciations of what he described as the “treason” of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, who had briefly cooperated with ICP members during the popular-front period.³²

Nguyễn Ái Quốc also paid close attention to the changing geostrategic situation in Asia and Europe. In 1937, Imperial Japan launched an all-out invasion of China. Following the fall of France in 1940, Japanese leaders forced the pro-Vichy colonial regime to permit Tokyo’s forces to occupy northern Indochina. By 1941, Japanese troops were using France’s empire as a base and springboard for their planned expansion into the rest of Southeast Asia. Amid the upheaval, Nguyễn Ái Quốc perceived new openings. He summed these up in a poem: “Now France is occupied/ the Japanese pirates just arrived/ Chinese, Americans, Dutch, English arrive together/ War and its troubles are raging everywhere/ This presents a good occasion for us.”³³ Having survived police surveillance, criticism, demotion, detention, and Stalinist terror, Nguyễn Ái Quốc now prepared to return to his native land for the first time in three decades. The pragmatic revolutionary was determined that the emerging opportunities he saw would not be wasted.

Renewing the Drive for Independence

Nguyễn Ái Quốc was still very much acting as an agent of the Comintern when he convened the Eighth Conference of the ICP Central Committee at Pác Bó near the Vietnam–China border in May 1941. The six men present agreed with Nguyễn Ái Quốc that the Indochinese revolution, though a struggle for national liberation, remained an integral part of the worldwide socialist struggle, its fate linked to that of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions. Those present also agreed that, to attain their goals, they needed to throw open their ranks to as many Indochinese as possible. This meant they would have to put their plans for a radical agrarian revolution on hold. The liberation they now envisioned would be achieved via armed struggle led by the ICP and would continue until all the peoples of Indochina (including Cambodians and Lao) were free of the French colonial yoke.

During the conference, Nguyễn Ái Quốc (still not yet known as Hồ Chí Minh) proposed the creation of a united national front called “The League for the Independence of Vietnam,”or Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh hội (soon to be abbreviated as “Việt Minh”). Having learned the lesson of the “Chinese tragedy” of the 1920s, all members of Việt Minh’s general directorate (tổng bộ) were communists. On June 6, Nguyễn Ái Quốc issued an appeal to the people of the nation, announcing that French colonial domination was nearing its end and calling for everyone to unite and bring about the liberation of the country.

With these goals in mind, Nguyễn Ái Quốc published “The Ten Policies of the Việt Minh” that summed up the objectives of the united front. He also wrote a “History of our country” (Lịch sử nước ta) in verse:

Our people must know his own history

To know the glorious story of our ancestors …

That story teaches us that when our nation is united …

Our country is independent and free …

But when it is divided, it is subjugated to foreign conquerors.³⁴

Contrary to what some authors later alleged, these declarations were not heretical by the current standards of the Comintern. Nguyễn Ái Quốc was very much in step with the resolutions of the 7th Congress and the directives issued by its president to the delegates from colonized countries. In 1943, Comintern chief Georgy Dimitrov urged them “to explain to the laboring masses in an historically objective way their nation’s past, to link their current struggles with the traditions of their people.”³⁵

On August 1, 1941, Nguyễn Ái Quốc published the first of 150 issues of a journal he would write and edit almost singlehandedly. Entitled Independent Vietnam (Việt Nam Độc lập), it became a key means for him to popularize his ideas, demands, and advice. Although his aims remained pedagogical, Nguyễn Ái Quốc eschewed theory and dogma, seeking instead to be understood by an illiterate mass.

Over the next four years, Nguyễn Ái Quốc carefully prepared the ICP for the day when he and his comrades could take power. In part, this involved efforts to build rudimentary guerrilla units and bases in the mountains of northern Tonkin. But it also involved diplomatic outreach efforts, the most important of which involved the United States. It was during his clandestine travel to meet with US commanders in southern China that Nguyễn Ái Quốc first adopted the alias Hồ Chí Minh, meaning “Hồ the enlightened” – a moniker that seemed calculated to appeal much more to nationalist unity than to socialist revolution.³⁶

In August 1945, the news of Japan’s surrender prompted Hồ Chí Minh to convene a national conference at Tân Trào, just over 80 miles (130 kilometers) from Hanoi. There, a gathering of ICP members and sympathizers quickly approved the creation of a provisional government, with Hồ Chí Minh at its head. At this critical moment, the ICP’s ability to control events at the local level across Indochina was severely limited. But Hồ Chí Minh still recognized the importance of seizing the opportunity to assert independence. He made his way to Hanoi, where he proclaimed the birth of an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945. In his speech – the most famous and most celebrated he would ever deliver – he made no mention of class struggle or social revolution. Instead, he called on all Vietnamese patriots to come together under the banner of đại đoàn kết (great unity). Not coincidentally, this moment also marked the first emergence of what would eventually become a full-fledged cult of personality around Hồ.

Hồ Chí Minh’s emphasis on national unity led to what would become one of his most controversial decisions: his November 1945 announcement of the dissolution of the ICP. Although the announcement was a ruse – the party merely shifted its operations underground – the move was opposed by some of his comrades. Indeed, in a different time and context, such a step would have led to Hồ Chí Minh’s prompt expulsion from the international communist movement (as experienced by American communist chief Earl Browder following his decision to dissolve the US Communist Party). But in the context of Indochina in 1945, Hồ’s decision made sense. Over the objections of some advisors, he freed the Vietnamese Catholic leader Ngô Đình Diệm from detention; he also sought support from prominent noncommunists such as Bishop Lê Hữu Từ and ex-emperor Bảo Đại. In early 1946, he consented to reserve a total of seventy seats in the new DRVN National Assembly for the nationalist VNQDĐ and Đông Minh Hội parties. He also signed a modus vivendi with French leaders and traveled to the metropole in mid-1946 to take part in negotiations at Fontainebleau, all in the hopes of avoiding war with the colonial state.

Yet these pragmatic – and ultimately unsuccessful – efforts to avoid war did not mean that Hồ Chí Minh had abandoned his Leninist convictions. Even as he preached unity and urged noncommunist groups and leaders to join the DRVN government, he made sure that key posts and ministries remained in the hands of senior Communist Party figures such as Võ Nguyên Giáp. Moreover, his outreach to his nationalist rivals was based on tactical expediency, not on a genuine commitment to inclusion. By late 1946, the ICP had abandoned its short-lived alliance with the nationalist parties and resumed cracking down on those deemed “traitors” to the revolution.

It was not long before Hồ Chí Minh’s bona fides as a genuine communist were reaffirmed. In 1949, two Vietnamese party members – one of whom was the younger brother of Trần Phú, who had replaced Hồ Chí Minh as ICP leader in 1931 – accused Hồ Chí Minh of “betraying” the movement. In their view, the public dissolution of the ICP in 1946 was proof that Hồ Chí Minh had embraced an “opportunist” and “nationalist” position.³⁷ This was substantially the same accusation leveled at Hồ Chí Minh by Hà Huy Tập in 1934. But in 1949, Hồ Chí Minh had the strong backing of the Chinese communists; his standing was affirmed by the endorsement of the French Communist Party (PCF), which sent representatives to meet Hồ Chí Minh at his mountain headquarters.³⁸ As historian Alain Ruscio has suggested, the PCF had become more tolerant of nationalism in Vietnam due to its own participation in the wartime resistance against the German occupation of France.³⁹ Not surprisingly, the accusations against Hồ quickly fizzled out, and the accusers ironically found themselves under suspicion of advocating Trotskyism.

Although Nguyễn Ái Quốc had been sidelined by the Moscow-trained cohort of Vietnamese “Bolsheviks” during the 1930s, a different fate awaited Hồ Chí Minh in the 1940s. As a committed Leninist who had always viewed national liberation as the route to socialist revolution, Hồ Chí Minh was perfectly in tune with the strategies that the Comintern and Moscow adopted in response to the shifting international situation. For Hồ Chí Minh, Leninism remained both “a compass for us Vietnamese revolutionaries and people” and “the radiant sun illuminating our path to final victory, to socialism and communism.”⁴⁰

Beyond National Liberation

By the time of the DRVN’s spectacular battlefield victory at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, Hồ’s position as the public face and irreproachable hero of the Vietnamese Revolution seemed unassailable (Figure 3.1). Moreover, the Communist Party he had founded, now reborn as the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), now wielded unquestioned control over the DRVN state. Nevertheless, Hồ Chí Minh would not be immune from the debates and rifts that would shatter the unity of the international communist bloc during the 1950s and 1960s. He would also subsequently find himself marginalized within his own party, as other Vietnamese communist leaders moved to assert control over DRVN policy and strategy. Thus, even as Hồ Chí Minh’s cult of personality and international stature expanded, his personal power – even the power to shape his own image – went into eclipse.

Figure 3.1 Hồ Chí Minh, the president of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam, in his office at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi (May 27, 1955).

Source: Keystone-France / Contributor / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

The DRVN’s land reform program, carried out in 1953–6 in north-central and northern Vietnam, was a watershed in both the history of Vietnamese communism and in the evolution of Hồ Chí Minh’s public image. Urged on Hồ Chí Minh by Stalin and implemented according to the blueprints devised by Mao, this program aimed to consolidate the Communist Party’s revolutionary authority by destroying the power of landlords and rich peasants in North Vietnamese rural communities. Even those who had loyally supported the revolution on patriotic grounds now faced expropriation, denunciation, imprisonment, or death. Although the power of these landed elites was shattered, many middle and even poor peasants were also targeted. Party leaders eventually acknowledged these “errors” and Hồ Chí Minh issued a public apology.⁴¹

In the wake of these admissions, some party insiders insisted that Hồ Chí Minh had been skeptical of the program from the outset, especially the targeting of patriotic landlords and revolutionary supporters.⁴² But recent research has cast doubt on these claims, suggesting that the program was the logical extension of the Maoist mass mobilization strategies that Hồ knew well and which the Vietnamese communists had begun to implement during the 1940s.⁴³ Hồ Chí Minh’s alleged reservations aside, it is clear that the program damaged his standing and authority within the Communist Party. Although the party continued to burnish his public image, his role was increasingly that of a figurehead. By the early 1960s, party policy and strategy was under the firm control of a new troika of leaders: Lê Duẩn, Lê Đức Thọ, and General Nguyễn Chí Thanh.⁴⁴

Hồ Chí Minh’s damaged standing can be seen in a 1963 internal report by Chinese communist leader Liu Shaoqi, who singled Hồ Chí Minh out for criticism:

Ho Chi Minh has always been a rightist. When we implemented land reform, he resisted. He did not want to become the chairman of the Vietnamese Workers Party and preferred to stay outside the party and become a nonpartisan leader. Later, when the news went to Moscow, Stalin gave him a harsh lecture. It was only then that he decided to implement land reform. After the war with French, he could not decide whether to build a capitalist or a socialist republic. It was we who decided for him.⁴⁵

Liu’s denunciation of Hồ Chí Minh was undoubtedly shaped by the emerging Sino-Soviet split. It also presaged the bitter estrangement between the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties that would emerge after 1968 and eventually culminate in Beijing’s 1979 invasion of northern Vietnam. Still, it is striking how Liu’s critique echoed the accusations leveled against Hồ Chí Minh by Hà Huy Tập in 1935. Hồ Chí Minh had survived the internecine ideological combat that wracked the international communist movement in the twentieth century, but he had not emerged unscathed. Although his status as a symbol of Vietnamese unity had been firmly cemented, he was in some respects more isolated and more remote from the Vietnamese masses that he had long claimed to serve.

