To the metropolitan populace, officials offered a different justification. France, they proclaimed, was engaged in a noble “civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrice), dispensing the benefits of modern civilization to the primitive peoples of Asia and Africa: the “white man’s burden,” Rudyard Kipling had called it in his famous poem of 1899. In earlier times, this sentiment had usually been cloaked in religious terms—to bring the word of God to the heathen—but by the 1880s and 1890s, the civilizing mission of French colonialism could be couched in secular language: Commercial development would integrate Asian societies into the world market. This would lead not only to their economic development but to a modern society based on representative government, the rule of law, and individual freedom.9
There were contradictions in these objectives, as perceptive observers quickly saw. The publicized goal of the civilizing mission rested uneasily alongside the pragmatic objective of exploiting the economic resources of the colonial territories for the benefit of the home country. As a result, the colonial government was never prepared to support the development of an indigenous manufacturing and commercial sector in Indochina that might compete against manufactured goods imported from France. The industrialization of colonial Indochina thus never occurred. Nor could Paris sincerely promote democratic institutions in Indochina when, in the end, such a society would inevitably wish to reclaim its independence. The first elected political entities in Indochina, which took the form of municipal councils in the larger cities and assemblies at the provincial level, lacked meaningful decision-making power and were composed mostly of Europeans or of wealthy local elites prepared to work within the colonial system. Unlike in India, where the emergence of the Indian Congress Party allowed nationalists to pursue their quest for independence partly through constitutional means, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were forced down revolutionary roads.
All the while, the message of the mission civilisatrice continued to be preached and even to animate the private discussions of some colonial officials, who believed they were bringing modernity and civilization to the Indochinese people, even when their actions often suggested something else. This ambiguity at the heart of French colonial policy would never go away; ultimately, it would bring the whole enterprise crashing down.
Equally portentous for the future was the division of Vietnam into three separate regions: Cochin China in the south (Nam Bo), a formal colony, along with the “protectorates” of Annam in the center (Trung Bo) and Tonkin in the north (Bac Bo). This division generated a welter of administrative arrangements that were in reality less complex than they seemed, for Annam and Tonkin were really colonies too. From 1887, a single ruler, the Paris-appointed governor-general of the “French Indochinese Union,” dominated all three sections of Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, from his palace in Hanoi.10
Yet the three sections of Vietnam developed differently, in part because the topography dictated as much. With her curved, hourglass shape, measuring some 127,000 square miles (about three-quarters the size of California, or slightly smaller than Japan), she bedeviled French administrators, and it didn’t help that the two deltas where most of the population lived, one in the north and one in the south, were seven hundred miles apart, connected via a long and narrow central region that at one point tapered to just thirty miles in width. Annam and Tonkin, poor in natural resources, attracted relatively little direct French economic penetration and were from the start somewhat peripheral in the colonial system. Cochin China, by contrast, experienced intensive efforts at economic exploitation and cultural transformation. Boasting a tropical climate and fertile soil, Cochin China became the principal base of French capitalism in Vietnam and the destination of choice for the French nationals who emigrated there. Many settled in the rich Mekong Delta, built up from a shallow marine bottom by alluvial deposits of the mighty Mekong River that terminates its meandering course here. Saigon, the colony’s capital and commercial center, became known variously as the “Pearl of the Far East” and the “Paris of the Orient.”
Early governors-general devoted much energy to economic development, using various forms of direct and indirect taxation to finance much of the work. These taxes placed a heavy burden on the majority-peasant populace, arousing widespread resentment, but the achievements were considerable: the creation of a road and railway network; the development of rubber plantations, many of them along the Cambodian border, and mining operations; the establishment of irrigation systems that vastly increased the area of cultivable rice paddies in the Mekong Delta; the combating of malaria; the construction of hospitals and schools; and the creation of a Pasteur Institute in Hanoi, as well as a university.
In relatively short order, there emerged an affluent Vietnamese bourgeoisie centered in Saigon, its wealth based on commerce and absentee landlordism. Frequently its members grew to admire French culture and institutions, eating the same food and wearing the same clothes as the settlers, or colons. (Sometimes more than admiration was at work: They hoped that by so doing, they could establish civilizational parity on the cultural front.) But they were often scorned by these same colons, and many of them resented the economic domination of the Europeans and the absence of genuine political autonomy. Nevertheless, when these Vietnamese agitated for increased political influence and economic benefits, they generally did so within the confines of the French colonial system.