Going Down in History

The complex history of Hồ Chí Minh’s relationship with the Vietnamese Communist Party raises broader questions about the connections between individuals and history, as well as between individuals and communities. Hồ Chí Minh’s central importance in modern Vietnamese history is indisputable. Yet his life and career cannot be plausibly separated from the international communist movement that he joined and served for decades, or from the Communist Party that lionized him.

The extent to which Hồ Chí Minh’s fate was bound up with that of the international communist movement is evident in the impact of the Sino-Soviet split on him and on his comrades.⁴⁶ According to the testimony of Hoàng Tùng and other party insiders, Hồ Chí Minh was dismayed not only by the fractures between the DRVN’s two most important allies after 1960, but also by the tensions and divisions that the split produced within the Vietnamese Communist movement.⁴⁷ Hồ Chí Minh himself famously refused to take sides – even going so far as to offer to mediate between Moscow and Beijing – perhaps because he had so many personal ties to colleagues in both countries. Of course, those ties had been forged during his decades of dedicated service as a Comintern agent. As a true believer in Leninism, he had apparently internalized Lenin’s understanding of politics and his notion of democratic centralism as a foundational principle of party governance.

Hồ Chí Minh’s subordination to the communist movement and to the party extended to virtually all aspects of his life. Although the party insists today that Hồ was never married, research has revealed that he wed a Chinese midwife named Tang Tuyết Minh in Canton during the 1920s. Separated from her husband during the 1927 nationalist crackdown, Minh later wrote to him when he was president of Vietnam. But neither Chinese nor Vietnamese authorities had any interest in allowing her to re-establish contact.⁴⁸ During the resistance years, Hồ Chí Minh was romantically linked to a Tày woman named Đỗ Thị Lạc. She hoped to marry him, but the Politburo forbid it, and her premature death gave rise to rumors of murder.⁴⁹

Nor did Hồ Chí Minh’s service to the party end with his death in 1969. In his testament (di chúc), he asked for his body to be cremated and the ashes scattered at the four cardinal points of the country. But even in death, the cult of Hồ Chí Minh’s personality was too valuable to be dismantled. The text of his testament was suppressed and only a truncated version was published. Party leaders then decreed that his body should be embalmed and preserved in a Hanoi mausoleum for viewing by pilgrims and tourists. It remains there to this day.⁵⁰

As much as any other fact about the life and career of Hồ Chí Minh, his postmortem treatment sheds harsh light on the true nature of his role in building and maintaining the power of the party that he founded. One is hard pressed to imagine a more poignant or convincing demonstration of the concept of the “social virtue of a corpse.”⁵¹ The edifice of Hồ Chí Minh’s mythology remains as imposing as ever today, even as the man behind it, like the body under glass at the mausoleum in Hanoi, remains just out of reach.

4 Indochina during World War II

Eric T. Jennings

Introduction

World War II brought about upheavals across the colonial world, overturning imperial loyalties, breaking connections with metropoles, and challenging some of the underpinnings of empire. Each of these transformations can be identified in the Indochinese case. As this chapter will show, maritime ties with France were virtually severed in late 1941. Moreover, a Japanese occupation lasting four years tested French colonial authority. Last but not least, the era profoundly altered local identity politics. Although it is important to avoid teleology, there can be no doubt that the war years in Indochina imprinted both the moments of independence and the revolutions that emerged from them across the Indochinese peninsula.

Watersheds

French authorities in Indochina felt threatened by Japanese advances in China through the 1930s. Indochina’s governor, Georges Catroux, faced a deluge of Japanese threats – including an ultimatum – in 1940, before being dismissed. A decree signed in Bordeaux on June 25 (the very day on which the Armistice sealing France’s defeat to Germany went into effect), and sent to Indochina five days later, named Admiral Jean Decoux the new governor-general of Indochina.¹ A career navy man with extensive prior service in the Pacific, Decoux had been named head of French naval forces in the Far East in 1939. With the blessing of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s new Vichy regime, Decoux signed preliminary agreements with Japan in September 1940 that allowed Japanese troops to enter northern Indochina, paving the way for economic cooperation between Indochina and Japan.

Tokyo alternated using carrots and sticks to gain a foothold in Indochina.² Thus, in September 1940 Japanese forces staged a coup de force against the French garrison at Lạng Sơn, killing some 150 defenders. In July 1941, new agreements were ratified between Tokyo and Vichy allowing Japan to station its troops across Indochina (including the South – prior to then they had only been present in the north), thus enabling Japan to use the colony as a launching pad for their planned operations against British Malaya.

The precarious coexistence that ensued entailed a sort of dual colonialism, French and Japanese. In one sense, it preserved French interests. While the British were removed from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaya, the Dutch from Indonesia, and the Americans from the Philippines, French Indochina remained the last functioning European colony on the continent, to the east of the British Raj. On the other side of the equation, Tokyo saw the utility in keeping this particular colonial structure in place, especially since Vichy was a de facto partner of Nazi Germany, an ally of Tokyo’s.

With France weakened by the 1940 defeat, and unable to send reinforcements to Indochina, Thailand (previously Siam) decided to seize territories in Cambodia and Laos on which it had long made irredentist claims. While Thai troops made headway on the ground, the French navy scored a victory over Thai vessels at Ko Chang on January 17, 1941. However, Japan brokered a peace that proved favorable to Thailand, forcing Decoux to cede to Bangkok some 19,000 square miles (50,000 square kilometers) of western and northern Cambodia as well as smaller strips of Laos.³

The next major political upheavals in Indochina occurred in March 1945. The argument for Japan’s accommodation of Vichy crumbled in 1944–5, after Paris was liberated and Vichy evaporated. The Japanese finally chose to strike on March 9, 1945, and liquidate French rule once and for all. Emperor Bảo Đại became the ephemeral head of state of a new national Vietnamese government, the Empire of Vietnam; Laos and Cambodia claimed their independence. Each nation operated within the orbit of the empire of the rising sun. However, only five months later, Japan was forced to surrender. The ensuing power void rendered the August 1945 Revolution – and the rise of Hồ Chí Minh and his Việt Minh movement – possible. Only the Việt Minh could claim to have battled both colonizers, French and Japanese.

The “Double Yoke” of Oppression

Hồ Chí Minh famously dubbed the uneasy dual control over Indochina by Vichy French and Japanese from July 1940 to March 1945 a “double yoke” of oppression.⁴ Although the expression certainly makes clear that Indochina was abruptly dominated by two occupiers, rather than one, it nevertheless poses several problems. In particular, the phrase tends to flatten the extraordinarily complex relations between Japanese, French, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

A series of agreements signed between Tokyo and Vichy in 1941 provided Japan with the use of bases in Indochina, as well as linking the two parties economically. Indeed, with trading relations between Indochina and France virtually severed after Pearl Harbor (December 1941), it is no exaggeration to suggest that Indochina jumped from one orbit to another, entering the gravitational pull of the so-called Japanese co-prosperity sphere. As early as 1942, Japan received a staggering 94.6% of all Indochinese exports, and provided 77.7% of Indochinese imports. That same year, French Indochina accounted for 12.8% of all of Japan’s total imports.⁵

A glimpse at the goods slated to be imported into Indochina in 1943 and 1944 reveals a relationship of utter dependency. Medications, canned sardines, cement, pens and pencils, and bicycle parts were all now purchased by Hanoi from Japan. In the opposite direction, in 1943–4, Vichy’s governor, Jean Decoux, agreed to provide at least 900,000 tons of Indochinese rice to Japan before the end of December 1944, as well as “any surplus.” This decision constituted one of the contributing factors to the devastating famine that ravaged Tonkin in 1945. Indeed, as officer and teacher René Charbonneau observed in 1944, Indochina’s rice production had been robust until 1943, but collapsed thereafter, in part because of transportation challenges (US bombings of rail lines and Japanese ship seizures).⁶ In other words, the commitment of 900,000 tons coincided with a mounting crisis.

In addition to rice, Vichy’s governor agreed to deliver to Japan 50,000 metric tons of bauxite, 2,800 tons of zinc, 2,400 metric tons of mangrove bark, and all of the iron ore and manganese that Japan desired.⁷ Vichy was not merely in a position of dependency; it was in one of near servility. French officials had but one market to which to export. Hanoi was well aware of Japanese diplomat Seiki Yano’s March 1942 declaration that Indochina should no longer expect to sell its rice at prewar prices, when Japan now had so many other rice-producing lands under its control.⁸ He might have added that Indochina had no other outlet left. He could also have noted that Indochina was contributing to Japan’s war effort already, not merely with natural resources, but also with technical services (Vichy dispatched engineers to help the Japanese repair oil wells destroyed by the Dutch in Borneo).⁹ A former colonial official has convincingly argued that anti-Decoux dissident Pierre Boulle’s Bridge over the River Kwai was an allegory for Decoux’s intense collaboration with Japan.¹⁰

In theory, the 1941 agreements were meant to govern nearly all aspects of Franco-Japanese relations in wartime Indochina. In reality, however, the era was marked by constant jockeying and tensions between the two occupiers.¹¹ Incidents between French and Japanese were legion. Many of them centered on Japanese support for the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious movements in Cochinchina. In point of fact, tensions simmered and occasionally flared through the duration of the war, from the initial Japanese testing of Indochina’s borders in 1940, to the March 9, 1945, coup. Consider the 1942 case of a Japanese consul berating the French administration for harassing Vietnamese people who were either working directly for the Japanese or doing business with them.¹²

More ominous still for the French grip on power were the events that unfolded on remote Phú Quốc island in 1941. In October of that year, a Japanese force some 150 men strong landed on the island, “occupying it” to use the phrase of a French report. Their goal was to build a new airfield that could accommodate long-range bombers. In order to do so, they brought to the island some 1,700 mostly Chinese “coolies.” Only a few days after their October 14, 1941, landing, they also attempted to recruit Vietnamese laborers. The French authorities immediately complained of vexations and provocations. Government buildings were commandeered. Japanese troops allegedly threw patients out of the local clinic, and did much the same with the children of a local school. They relentlessly beat and mistreated Chinese laborers before the eyes of shocked Vietnamese and French. Japanese forces broke into the island’s radio transmission post, bound and gagged its operator, destroyed the radio material, then proceeded to rifle through the local archives. They struck the local accountant and jabbed his calves with bayonets. Vietnamese were also mistreated, many of them accused of espionage and interrogated for hours under the burning sun. In Hanoi, Vichy officials raised the matter repeatedly with Japanese representatives, and temporarily regained the upper hand. By the end of March 1942, the Japanese withdrew their forces from Phú Quốc. However, they would subsequently utilize Phú Quốc’s airfield to provide air cover for their expansion into Malaya and Burma.¹³

Another case of Vichy-Japanese tensions merits attention. In June 1943, a Japanese captain approached the French authorities in Nha Trang, requesting the permission to show a Japanese military recruitment film. The request was denied. And yet a pattern was emerging. That same month, Vichy’s secret services in Indochina became aware of a new Vietnamese-language recruitment poster for the Japanese imperial army (Figure 4.1). The poster showed three different Vietnamese men entering a Japanese military gatehouse: one outfitted in a conical hat, one dressed in European garb, and a third wearing the Vietnamese police helmet. They emerged from the other side dressed in Japanese uniforms. The text read “Enlist in the Japanese army!” The artist who drew the images was Munestugu Satomi, who had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts. That irony was not lost on the French police.¹⁴

Figure 4.1 A recruitment poster calling on Vietnamese to join the Japanese army.

Source: Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Gouverneur général de l’Indochine, CM 249.

Over the course of the next three months, Vichy’s officials became aware of Japanese schemes in Tonkin to recruit 4,000 Vietnamese mechanics to serve in the Japanese military. Some 250 northern Vietnamese had already registered, signing three-year contracts. Meanwhile, in Saigon, new Indochinese military recruits paraded in the streets wearing the uniform of the Japanese navy and infantry, eliciting “the curiosity of their compatriots.”¹⁵ Ultimately, Vichy succeeded in having the poster removed. However, the limited recruitment of Vietnamese auxiliaries in the Japanese army and navy proceeded. Thus, while Vichy prevailed in the poster flap, it lost the broader recruitment war (even though relatively few Vietnamese ultimately enlisted). Such compromises and tensions were commonplace in this period.

Japanese authorities sought above all a peaceful, well-managed Indochina (the so-called maintenance of tranquility) from which to extract raw materials and launch their operations. “Collaboration” with Vichy was a logical extension of these two imperatives. Thus, in December 1943, the Japanese consul, Watanabe, proposed to Vichy censors the circulation of the poster featured in Figure 4.2. Typical of Japanese imperial visuals in this era, it shows female allegories of Annam, Japan, and France dancing in front of their respective national flags. Governor Decoux’s officials accepted the gist of the gesture, but still rejected the visual because they wished to see the French flag, and the French girl, centrally positioned. Here was another sign of what Chizuru Namba has termed the “latent instability” behind Vichy-Japanese coexistence in Indochina.¹⁶

Figure 4.2 A Japanese propaganda poster from Japanese-Vichy Indochina. It reads: “The Result of Japanese-French-Indochinese Collaboration” (c. 1942).

Source: Pictures From History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

Examples of this dynamic abound. In June 1944, a Japanese propaganda film was shown at the Olympia cinema in Hanoi. It depicted “children of greater Asia delivered from Anglo-American domination.” It trumpeted the right of Asian people to determine their own future. Little imagination was required to project these themes onto Indochina, as French censors were painfully aware. And yet the film was screened, part of a delicate balancing act with profound consequences on local nationalism.¹⁷

Arguably the greatest test of Japanese–French relations in wartime Indochina involved the prisoner-of-war camp established by the Japanese at Xóm Chiếu, in the outskirts of Saigon. The facility held 1,800 prisoners, including Australians, British, Indians, Malaysians, and Burmese. They had been captured after the fall of Singapore, and then transferred to Indochina aboard the Japanese ship Nishin Maru in April 1942. In this matter, Vichy seems to have been especially appalled by the Japanese violation of colonial codes of racial privilege. Several documents emanating from French sources in Hanoi insisted on the fact that the Japanese were using Anglo-Australian “white troops” as “coolies.” Onlookers, colonizer and colonized alike, played a key role in this story. Even as the Commonwealth troops were being transferred into the Saigon prison camp, many Vietnamese people came to offer them biscuits and cigarettes. Several of these well-wishers were then arrested by the Japanese. Indeed, in those first days, seven Indochinese were arrested on such grounds, including an elderly man and a woman. That same month, three of them were tied to a post for an entire day in broad Saigon daylight, by way of reprisal. When local children were caught throwing cigarettes to the inmates, Japanese police traced the provider, a street cook, and proceeded to shave his head and beat him with a heated metal bar. And yet, well-wishers could not be deterred. French nationals and Chinese inhabitants of the Saigon area soon followed suit, flinging money and food over the camp walls, only to be arrested in turn.¹⁸

Vichy duly protested the internment of prisoners on Indochinese soil, invoking both its putative neutrality and “moral” objections. Based on the context of the archival file, the latter likely involved the loss of white prestige implicit in the internment of British troops by the Japanese in an Asian colonial setting. Needless to say, both arguments fell on deaf ears. Stonewalled, Vichy officials sought to dig deeper, wondering why the prisoners could not have been posted in any other territory under Japanese control. After diplomatic channels in Tokyo yielded the implausible response that Japan had found no other place to hold the prisoners, intelligence in Saigon provided the most likely explanation. At the end of April 1942, a Japanese lieutenant at the camp revealed to a Vietnamese interlocutor: “We did not bring prisoners to Indochina merely to make them work, but rather to understand the true reactions of the French and the Vietnamese towards the British.”¹⁹ Tokyo wished to get to the bottom of the question of whether or not Vichy was playing a double game in Asia. However, if this were the goal, then Tokyo missed the mark. If Decoux was engaging in a double game, it was a colonial one. Even a quick perusal of Indochina’s tightly controlled press reveals that Admiral Decoux’s coterie loathed the British.²⁰ Where the Xóm Chiếu camp proved to be a real test was in the realm of colonial race relations: French officials in Hanoi cringed at seeing whites, even British or Australian ones, dragging logs under the burning sun, under the watchful gaze of Japanese taskmasters.

Japanese–French coexistence in Indochina was thus marked by brinksmanship and tensions of all sorts. On the French side, keeping up appearances was paramount: in August 1944, Decoux issued a circular enjoining his officials to show “no weakness or sign of division” at a time when so many “foreigners” were observing Indochina.²¹ However, as Chizuru Namba has noted, until March 1945, Japan served its own interests by maintaining a measure of calm in Indochina. This was especially true early on, when the area was used as a staging ground for the conquest of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and when it provided valuable raw materials at little cost. Both sides had a vested interest in not letting conflicts escalate.²² All of this would change after the Vichy regime was toppled in metropolitan France during the summer of 1944. Thereafter, the logic that had governed Franco-Japanese coexistence in Indochina became a charade: France was no longer the satellite of Berlin, so depicting French Indochina as an “ally” of Tokyo was increasingly impossible.

Channeling and Championing Nationalism

From his grotto at Pác Bó in 1941, Hồ Chí Minh reoriented his struggle, recasting it in the lineage of Vietnamese heroes of the past. He thereby widened his coalition, bringing noncommunist nationalists into a Việt Minh front far broader than the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).²³ But Hồ Chí Minh was far from the only actor in Indochina who was experimenting with new nationalist configurations during the war years. Both Vichy French and Japanese leaders also stoked the embers of nationalism in Indochina.

Japan wasted little time in pointing pan-Asian-themed weapons at French rule. However, Tokyo’s ideological arsenal featured other arrows as well. On April 23, 1941, the Japan Times ran an article, castigating French rule in Indochina for having “deprived the Annamese of their language, their history, and their traditions.”²⁴ This was precisely the cultural project that Imperial Japan promised to undo, by offering an alternate noncolonial path to modernity.

However, many a Vietnamese nationalist who had drawn hope from the arrival of Japanese troops grew disillusioned. Consider the correspondence reaching the Japanese consul in Saigon. One letter from April 1943 pulled no punches: “If the Japanese wish to protect the Annamese, they must do so openly and topple the French, who although defeated still continue to exploit the natives in a thousand different ways, intern Indochinese who wish to join the Japanese army, and prevent coolies from studying in Japanese schools.”²⁵ As a Japanese official observed in August 1943, Vietnamese people watched on enviously as Japan granted independence or autonomy to the Philippines, Burma, and other former colonies.²⁶ And yet to further their military objectives, the Japanese were content to utilize existing European governance and mechanisms in Indochina. One example of this can be found in their refusal to advance the cause of their long-time ally Prince Cường Để.²⁷ Nevertheless, Japanese officials tried to play several cards, however limited their success. These included Asian brotherhood (expressed in hazy notions of a greater Asian co-prosperity sphere), anticolonialism, and professions of respect for Vietnamese traditions and culture.

To say that Vichy merely fought back would be a simplification. In fact, the “arch-Pétainist” Jean Decoux and his henchmen believed in a renaissance of their own, that of a France transformed by its defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany in June 1940.²⁸ Their formula for a phoenix-like rebirth was built on large doses of essentialism, and a return to a distant past of rigid hierarchies. It also involved the persecution of the same scapegoats targeted in France, especially Jews and Freemasons (both groups were dismissed from their posts in Indochina under Decoux).²⁹ In the cultural realm, as well, Vichy dispatched the same directives to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam as it did to the Pyrenees and Provence. If these reductionist guidelines could serve as firewalls to Japanese schemes, all the better. As a consequence, a deluge of rediscovery rained down on wartime Indochina. Some publications vaunted national flags and national anthems. Others drew parallels between the wisdom of Confucius and that of Philippe Pétain. Not surprisingly, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian nationalists wasted little time co-opting and redirecting this newly permissive discourse.