Others were not so constrained. Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, the colonial system came under challenge from the first generation of nationalists, who were inspired in part by the very educational system that the French had imposed, which sought to elevate French teachings and models over Confucian ones. Some of these teachings were, to say the least, unhelpful to the colonial enterprise. Voltaire’s condemnation of tyranny, Rousseau’s embrace of popular sovereignty, and Victor Hugo’s advocacy of liberty and defense of workers’ uprisings turned some Vietnamese into that curious creature found also elsewhere in the empire: the Francophile anticolonialist. These early nationalists also drew encouragement from Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, which showed conclusively that Asians could triumph over European power. By 1907, alarmed colonial military officials could report the existence of “revolutionary and subversive theories” among indigenous troops, and in the succeeding years exiled leaders, many of them in Japan, flooded their homeland with anti-French pamphlets and poems. In colonial prisons, meanwhile, squalid conditions and overcrowding in common rooms fueled nationalist agitation. For a time, French authorities kept a lid on the agitation, and by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 they felt sufficiently secure to leave only 2,500 European military personnel in Indochina.11
Scarcely did they realize that the war, a global struggle with an important colonial dimension, would be a major catalyst for nationalist movements throughout Asia and Africa. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, and Africans fought on the Western Front, with some 200,000 perishing on the French side alone. A new generation of Vietnamese expected something in return for this massive sacrifice and were not impressed by the sentimental imperialism that extolled the participation of people of all colors and religions in saving “eternal France.” In particular, these Vietnamese counted on French authorities to adopt a reformist policy in Indochina, greatly increasing local autonomy, and they were emboldened by several powerful forces emerging at the same global conjuncture: Wilsonianism, with its promise of self-determination; Bolshevism and the birth of the Third International (Comintern), created to support and guide Communists throughout the world and preaching anti-imperialism; and the example of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party in China, which preached a tripartite message of nationalism, democracy, and socialism.
III
FOR HO CHI MINH, CERTAINLY, THE GREAT WAR WOULD HAVE THIS kind of transformative impact, even if his nationalist agitation predated the outbreak of hostilities. Christened Nguyen Sinh Cung at his birth in Nghe An in 1890, he to
ok the name Nguyen Tat Thanh (Nguyen Who Will Succeed) at age ten.12 Under his father’s tutelage, Ho studied classical Confucian texts but also the writings of leading Vietnamese nationalists such as Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh. These left a deep impression, and when Ho enrolled at the prestigious National Academy in Hue in 1907, he had already committed himself to the great task of reclaiming Vietnam for the Vietnamese people. The following year he was expelled for lending support to peasants protesting high agricultural taxes and corvée labor. Pursued by the French secret police, Ho made his way south, taking jobs where he could. In early 1911, at age twenty-one, intent on saving his country and learning more about European civilization, he left Vietnam, signing on as an assistant cook on a steamer bound for France, under the pseudonym Van Ba—the first of some seventy aliases he would use. He would not see Vietnam again for thirty years.
Ho Chi Minh’s travels would take him over the next several years to ports in Asia and Africa, to Mexico and South America, to the United States and Britain. He first reached French soil in September 1911, disembarking in Marseille. His views were complex, mixing opposition to colonialism with a fascination with French culture and a respect for the French ideas of liberté, égalité, et fraternité that he would never reject. France, he realized, was not exclusively a nation of policemen and colonial officials, and he hardly came off as radical in his first communication with the authorities, an application for admission to a government school training bureaucrats for service in the colonies. “I am eager to learn and hope to serve France among my compatriots,” he wrote.13 Skeptics will say he was merely being careful with his words, and that he sought admission to this academy merely so he would learn from France how to fight France. Possibly, but there’s no doubt he possessed in these years conflicting feelings about the colonial overlord and about how swiftly independence for Vietnam must come. Like many colonial subjects, Ho then still believed, in that prewar moment, that the “modernization” of his country might be best achieved working with the colonizers, not against them, and that Republican France would in fact live up to the ideals she professed to hold dear.14
In late 1912, he crossed the Atlantic aboard a French vessel, visiting Boston before taking a job as a laborer in New York City. Manhattan’s skyline astonished him, and he was impressed that Chinese immigrants in the United States could claim legal protection even though they were ineligible for U.S. citizenship. He expressed admiration for Abraham Lincoln’s leadership in ending slavery and preserving the Union. But Ho also saw the grim realities of America’s current race relations as he mingled with blacks in Harlem. It dismayed him that America could espouse such idealistic principles yet subject blacks to segregation, to blatant discrimination in all areas of public life, to lynching.
Ho Chi Minh stayed in the United States several months, whereupon he decamped for London, finding work as a pastry chef under the renowned chef Auguste Escoffier at the luxurious Carlton Hotel. Always thirsty for knowledge—it was one of his distinctive personal attributes—he spent his free time reading and writing and improving his English. (He eventually spoke it almost fluently, along with French, Russian, and Chinese.)15 The Irish struggle for independence moved him deeply, and he later wrote that he cried upon learning of the death in 1920 of the mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who had been sentenced to two years in prison by the British and who suffered in anguish for seventy-four days during a hunger strike.16 Here again, as in New York, Ho witnessed the disconnect between theory and practice, saw the willingness of even liberal democracies to tolerate discrimination and colonialism.
All the while, Paris beckoned. At the end of the Great War, Ho crossed the English Channel and immediately immersed himself in the political activities of anticolonial nationalists living in the French capital.17 Soon he became one of their leaders, working first from shabby apartments at 10 rue de Stockholm and 56 rue M. le Prince, then from the flat at Villa des Gobelins. In the spring of 1919, together with fellow nationalists Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Van Truong, he drafted the petition for the Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference. To be more precise, Ho and Trinh came up with the basic points, and Truong—the ablest stylist of the three, at least in French—wrote them down, over the signature Nguyen Ai Quoc.