As a result, wartime nationalist politics in Indochina were anything but monolithic. At times, they seemed outright chaotic. For instance, in November 1942, Vichy’s military cabinet in Indochina put the final touches on a new manual to be distributed to Cambodian troops. Within military headquarters, officers debated various nationally charged symbols to be included in the instruction booklet. Including a Garuda bird would constitute a grave mistake, argued one voice, as it had been adopted by Siam as a national symbol. Why not show the Angkor-era Hanuman monkey instead? Another suggested that too great a symbolic emphasis was being placed on Franco-Cambodian entente, when Indochinese federalism also needed to be celebrated. Finally, although local particularism needed to be emphasized, were the booklet’s authors not going too far in their heavy use of the phrase “Cambodian race?”³⁰ In short, Vichy’s ideologues and commanders were hotly debating precisely how to manipulate, recast, and redirect identities which they considered local, but could easily be read as “national.”

One of the most astonishing attempts to channel Indochinese nationalisms can be found in the 1941 publication Hymnes et pavillons d’Indochine (Hymns and flags of Indochina). Published by the colonial authorities in Hanoi, it featured the standards, heraldry, and national anthems of France, Annam, Laos, and Cambodia. The Vietnamese anthem included the verse: “Our race has contributed to consolidate our heritage for three thousand years, from the South to the North we are all alike, we are all sons of the Hong and descendants of the Lac.” Meanwhile, the freshly invented Lao anthem featured the words: “Our race once enjoyed a great reputation in Asia, back when the Lao were united and loved one another. Today once again, the Lao have learned to love their race once more and are lining up behind their leaders.” While the French objective involved steering Lao away from the siren calls of Thailand, the nationalist message could not have been more obvious.³¹

Nationalist “reawakening” took many forms. In Laos in May 1941, a committee for music was established to rekindle ancient songs. While there was mention of modernizing them, the main thrust remained preservationist. Considerable emphasis was placed on the “heritage that has been passed on to us from the time when the Lao race/nation was born.” Poetry and literature both experienced similarly channeled and carefully choreographed “revivals.” Emphasis was placed on retrieving original classics tainted by centuries of misinterpretations. In short, Vichy was fostering a return to an idealized precolonial past, while admitting the failings of French colonialism prior to 1940.³² More than this, however, French officials were now deliberately fostering and channeling Laotian nationalism. Take a September 1942 circular drafted in Hanoi: “We must first and foremost guide Laotian patriotism … show that a nation is constituted not by tribes or villages … Rather a nation … is above all a soil fertilized by the common, unified efforts of the men who live on it.”³³

Colonial-era archives from 1943 reveal telling signs that French officials came to understand that their policies had backfired. The cultural control fires they thought they were lighting had actually contributed to fanning a nationalist blaze. Thus, in summer 1943, a Vietnamese informant told the Saigon police that “some songs such as Tran Bach Dang and Trung Tac, widely sung by youth organizations, with the blessing of the authorities, have awakened patriotic sentiment among the masses; it is natural that the Annamese be moved by them and they get goose bumps from these songs lionizing the heroes in their past.”³⁴

In addition to rekindling a distant past, Vichy officials in Hanoi sought to regiment and shake up Indochinese youth whom French stereotypes had long held to be “indolent.” New stadiums sprang up throughout Indochina, much ink was spilled on which sports Indochinese “races” could thrive at, and a Tour d’Indochine bicycle race was launched, reminiscent of the Tour de France. Maurice Ducoroy, whom Decoux charged with the youth and sports portfolio, made his goals clear: “progressively rendering more virile peoples long considered soft and weak.” Given that he perceived mandarins as the softest of the soft, he considered one of his crowning achievements to be an athletic competition he organized for mandarins from across Indochina in Phnom Penh in January 1945.³⁵ Nor, evidently, were youth the only group targeted by this athletic campaign. By 1943, most Indochinese civil servants had formed sporting associations, supported by the colonial government in Hanoi.³⁶

Of course, manipulation of identities and proto-fascist regimentation by Japan and France could only go so far. Profound transformations were at work within Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian societies during the war. For instance, as François Guillemot has shown, a potent fundamentalist nationalist strain ran through Vietnam’s right-wing nationalist currents.³⁷ The war years marked both an opportunity and a setback for these phalanxes that looked to Berlin for inspiration. On the one hand, the Đại Việt movement, which best embodied this strain, was swiftly dropped by Japan, and left at the mercy of Vichy reprisals as early as 1941. On the other hand, the Đại Việt members who managed to avoid this crackdown then took advantage of Vichy’s emphasis on youth sporting movements and cultural renaissance to spread their message in broad daylight.³⁸

However, the main thrust of the Vietnamese nationalist resurgence was not as extreme as these splinter parts of Đại Việt. What is more, this mainstream nationalist renaissance benefited from the newly permissive atmosphere fostered by Vichy’s promotion of authenticity. Decoux became the first French governor-general to use the term “Vietnam.” With Vichy’s censors now allowing the use of the word, the Vietnamese popular press needed no invitation to charge the breach. Thus, Trí Tân (New Knowledge), a mainstream periodical to which many intellectuals contributed,³⁹ ran a June 3, 1941, article enjoining Vietnamese people to cease referring to themselves as Annamese. In so doing, it invoked the greatness of the Vietnamese past, citing Emperor Gia Long’s exploits.⁴⁰ The very next issue castigated past renderings of Vietnamese history for having been tainted by Chinese inflections, and Western readings. It urged Vietnamese intellectuals to uncover the Vietnamese past, to reevaluate it, to visit historical sites, and to conduct oral histories with seniors.⁴¹ The July 18, 1941, issue included an article tellingly entitled “One Needs to Know the History of One’s Country.” It derided the fact that many Vietnamese people were better versed in French history than in that of their own land. It further celebrated the “love of one’s country and national spirit.”⁴² Clearly, the local past was fast becoming an instrument with which to shape a national future.

Material Change and Upheaval

Because the Indochinese economy switched trading partners completely over the course of 1941, and because of the damage wrought by Allied bombings, living conditions declined in World War II Indochina. Inflation and the colony’s payments to Japan for the billeting of troops compounded matters. The shift from a “free Yen” to the “special Yen” imposed by the Japanese in 1942 also contributed to this downward spiral. As a result, the cost of living for an Indochinese worker grew nearly sixfold between 1940 and 1944.⁴³ In their private letters, Indochinese correspondents complained about how expensive everything had become.⁴⁴

Japan could not furnish Indochina with all of the finished goods it required, and after 1941 autarky spurred new forms of local production. Indeed, in 1942 Vichy officials in Hanoi tried to negotiate not just the price of the rice they were exporting to Japan, but also the quantities of finished goods they were receiving; talks proved arduous.⁴⁵ However, quotas were seldom actually met, and Indochina endured shortages in many areas.⁴⁶ As a result, textiles were increasingly produced in Indochina itself, rather than being imported. Because of shortages of cement, ersatz materials were used at construction sites in Hanoi.⁴⁷ Fish and peanut substitutes were found for fuel.⁴⁸ And yet, despite this accrued local production and resourcefulness, all of the other factors just examined – disrupted avenues of communications, lack of trading partners, etc. – meant that the Indochinese economy stood on the brink of collapse by 1944.⁴⁹

The Case of the Indochinese Residing in France

The Indochinese population in France in 1940 included many soldiers and workers brought there to wage economic and military warfare. After France fell to Germany in June 1940, the fate of these mostly Vietnamese subjects became a source of acrimony. At Paris’s Lycée Henri IV, teacher Jean Guéhenno observed in passing the number of young Vietnamese people he saw signing up in German ranks.⁵⁰ No doubt they seized the opportunity of France’s defeat. But was this merely a matter of making a friend out of an enemy’s enemy? A few weeks after the Allied landings in Normandy, General de Gaulle’s Free French issued a report on Indochinese workers who had been recruited by the Germans to build fortifications as part of Operation Todt. The document mentioned that some fifty Vietnamese were training to join the Wehmarcht. Another source evoked a German office near the Eiffel Tower, devoted to recruiting both soldiers and workers.⁵¹

In intellectual milieus as well, fascism held a certain appeal. Charles Keith has traced the contorted political itinerary of men like Đỗ Đức Hồ, who emerged as passionately anticommunist. Đỗ Đức Hồ wished to graft the canonical right-wing nationalism of Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras onto Vietnam. He soon became enamored of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and with the notion of an independent Vietnam allied to Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. He even asked the Japanese to send him back to Indochina, which they refused to do, granting only his request to found an institution in France devoted to pan-Asian “friendship.”⁵² In this respect, his choices may have been inspired by, or at least bear some parallels with, Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, who allied himself with Japan and Germany and raised an army for his cause.

Of course, the vast majority of Indochinese subjects in France did not take this route. Lê Hữu Tho’s memoirs recount his wartime years as part of the Main d’oeuvre indigène (MOI), a government labor agency. He explains that some 20,000 Vietnamese were working as part of this organization in mainland France in June 1940, but that roughly 4,000 of them were sent back to Indochina in the early days of the Vichy regime, leaving around 15,000 MOI Indochinese workers in France for the duration of the war. Many initially toiled in munitions factories, before France’s defeat in June 1940; thereafter they were redirected to farm, road, mechanical, or forest work. Pierre Daum estimates that 95% of these workers had been enlisted in Indochina “against their will.” In French factories, and in fields, Vietnamese laborers worked for a fraction of the pay earned by their French colleagues. Furthermore, many Vietnamese forged friendships and struck up romances with local French women, which unnerved colonial officials, because they challenged colonial hierarchies. Experiences in this community varied widely. David Smith has found that 7% of the Vietnamese population in France in World War II were at some point arrested by Vichy, mostly for stealing food. Additionally, some were outsourced to the Germans for construction projects. Others, like Lê Hữu Thọ, were arrested by the Germans.⁵³

The March 9, 1945, Coup

In Indochina, everything changed on March 9, 1945, when a surprise Japanese coup toppled French rule. One French account explains: “The facts are brutal: in a few hours, over the course of a few days, the French army was completely eliminated, massacred, taken prisoner, or driven out of Indochina.”⁵⁴ Although a handful of French nationals were retained in technical posts, the vast majority were interned.

In 1948, looking back on the troubled year 1945, Dr. Marcel-Louis Terrisse, the long-time director of indigenous health (AMI) in Annam, recalled the unique features of “concentration life” in Hue. Although he was never personally threatened, he had endured internment first by the Japanese, then by the Chinese, and finally by the Việt Minh.⁵⁵ He claimed that his Vietnamese patients never altered their attitude toward him, but even he recognized the palpable shift in power relations. Those who until recently had been carried around in rickshaws were now lumped together in prison camps and specially marked quarters.⁵⁶

The March 9, 1945, Japanese coup de main occurred nearly a year after Vichy ceased existing in the metropole. This has led some to wonder why Japan waited as long as it did. No doubt Imperial Japan was already obtaining what it wanted from Vichy cooperation at limited cost. But then why the change of heart in March? American air attacks in January 1945 had reinforced Japanese suspicion that the United States might be planning landings in Indochina. Conspiracy theories abound around March 9, 1945. A French novelist-cum-historian has suggested that word got out in the mainland French press before it even happened, thereby implying collusion.⁵⁷

In any event, on location the surprise was total. Many French nationals were left stranded in a movie theater in downtown Hanoi watching another colonial parable, Tarzan, as the coup unfolded.⁵⁸ None saw it coming. Georges Jacquinot offers an interesting example. His personal papers show that he spent the war years relatively comfortably: his Hanoi Cercle Sportif (athletic club) membership was issued in July 1942. The file also includes an intriguing conversion table designed for the French to read the insignia, ranks, and uniforms of the Japanese army. Finally, it contains the programs of Japanese plays performed at Hanoi’s municipal theater in November 1940. All of this suggests that Hanoi’s colonial society had lived in a bubble and had established cordial relations with the Japanese. The bubble burst on March 9 as Jacquinot rose from the dinner table to the sound of gunfire. He tried to reach the citadel, where resistance was being organized. As he caught his breath in front of the Splendide Hotel, a detachment of Japanese troops arrived and secured the quarters, driving Jacquinot indoors.⁵⁹ Shortly thereafter, Japanese forces entered the hotel and arrested all Europeans, seizing their arms. French colonialism had crumbled in a matter of hours.

Over the coming months, in Saigon, Vietnamese lawyers opted to work in Vietnamese, rather than French. Throughout Vietnam, French place-names were replaced by Vietnamese ones. The names of Vietnamese military heroes of the past replaced Garnier, Ferry, and Joffre streets. In Huế, authorities under the leadership of Emperor Bảo Đại tried to wrestle the everyday management of Vietnam from the Japanese. In the press, colonialism was decried, and the future hotly debated. On the initiative of Tokyo, a new school for bureaucrats was founded in Hanoi.⁶⁰

Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh, King Norodom Sihanouk (handpicked by Decoux in 1941) declared Cambodia’s independence on March 13. The country was henceforth called Kampuchea. The Buddhist lunar calendar was reimplemented, at the expense of its Western counterpart. All accords guaranteeing French tutelage were now null and void. Cambodia would operate within the framework of the Japanese co-prosperity sphere.⁶¹

In Laos, the king of Luang Prabang declared independence on April 8, 1945. He called Japan a “trusted ally” and vowed to operate within the co-prosperity sphere. In August, after Japan’s surrender, the king would warn liberated French people in Laos that the clock could not be turned back: the war might be over, but Laos’s April 1945 independence was not negotiable.⁶²

The Hours of Independence

One of the particularities of the Indochinese context has to do with the double proclamations of independence that took place in March, then in August 1945. The first followed the abrupt overturning of French rule by the Japanese on March 9, the second the surrender of Japan after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The period from March to August 1945 was one of rapid change. Bảo Đại declared Annam and Tonkin to be independent. In April, he formed a new Vietnamese government led by Trần Trọng Kim. His ministers were, according to Vũ Ngự Chiêu, “a team of modern professionals” comprised of lawyers, teachers, and doctors, many of whom had been tempted early on by collaboration with Japan. They swiftly undertook meaningful reforms. Vietnamese replaced French in the administration and in the classroom. Public assemblies, including protests, that had long been curtailed under French rule, were now permitted. Although later dismissed by the Vietnamese communists and French alike – the latter spoke of a “gouvernement de fait” – the short-lived Trần Trọng Kim era was undoubtedly significant. It cemented Vietnamese national unity, both constitutionally and territorially, and saw a re-energizing of youth movements and of the political scene more generally. However, in the end, the challenges it faced proved overwhelming. For instance, in July 1944, Vũ Ngọc Anh, Kim’s minister of health, was killed during an Allied air raid. Mostly, Trần Trọng Kim’s government was tributary to Japan’s military presence. Public opinion also connected it to the disintegration of Vietnam’s economy. Despite many attempts to create relief organizations, the terrible famine in the North exacted a dreadful toll.⁶³

When Japan surrendered unconditionally in August 1945, the opportune moment presented itself to the Việt Minh. We should, however, be careful when framing this takeover historically. Christopher Goscha reminds us that there was nothing foreordained about the outcome of the August 1945 revolution: after all, at the time the Communist Party only counted some 5,000 members, some half of them incarcerated.⁶⁴ The seismic shifts brought about by World War II certainly had multiple consequences, but they hardly propelled Hồ Chí Minh to power, deus ex machina. The ICP’s uprisings in Cochinchina had been roundly crushed by Vichy’s police and military in 1940, with executions of participants in these rebellions continuing through 1941. In the South, especially, the ICP had been outright “decapitated.” Given that the Việt Minh was staging war against both Vichy and Japan, few signs seemed to presage its seizure of power in August 1945.⁶⁵ Indeed, in August 1945, some at the heart of the organization still fretted that the Việt Minh had not learned the errors of 1940 – which is to say that they should avoid rash action when presented with a power vacuum.⁶⁶ Orders issued by the ICP reveal a measure of confusion and hesitation as well, at a time, moreover, when Hồ Chí Minh himself was recovering from a serious illness. Improvisation proved key in August 1945. A frontal attack on Japanese forces was only narrowly avoided, and a way of seizing power without confronting the Japanese was ultimately devised.⁶⁷ The August 1945 Revolution flowered from a cracking Japanese foundation, but its ultimate outcome had more to do with contingency and the discredit suddenly heaped on those perceived to have collaborated with Japan.

In Cambodia, meanwhile, independence was celebrated for the second time in under a year. An August 1945 report held in the Cambodian national archives – still drafted in French – recounted the “grandiose” celebrations that took place in Kompong-Chnang on August 26, 1945. Thousands of Cambodians, as well as Vietnamese and Chinese “delegations,” were said to have participated in the event. Two young men holding the Cambodian national flag led a procession roughly half a mile (1 kilometer) long. A large banner read “Long live independent Kampuchea!” A row of national guards blared their horns. Yuvan youth groups, established under Vichy rule, paraded. A public official delivered a speech built on three pillars: Kampuchea’s independence, the role of the monarchy, and Buddhism.⁶⁸

The Future of Indochina

In 1941, as he sailed from Indochina to the United States en route to joining General de Gaulle’s ranks, Hanoi teacher Pierre Laurin mused over the future of the colony he had just left. He articulated his thoughts around three main points. First, the language of liberation, democracy, and justice deployed by the anti-Axis forces spelled the inevitable advent of decolonization, he opined. Second, Indochinese nationalism had matured, around intellectuals he himself had trained, into a multidirectional and potent force. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. This new generation of nationalists, whom some called communists (Laurin refused to), many of whom he had personally taught at the Lycée Albert Sarraut, rejected the mandarin system that the French had not only left in place but actually bolstered. Third, the Vietnamese could not be held in check much longer. They faced a glass ceiling in Indochina’s various bureaucracies; a mere trip to Siam or the Philippines could open their eyes to high-ranking Asians in position of power. Japan’s emancipatory discourse achieved much the same effect. In short, Laurin predicted, Vietnamese independence would happen one way or another: either with France’s approval or against it. Perhaps French Indochina’s federalism could be morphed into a US-inspired structure, in which France might retain a role, he wondered?⁶⁹

Such notions of maintaining France’s relevance in Southeast Asia would prove enduring. By 1946, in France, colonial reformers (many of them, like Henri Laurentie, having occupied important positions in the colonial administration of de Gaulle’s Free French, Vichy’s imperial rival) were beginning to chart new paths in which empire would make way for a “union” and colonies would eventually be replaced by “associated states.” In Indochina, they revived earlier schemes for a vast federation; to some these plans were earnest, to others they mostly involved ways of countering Việt Minh influence.⁷⁰ However, fundamentally, even these more enlightened officials failed to recognize the fact that, across Indochina, such attempts at reform were backward-looking, insofar as independence had already been declared – twice – in 1945.

Conclusion

We have seen that straight lines cannot be drawn even in the immediate buildup to the August 1945 revolution. This said, the war years clearly acted as a catalyst. For instance, there can be no doubt that the Japanese and Vichy – as well as the competition between them – fostered (sometimes unwittingly) a fertile terrain for nationalists and revolutionaries. Japanese and Vichy policies, combined with Allied bombings, also conspired to create the conditions for famine. The March 1945 coup started a chain of events that brought about not one but multiple declarations of independence, what some might call an acceleration of history. The ramifications of the war years would also bear fruit later on, some of it bitter. King Sihanouk of Cambodia, who would traverse the twentieth century, was a Decoux pick. More ominously, several historians have suggested that some remnants of Vichy’s essentialist ethos, especially its quest to “return to the soil,” would continue to shape that nation, including its murderous leader Pol Pot, long afterward.⁷¹ In Vietnam, some Vichy-era nationalist formulae would resurface, albeit in transposed form, during the long years of division and war between North and South Vietnam. Just as the Vichy period lurked for a long while, sometimes unacknowledged, in the collective memory of metropolitan France, so, too, would the wartime era shape the post–1945 politics of all the countries of Indochina.

5 The August Revolution of 1945

Stein Tønnesson

The wars for Vietnam in 1946–75 came out of a revolution. That revolution took place in August 1945, after months of dramatic social, political, and military change. The previous January, Japan had decided to launch a coup against the French colonial regime. Until then the French governor-general in Hanoi, who served under Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government, had been allowed by Japan to keep governing French Indochina on the condition that Japan could station troops there. Since 1940, French and Japanese forces lived side by side in the French colony. In communist propaganda, people were said to suffer under a “double yoke.” To prevent the French colonial army from assisting an anticipated Allied landing, Japan launched its coup on March 9, 1945. The French were quickly defeated and lost all control of their colony. If Japan had not taken this action, the August Revolution would not have occurred in August – or, if it had, it would have been quelled in blood.

Once Japan had launched its coup, it arranged for the French puppet emperor, Bảo Đại, to declare an independent Vietnam. He appointed the widely respected scholar Trần Trọng Kim to form a government. Its greatest achievement was to obtain Japan’s permission to unify Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin, which the French had given separate status, into one Vietnamese state, governed from the imperial capital, Huế. Japan controlled the government at the highest levels, but at this late stage of the Pacific War, it did not have the capacity to replace the French colonial administration. The result was a local power vacuum. Traditional mandarins and organized groups with a variety of ideological or religious convictions seized upon this chance to compete for power. Some acquired weapons in the hope of being able to prevent a French return when Allied forces arrived to fight Japan. Notably, the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) prepared itself for launching a general insurrection in conjunction with the expected arrival of Allied forces, be they British, Chinese, or American.

Japan’s surrender on August 15 caught everyone by surprise. Yet it sparked a widespread revolt. On August 19, young activists seized power in Hanoi, the Indochinese capital (Figure 5.1). Subsequently, similar popular takeovers took place in all three parts of Vietnam – but not in Cambodia or Laos. The local insurrections varied in form, but they did not meet armed resistance. Local activists held demonstrations in the streets in order to probe the intentions of the Japanese Army and local representatives of Bảo Đại’s government. When there was no resistance, the activists seized power, and set up people’s committees. In several places, the activists also used the occasion to settle old scores and kill political adversaries.

Figure 5.1 Public gathering in Hanoi (August 19, 1945).

Source: Keystone-France / Contributor / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images.

Four years earlier, the veteran communist leader Hồ Chí Minh had taken the initiative to set up a national liberation front in the border area to China: The Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh hội (Việt Minh for short). A small National Liberation Army was later formed under the command of a former history teacher, Võ Nguyên Giáp. His forces did not play a part in the revolution as such, but once power had fallen into the hands of local activists, his army and the Việt Minh leaders could leave their secret headquarters in the countryside and enter Hanoi, where Hồ Chí Minh assumed the presidency of a new provisional government.

In Huế, local communists probed the intentions of Bảo Đại and his cabinet. On August 20, the emperor made a huge impression by declaring that he would “prefer to be citizen of an independent country rather than king of an enslaved one.”¹ Ho’s provisional government sent a delegate to Huế in order to demand Bảo Đại’s abdication. He solemnly abdicated on August 30, and was subsequently appointed “supreme advisor” to Hồ Chí Minh’s government.

On September 2, Hồ Chí Minh mounted a platform in Hanoi’s Ba Đình square, and asked a huge crowd through a microphone: “Can you hear me?” When they roared back “We hear you,” a mythical thread was knit between the people and its leader. One can still observe the force of that thread by watching the lines of visitors waiting to pass by Hồ Chí Minh’s glass coffin in his mausoleum next to Ba Đình square.

At the September 2 meeting, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) with himself as president. The term democratic republic was an innovation, which in Marxist–Leninist thinking signified an interim democratic stage on the way to socialism. Of course, those with different convictions could see democracy as an end in itself. What unified the revolutionary movement was not a shared understanding of “democracy” but a common aspiration for national independence of a united Vietnam.

Once the DRVN had been formed, all of Vietnam’s rival political groups faced the choice between supporting the new republic or being accused of treason. From the perspective of the communists, power had fallen into their hands like a ripe fruit. The challenge now was to defend the revolution against a combination of internal and external enemies. In September–October, a huge Nationalist Chinese Army poured in from the North to receive the surrender of Japanese troops in northern Indochina. A British force landed for the same purpose in the South, and an expeditionary corps was on its way from France to reconquer its Asian empire.

What Is Revolution?

The American and French revolutions have informed modern concepts of revolution. They are at once associated with dramatic events, such as the Boston Tea Party and the storming of the Bastille, and with the long-term changes they fostered. The Vietnamese revolution of 1945 was sparked by the August 19 storming of the Résidence Supérieur in Hanoi, a symbol of French colonial rule. The American and French revolutions were borne out in two basic texts: The US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Hồ Chí Minh cited both of these texts in his Declaration of Independence. The American and French revolutions replaced monarchies with republics and led to radical social change as well as violence and war. The Vietnamese revolution did likewise.

“Revolution” may be defined either as a successful political rebellion leading to radical political and social change or as the radical political and social change itself. In the first case, an incumbent government is overturned and a new government established, which proceeds to drastically change political institutions, property distribution, and ways of organizing the economy. This often includes the adoption of a new constitution. If we use the second definition, a revolution does not require any revolt or change of regime, but may be initiated by the victorious party in a war or by an incumbent government deciding to launch radical reforms.²

The American, French, Russian, and Vietnamese revolutions satisfy both definitions. Existing governments were overturned, and new leaders initiated radical change. The American Revolution was anticolonial. So was the Vietnamese – though the Vietnamese case did not involve the substitution of white settler rule for metropolitan authority. The French and Russian revolutions would also combine internal change with struggle against external enemies. Moreover, all of these revolutions abolished monarchy and instituted republics – though France would alternate between monarchic and republican governance until its Third Republic was consolidated in the late 1870s.³ China, in contrast, had two modern revolutions: the republican revolution of 1911–12 that ended the Qing Dynasty, and the communist revolution that established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The first of these aligns with the “political rebellion” definition, while the second fits better with the “radical political and social change” definition.

If we use the second definition, it is difficult to say when a revolution ends. One might argue that the Vietnamese Revolution ran out of steam in the 1960s, when it was absorbed in the war to liberate the South, but that a new revolution of sorts was also imposed on southern Vietnam after 1975. Alternatively, we could say that the Vietnamese Revolution lasted all the way to 1986, when its communist leaders gave up their attempt to create an ideal socialist society and instituted market economic reforms under the slogan Đổi Mới. Vietnam now immersed itself in the capitalist world. Yet the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN), which was created through national unification in 1976, has survived till this day as a Communist Party state.

For the most part, this chapter uses the first definition of revolution. The Vietnamese August Revolution consisted of a sequence of events lasting from August 15 to September 2, 1945. These events resulted in the demise of the Vietnamese monarchy, and the establishment of Vietnam’s First Republic. At the same time, I readily acknowledge that the August Revolution can also be thought of as one episode in a much longer Vietnamese Revolution of the second type.

After Vietnam’s colonization in the late nineteenth century, its intelligentsia was exposed through textbooks and newspapers to the French revolutionary tradition. Some Vietnamese saw it as a threat to their Confucian or Buddhist heritage. Others were inspired to organize their people for the twin struggles against French colonialism and Vietnam’s backwardness. For many Vietnamese nationalists – communists and noncommunists – the American, French, and Russian revolutionary traditions served as the backdrop for the drama that unfolded in Vietnam in 1945.

Hồ Chí Minh and Trường Chinh

Vietnam’s two main communist leaders in August 1945 were Hồ Chí Minh (1890–1969) and Trường Chinh (1907–88). They intensely admired Vladimir Ilych Lenin as the mastermind of the Russian revolution. During March–August 1945, Hồ Chí Minh and Trường Chinh dedicated themselves to preparations for the launch of a general insurrection to coincide with an expected landing of Allied troops. After the August Revolution, Hồ Chí Minh dedicated himself to the work as president, while Trường Chinh maintained a shadowy role as leader of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). The irony is that neither of them played a part in the August Revolution as such. It happened while the ICP’s main leaders were assembled in a place called Tân Trào, 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Hanoi. They received radio news but had no way to send out instructions to the party’s local members far away. The revolution happened without the ICP’s most senior leaders. This has never been acknowledged in official Vietnamese narratives. They claim that the August Revolution was both planned and carried out by the party.

It was not Hồ Chí Minh but Trường Chinh who coined the term “August Revolution.” While Hồ Chí Minh was the public face of the new revolutionary powers, Trường Chinh operated behind the scenes as party organizer and author of doctrinaire texts. Yet Hồ Chí Minh was more deeply immersed in the international revolutionary tradition.

A native of central Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh had traveled widely and taken part in the 1920 French socialist congress at Tours, which led to the founding of the French Communist Party. In the 1920s–30s, under the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Nguyễn the Patriot), Hồ Chí Minh became Vietnam’s most famous revolutionary of his time. He spent time in the Soviet Union, traveled for the Communist International (Comintern) to various Asian countries, trained young Vietnamese émigrés in Guangzhou, founded the ICP in Hong Kong in 1930, and was arrested there by the British in 1931 and kept in jail for a year. After his release, he returned to the Soviet Union, where he survived Stalin’s purges.⁴

In 1938–41, Nguyễn Ái Quốc traveled from Russia through China, where he stayed for some time in Mao Zedong’s wartime capital, Yenan. From there he journeyed to the Vietnamese border. This is when he took up his new name Hồ Chí Minh (The Enlightened Will). He set up secret headquarters inside Vietnam and convoked a number of comrades in May 1941 to join him in founding the Việt Minh. This is when Hồ Chí Minh first met Trường Chinh.

Trường Chinh (Figure 5.2) grew up in an intellectual family in the Nam Định province of northern Vietnam. He took part in revolutionary activities from 1925. In 1929–30, he played his part in organizing the northern section of the new ICP. Trường Chinh had none of Hồ Chí Minh’s charisma. He was a nerd, an avid reader of books, and became a rigorous Marxist–Leninist, always concerned to boost the standing of his party. He is described in his official biography as “the most outstanding disciple of President Hồ Chí Minh, a brilliant moral example of a true communist, a humble and simple man of high principle, who worked scientifically and carefully, knew how to listen to and be democratic to his subordinates, an elite child who had profound affection and gratitude to his homeland.”⁵ His real name was Đặng Xuân Khu, and although his family denies it, he most probably adopted the pseudonym Trường Chinh (Long March) in admiration of Mao Zedong.⁶

Figure 5.2 Vietnamese Communist political leader and theoretician Trường Chinh (1907–1988).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group Editorial / Getty Images.

Trường Chinh joined a small group of communist intellectuals in Hanoi during the 1930s and wrote a treatise on The Peasant Question in 1938 together with the history teacher Võ Nguyên Giáp, another young comrade who joined up with Hồ Chí Minh in the Chinese border region and took command of Vietnam’s nascent National Liberation Army of some 400 men. Trường Chinh managed to survive clandestinely in the northern lowlands, consistently avoiding arrest in a period when the French severely repressed not just communists but any opponents of their rule. A failed uprising in Cochinchina in November 1940, in which the northern communists did not take part, led to the arrest or execution of the ICP’s southern leadership, thus opening the way for Trường Chinh’s northern group to form a new national leadership.⁷

Trường Chinh took up the role of acting general secretary, and was confirmed in his role as general secretary by the group of communists who met with Hồ Chí Minh in May 1941. In party history, this meeting is called the 8th Central Committee Plenum. From 1941–5, Trường Chinh moved from one village in the Red River Delta to another, disguised as a merchant, village clerk, or rural schoolteacher, sometimes entering a town or even Hanoi.⁸ His main achievement was to convene a three-day meeting of leading communist organizers right after the Japanese coup against the French on March 9, 1945. On March 12 he issued a set of instructions to prepare an insurrection to be launched once Allied forces arrived to fight against Japan. These instructions were sent by couriers to local communist leaders throughout much of north-central Vietnam.

Trường Chinh’s loyalty to Hồ Chí Minh would be tested in November 1945, when Hồ Chí Minh for tactical reasons persuaded a majority of party leaders to officially dissolve the ICP, and only let it continue in the form of Marxist study groups.⁹ This forced Trường Chinh to close down his newspaper Cờ Giải Phóng (Liberation Banner) and make do with the theoretical journal Sự thật (The Truth). The dissolution of the ICP – and the failure of the DRVN to carry out radical land reform in 1945–6 – would harm the reputation of the Vietnamese communists within the international communist movement. Trường Chinh played a key role in rebuilding the party until it could be re-established officially as the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) in 1951.

The Vietnamese Communist Party considers Hồ Chí Minh to have been the soul of the revolution, while Trường Chinh was its brain. Apparently, the brain was always loyal to the soul, even when their attitudes differed. Trường Chinh was not personally ambitious. During 1945–7, he stayed in the shadows. I have not found a single French intelligence file on Đặng Xuân Khu (Trường Chinh) from that period, and in the many French intelligence reports discussing the relative influence of personalities in Hồ Chí Minh’s entourage, I have only found one reference to a person who is likely to have been Trường Chinh.

The differences between Hồ Chí Minh and Trường Chinh are reflected in the contrasting ways that the two men have been memorialized. When Hồ Chí Minh died in 1969, his body was preserved by Russian forensic experts and exhibited in a mausoleum in Hanoi similar to Lenin’s in Moscow. Its construction began right after the Paris Agreement in 1973, which allowed the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. The mausoleum opened in August 1975, four months after the communist conquest of Saigon. In the 1990s, a Russian architect designed a Hồ Chí Minh museum next to the mausoleum, in the form of a lotus, Vietnam’s national flower.

Trường Chinh would die alone in 1988 after a fall on the stairs of his home. In a small section of the Hồ Chí Minh museum, a modest exhibition was arranged in 2017, on the occasion of Trường Chinh’s 110th anniversary. It included his books and articles and some artifacts from his exemplary life, and multiple photographs of him and Uncle Hồ together.

The Concept of “August Revolution”

Naming revolutions after the month in which they occurred is a practice dating back to 1830. Paris had a July Revolution that year, a June Rebellion in 1832, and a February Revolution in 1848. St. Petersburg had a February and an October Revolution in 1917. Marxist–Leninists used to treat revolution as a kind of science. They debated their defeats, successes, and mistakes with a view to arriving at a correct course of action. Since April 1975, when Vietnam’s long war for independence and unification reached its end, all Vietnamese schoolchildren have been told that the Cách mạng Tháng Tám (Revolution of Month Eight) is the origin of their national independence. It was achieved, their textbooks say, through the wise leadership of the Communist Party. The national day of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is September 2, the date when the DRVN was proclaimed.

Trường Chinh’s writings about the revolution are worthy of a study, both because they reveal the thinking of a key actor at the time, and because his teachings form the basis for the Vietnamese Communist Party’s historical narrative. His way of thinking was instrumental. He led an organization – the party – that took responsibility for carrying out a popular insurrection according to scientific principles. A key purpose of Trường Chinh’s analysis of the August Revolution was to establish what had gone right and wrong. A second aim was to enhance the legitimacy of the party in Vietnam as well as internationally. While the first ambition required some factual accuracy, the second encouraged distortion and exaggeration.

In his analysis, Trường Chinh had two basic problems to tackle. First, the sudden Japanese surrender had come as a surprise for the communist leaders and made the seizure of power too easy. Too little blood was spilled. Second, there had been too little central direction. Hence it was imperative to pretend that the party had prepared meticulously for using the opportunity when it arose, that the seizure of power had not been a spontaneous revolt or coup but a genuine revolution, that violence had been used in many places, and that the party had led the revolution throughout. To promote this narrative was all the more important since the August Revolution received only scant and ill-informed attention in the international communist press. Moscow had not expected a revolution in French Indochina. Stalin was keen to see a further strengthening of the Communist Party in France, which was represented in the provisional French government of General Charles de Gaulle. The French communists did not care much about Indochina. The French communist press speculated that the “disturbances” there had been instigated by Japan.¹⁰

Trường Chinh set out to study the events immediately after they had happened, and presented his first analysis in the ICP mouthpiece Cớ Giải Phóng on September 12, 1945, the first issue to be published on an actual printing press in Hanoi. The title of his article was “Coup or Revolution?” (Cách mạng hay đảo chính?), and the first sentence read: “We have accomplished the August Revolution” (Chúng ta đã làm cuộc Cách mạng Tháng Tám). Then he sought to prove that it had been genuine: “We have driven the enemies of the country away, gained power, abolished the old order, established the new order, abolished the feudal regime, established a Democratic Republic regime, abolished the poll tax, the market tax, liberated political prisoners, etc. Was not this a revolution?”¹¹

Then he added violence as a defining feature: “A revolution must use violence.” He noted as a fact that the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, and on August 16, the Việt Minh leadership had issued an order for a nationwide insurrection. Immediately afterward, he claimed, the Liberation Armies spread to all fronts. He did not mention that the orders issued at Tân Trào would become known only after the revolution. He also did not mention that the armed units had no role in the revolution itself. In a number of localities, Trường Chinh claimed, the Japanese Army was disarmed, and was even destroyed in some places. This was not true. He also asserted that a nationwide armed demonstration was held for the three days of August 17–19. While it is true that there were demonstrations all around, they were not orchestrated, only inspired by each other, and they were mostly unarmed.

Next, Trường Chinh accurately admitted that “we succeeded because the French had been disarmed by the Japanese, and then the Japanese themselves were defeated, lost their morale, and the Vietnamese traitors were frustrated and smashed.” But he immediately added: “However, it was not by chance that the power was given to the hands of the people. It was given to the hands of the people because of the organized activities of the armed masses, because of the timely and rapid attacks by the vanguard revolutionary groups.”

He explained that a coup happens when one ruling circle overthrows another and establishes a new government while leaving the old regime intact. So then he asked: “How can anyone dare to call an uprising of the oppressed people to liberate itself and seize power a coup d’Etat?” He conceded that the seizure of power had been easy. The favorable circumstances had made the situation ripe. The victory of the August Revolution was like harvesting a ripe fruit. This was partly thanks to the favorable conditions created by the world war. “But,” he asked rhetorically, “was it not mainly due to the heroic struggle of our Party and the Việt Minh League?” This question was followed by a list of armed incidents in the border region with China after March 1945. “A lot of blood has been pouring,” he claimed, “and many heads were cut off.”

In 1946, while preparing for the first anniversary of the August Revolution, Trường Chinh extended his analysis in a series of articles in the theoretical journal Sự Thật. These articles were subsequently collected and edited for publication in a booklet that would be reprinted many times in several languages as The August Revolution.¹²

In the preface to the 1946 edition, Trường Chinh warned against listening to those reactionary traitors who denied the importance of the revolution and claimed that power fell into the hands of the people by chance. The author announced that he would particularly stress “the leading role and organizing work of the Indochinese Communist Party and the Việt Minh Front as well as their skilful tactics in the preparatory period leading up to the insurrection.”¹³ He saw the revolution as a “treasury of experience” that revolutionary fighters could draw upon. Then he proceeded to explain about the meeting he himself had organized in Bắc Ninh right after the March 9 coup. This meeting called for the creation of a national salvation movement against the Japanese fascists. He claimed that guerrillas had subsequently fought hard both against French and Japanese troops. The people had stormed thousands of Japanese paddy stores and their stocks of rice had been distributed among the poor. In April, a High Command of the Liberation Army had been set up at a meeting in Bắc Giang province, and a liberated zone had been established in June: “The new Vietnam came into being.”¹⁴

According to Trường Chinh, events at the end of the war against Japan “provided the August General Insurrection with extremely favourable conditions at the outset.” The intention had been, he said, to convene a national congress as soon as possible after March 9, but for various reasons it could not be done until August, “at the very moment of the Japanese capitulation.” He did not mention that Japan’s surrender came as a surprise. Yet he conceded that in numerous places the Việt Minh militants took the initiative to seize power even before receiving the general insurrection order.¹⁵ Although he noted the confusion among the Japanese troops, who – he must have understood – no longer had much to defend except their lives and arms, he claims that the ICP advocated an “extremely judicious policy” when it decided at Tân Trào to lead the masses in insurrection in order “to disarm the Japanese before the arrival of Allied forces.” Luckily for the unarmed activists who carried out the revolution, they did not know about that “judicious policy” and refrained from trying to disarm the Japanese.

In good Marxist fashion, Trường Chinh explained the triumph of the revolution by one subjective and one objective condition. The objective condition was the favorable occasion created by the fact that the French were first defeated by Japan, whereafter the Japanese were forced to surrender. Yet, he said, this could not have led to triumph without the subjective condition.¹⁶ “It is impossible,” he stated, “to speak of the August Revolution without stressing the role of its leading core, the Indochinese Communist Party.” And he asked: “Was not the triumph of the August Revolution due in great part to the intelligent and correct leadership of the Party?”¹⁷

In a chapter on “flexibility of tactics,” Trường Chinh claimed that the party had “correctly foreseen that the Japanese and French would inevitably come into conflict.”¹⁸ This was not in fact inevitable. The Japanese would have let the French continue to administer the colony if they had not anticipated an Allied landing. What triggered that anticipation was a raid of the Vietnamese coast conducted by US Admiral William Halsey’s carrier groups in mid-January 1945. It made Tokyo decide to launch the March 9 coup.¹⁹ Trường Chinh was probably right, though, that the ICP’s effort to organize seizures of French and Japanese rice stores enhanced its standing among poor peasants in north-central Vietnam. The US Marxist scholar Gabriel Kolko has seen Vietnam’s 1944–5 famine as the key to understanding how the Việt Minh was able to gain widespread support in a very short time.²⁰

In his capacity as a revolutionary scientist, Trường Chinh dedicated one chapter to the good and one to the bad. The good things were careful preparation by “a genuinely revolutionary party,” the induction of “the great majority of the people to rise up,” and the “promptitude and timeliness” in launching the general insurrection. It would have been a mistake, he said, to launch an insurrection immediately after March 9 or to wait until the Allies arrived. The leaders of the August Revolution, he claimed, had chosen the right moment for the decisive blow.²¹ This elided the inconvenient fact that Japan’s unexpected surrender had created the moment. The main reason why Trường Chinh had to repeatedly emphasize the leading role of the party was that its actual role remained obscure.

What were the August Revolution’s weaknesses? First, according to Trường Chinh, the party had few means of communication. The insurrections were launched at different times in different places, while it would have been better to launch them simultaneously in the main towns. The southern leaders were not as well organized as in the north, and believed too much in diplomacy with the Japanese, instead of fighting them. Second, there was a “failure to fully implement the slogan of disarming the Japanese troops.” As in the Paris Commune of 1871, there was also a lack of firmness in the repression of counterrevolutionary elements “on Jacobin or Bolshevik lines,” and there was a failure to seize the Bank of Indochina. When holding these out as major weaknesses, Trường Chinh did not take into consideration that the local activists were armed only with spears, machetes, pistols, old muskets, and hunting rifles, and thus could only disarm the Japanese or seize the Bank of Indochina if the Japanese ceded them voluntarily. Another general weakness of the August Revolution, in Trường Chinh’s view, was that it was only anti-imperialist, not social; it did not carry out land reform and give the land to the tillers. Yet the August Revolution had elevated the Vietnamese people to the “rank of the vanguard peoples” and had been warmly welcomed by progressive opinion in the world.

Trường Chinh’s insistence on the party’s leading role may have created an illusion among Vietnam’s communist leaders that it is possible for a well-organized party to plan and produce a popular uprising. In February 1968, the party got a chance to test this assumption in Huế, Saigon, and many other towns in South Vietnam. A lightning military attack took place, coinciding with the Vietnamese New Year (Tết). It had been well prepared and organized by the party. Yet it did not unleash any popular uprising. The Tet Offensive would have gone down in history as an ignominious defeat had it not been for the way it affected the American will to pursue its Vietnam war. It is possible that Trường Chinh’s misinterpretation of the August Revolution was partly responsible for Hanoi’s mistake.

The most convincing of Trường Chinh’s arguments to demonstrate the party’s decisive leadership was the claim that his March 12 instructions had prepared local communist cadres for seizing the chance and launching an insurrection at the moment when the Allies arrived. These instructions are likely to have reached the party branches throughout northern Vietnam and all the way down to Nghệ An province of north-central Vietnam. This helped prepare the local communists for taking decisive action when the opportunity arose.²²

The Global Context and the Role of the United States

Trường Chinh’s frank admission about the importance of the Japanese coup against the French in March 1945 belies an important truth: the circumstances in which the August Revolution unfolded were profoundly influenced by states and leaders outside of Indochina. The Japanese removal of the French regime, followed by Tokyo’s surrender five months later, created a power vacuum in Indochina. Although ICP membership numbered only around 5,000 in 1945, the party’s sponsorship of the Việt Minh league provided Hồ with the opportunity to fill the vacuum with the creation of the DRVN state – a feat that no other Vietnamese leader or group was able to accomplish. The emergence of the power vacuum thus appears as a crucial precondition to the success of the revolution. But why had the Japanese opted to move against the French in the first place?

The answer may well turn on the strategic decisions and deception operations undertaken by the United States during the last months of World War II. With hindsight, it is clear that Japan’s decisions in Indochina were driven by fears of an Allied landing in the region. This raises the question of whether US President Franklin D. Roosevelt may have helped encourage the March 9 coup against the French. FDR had long wanted to liberate Indochina from France and place it under an international trusteeship, with no role for France and with Nationalist China as one of the trustees. Admiral Halsey’s massive naval raid against Japanese targets on the Vietnamese coast during January 10–12, 1945, convinced Japan that the United States intended to invade Indochina. Moreover, US intelligence services learned of the Japanese plan for the March 9 coup through Magic intercepts well before it was executed. Yet they did not warn de Gaulle’s French government, which had instructed the commander of the French Indochina Army to set up a secret resistance organization against Japan. It is therefore possible that Roosevelt may have deliberately lured Japan into carrying out the coup.²³

A Divided Nation

In August 1945, among all of Vietnam’s groups and parties, the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was in the best position to lead a national revolution. It had supported the Allies and had established a working relationship with the US intelligence services. It was the only party to have maintained a clandestine presence in all three parts of Vietnam during the war. Unlike many other nationalist groups, it had not sought Japanese support. Compared to other groups, the ICP was especially strong in northern Vietnam. In contrast to other northern groups, it did not depend on support from Nationalist China. It had a charismatic leader in the person of Hồ Chí Minh, whose front organization, the Việt Minh, recruited widely. Moreover, support for the Việt Minh in northern and north-central Vietnam was enhanced by the front’s efforts to provide relief from the devastating 1944–5 famine.²⁴

This does not mean, however, that the Việt Minh were lacking for rivals in northern Vietnam. The Việt Nam Quốc dân Đảng (VNQDĐ) and Đồng minh Hội (ĐMH) followed in the footsteps of the Nationalist Chinese occupation army entering Indochina to disarm the Japanese. Because of their ties to the Chinese government, both groups were invited to appoint members of the DRVN’s parliament and given ministerial posts in the government. They also took control of areas along the China border. However, after Hồ Chí Minh signed an agreement with France on March 6, 1946, the Chinese Army began to withdraw from Indochina. Under the March 6 agreement, France recognized Vietnam as a “free state” and in return was allowed to station troops in the north. The VNQDĐ and ĐMH stepped up their opposition to the French presence, hoping to undermine the nationalist credentials of the communists. But once the Chinese Army had departed, the DRVN government had a free hand to crack down on the anti-communist parties. By the time war between France and the Việt Minh broke out in Hanoi on December 19, 1946, the noncommunist groups in the North had been decimated by arrests and assassinations, and the Việt Minh had consolidated its position as the dominant nationalist group in the North.

The ICP was considerably weaker in southern Vietnam. The French suppression of the 1940 “Southern Uprising” had devastated the party’s apparatus in the region. As a directly ruled French colony, Cochinchina had developed its own political culture, characterized by religious and political diversity. In 1945, the South had two communist factions, with two rival regional committees, none of which wielded the same level of authority in the South as the ICP in the North. One of the southern factions worked in tandem with a front organization, the Vanguard Youth, which was tolerated and even encouraged by the Japanese. Its leader was an undercover communist, working closely with the leader of the main communist faction in Saigon, the Moscow-trained Trần Vӑn Giàu. Giàu would lead the August Revolution in Saigon. But because the party’s position was so tenuous, he established a revolutionary coalition government, in which noncommunist groups were represented. The Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo religious movements both had a huge following in the southern countryside. They had relied on Japan for support and built their own armies. A criminal syndicate in Saigon, the Bình Xuyên, also maintained its own armed forces.

Trần Vӑn Giàu’s power did not last long. In mid-September, British forces landed in Saigon to disarm the Japanese. They released and rearmed French prisoners of war, and arranged for them to resume control of Saigon on September 24. Moreover, instead of disarming the Japanese, the British ordered them to help crush the revolution. From September 1945 to February 1946, British Indian Gurkhas and Japanese troops dealt severe blows to the armies of the communists, Hòa Hảo and Cao Đài, one after the other. Meanwhile, conflict also arose among the Vietnamese groups, as ICP leaders sought to assert control over the noncommunist groups. Amidst this chaos, Trần Vӑn Giàu was summoned to Hanoi and replaced as leader of the southern revolution by a former nationalist, Nguyễn Bình, who built a new guerrilla force that would engage in a drawn-out but indecisive struggle against the French and the rival southern groups.

The Vietnamese Catholic leader Ngô Đình Diệm was another potential rival to the communists in 1945. He briefly served in the first cabinet of Emperor Bảo Đại in 1933, but left it when the French refused to implement reforms to restore certain powers to the Vietnamese monarch. Diệm also declined a Japanese request in March 1945 to lead Bảo Đại’s new cabinet in Huế. The job went instead to Trần Trọng Kim. Kim’s cabinet was dissolved when Bảo Đại abdicated, and its ministers ended up in different camps. Some joined the Việt Minh. Others would again serve Bảo Đại when he returned to Vietnam in 1949 as head of a new French-controlled State of Vietnam (SVN), backed by a panoply of noncommunist groups and personalities. Diệm declined another offer to join Bảo Đại in 1949, but would re-emerge in 1954 as the SVN prime minister.

Revolution and War

Revolutions are often born of war and lead to further wars. The August Revolution is no exception. Right after Trường Chinh’s The August Revolution had been published, war between the Việt Minh and France broke out in Hanoi. Trường Chinh’s next task was to write The Resistance Will Win, a classic introduction to people’s war.

Although the August Revolution was an event of relatively short duration, it would have a lasting influence on the ensuing decades of war in Indochina. Its impact was especially strong in three areas.

First, the August Revolution gave the communists a flying start in their bid for power. August 1945 was their moment. They rode to power on a wave of popular enthusiasm. Moreover, as David G. Marr has shown, they were able to take over existing state institutions and form new ones.²⁵ The August Revolution also gave Hồ Chí Minh his chance to establish himself as both a national and international leader. In May 1946, he was invited to France as a guest of the French government. His national and international “investiture” was almost like a coronation, and made it impossible for Bảo Đại in 1949, Ngô Đình Diệm in 1955, and Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu in 1965 to match Hồ Chí Minh’s standing.

The second major impact of the August Revolution was to divide Vietnam into hostile camps fighting each other. Instead of uniting the nation against France, the communist domination of the DRVN, and its repression of noncommunist opponents, alienated a sufficient number of people to make it possible for Bảo Đại to gain a following in 1948–9, and to convince France, the United Kingdom, and the United States that they could bet on him. This paved the way for the rise of a rival State of Vietnam (SVN), which would eventually be transformed into the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). After 1954, many of South Vietnam’s leading politicians did not hail from the south, but had fled from communist-controlled areas. Moreover, as David G. Marr, Christopher Goscha, Brett M. Reilly, Shawn McHale, and others have pointed out, the communists never won the same degree of control in the South as in the North. The success of the August Revolution in the South was fleeting and quickly gave way to war not just with the British and French, but also between rival Vietnamese groups.²⁶

Third, the August Revolution influenced the strategy of revolutionary warfare pursued by the communists in their struggles against France, the United States, and their internal enemies. Within the international communist movement there were recurring debates between advocates of city-based revolts with the working class as vanguard, and those who backed a rural “people’s war” strategy to build up peasant armies, following the model of Mao Zedong. In the August Revolution, local rebels quickly took control of cities and towns, allowing Võ Nguyên Giáp’s rudimentary army to enter them unhindered. Although the communists would subsequently retreat to the countryside and wage a Maoist-style war, the memories of the 1945 uprisings in Hanoi and other cities lingered. During both the Indochina War against France and in the “Vietnam War” against the United States and the RVN, the communists would rely on a mix of Leninist and Maoist strategies. Especially during the latter conflict, the communists built a peasant army in rural areas while still planning for uprisings in urban centers.

However, the fortuitous circumstances of August 1945 never reappeared. The final victory of North Vietnamese forces in the Hồ Chí Minh campaign of 1975 had none of the elements of the August Revolution. It was a conventional military campaign, ending in the conquest of a mostly hostile Saigon. In this respect, the August Revolution still appears as a unique moment in modern Vietnamese history and the history of modern revolutions.