As Ho himself perhaps understood, his appearance at the Peace Conference marked the start of a new chapter of his life, and it would have done so irrespective of how the Allied statesmen reacted to his modest plea. In the months thereafter, he became more radicalized, more certain that his cause must be the full independence of peoples subjected to colonialism of any sort. He couldn’t count on Woodrow Wilson, he knew—he had read into Wilson’s message a universal liberating agenda that the American never intended. Accordingly, Ho made connections with Koreans fighting for independence from Japan, and Irish activists who sought the same from Britain. When the governor-general of Indochina, Albert Sarraut, late in 1919 proposed a set of reforms to colonial policy in Indochina, Ho rejected them as inadequate. The reforms, he charged, would have little or no impact on ordinary Vietnamese, who lived lives of scorn and humiliation. His activism now drew the attention of French Socialists such as Léon Blum and Jean Longuet, who invited him to join them. He did, attending the party’s congress in the provincial capital of Tours in December 1920.
A striking photograph taken at the meeting shows a slender and intense Ho addressing a group of well-fed and mustachioed Frenchmen, appealing to them for support, “in the name of all Socialists, right wing or left wing.”
It is impossible for me in just a few minutes to demonstrate to you all the atrocities committed in Indochina by the bandits of capitalism. There are more prisons than schools and the prisons are always terribly overcrowded.… Freedom of the press and opinion does not exist for us, nor does the freedom to unite or associate. We don’t have the right to emigrate or travel abroad. We live in the blackest ignorance because we don’t have the freedom of instruction. In Indochina, they do their best to intoxicate us with opium and brutalize us with alcohol. They kill many thousands of [Vietnamese] and massacre thousands of others to defend interests that are not theirs. That, comrades, is how twenty million [Vietnamese], who represent more than half the population of France, are treated.18
The speech, twelve minutes in length and delivered without notes, won warm applause but little more. Ho quickly realized that colonialism ranked low for a party focused on the struggle between capitalism and socialism within France. When a group of socialists broke off to form the French Communist Party, Ho went with them. He had read Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” a document that, in his own words, attracted him as a means of liberating Vietnam and other oppressed countries from colonial rule. Other Marxist writers whose work he knew seemed concerned only with how to achieve a classless utopia, a subject that left him cold. Only Lenin spoke powerfully about the connection between capitalism and imperialism and about the potential for nationalist movements in Africa and Asia. Only he offered a cogent explanation for colonialist rule and a viable blueprint for national liberation and for modernizing a poor agricultural society such as Vietnam’s. Communism could be applied to Asia, Ho Chi Minh assured his Vietnamese allies in Paris; more than that, it was in keeping with Asian traditions based on notions of social equality and community. Moreover, Lenin had pledged Soviet support, through the Comintern, for nationalist uprisings throughout the colonial world as a key first step in fomenting worldwide socialist revolution against the capitalist order. What could be more relevant to Indochina’s situation?19
NGUYEN AI QUOC AT THE CONGRESS OF THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY, TOURS, DECEMBER 29, 1920. (photo credit prl.1)
“What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me,” he recalled, years later, of reading Lenin’s pamphlet. “I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation.’ �
��20
One is tempted to draw a straight line between the failure of the great powers to address the colonial question seriously in 1919 and this decision by Ho Chi Minh—and many other Asian nationalists—to turn to more aggressive means to achieve independent nation-states. There’s something to the notion. Lenin’s position on colonialism and self-determination was substantially formed by the time the peace conference got under way, but he was very much in Wilson’s shadow that year, his words far less influential in the colonial world. The American president had set the terms of the armistice and appeared ready to do the same for the peace settlement. Upon arrival in Europe, he was showered with adulation everywhere he went, greeted as a conquering hero, a savior of the world. Lenin’s Bolsheviks, meanwhile, were struggling to maintain power in Russia, engaged in a bloody civil war whose outcome was anything but certain. Only later, after the collapse of what historian Erez Manela has aptly called “the Wilsonian Moment” and the stabilization of Soviet rule in Russia, did Lenin’s influence in the colonial world begin to surpass Wilson’s. For Ho Chi Minh, the turn had been made by the early weeks of 1921.21
Thus began for Ho a frenetic period of writing and of attending conferences and lectures. He cofounded a journal, La Paria (The Outcast), and churned out articles for publications such as Le Journal du peuple, L’Humanité, and La revue communiste. He wrote and staged a play, Le Dragon de bambou, a scathing portrayal of an imaginary Asian king; the audience response was apparently underwhelming, and the play closed after a brief run. He found time to attend art exhibitions and concerts, to read Hugo and Voltaire and Shakespeare, and to hang out in the cafés of Montmartre, where everyone debated everything. In May 1922 he even wrote an article for the movie magazine Cinégraph that showed again his complex view of the colonial metropole. The French boxer Georges Carpentier had just defeated the British champion Ted Lewis, and Ho, writing under the pseudonym Guy N’Qua, waxed indignant that French sportswriters had resorted to Franglais in their coverage with phrases such as “le manager,” “le knockout,” “le round.” He urged Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to ban the use of foreign words by newspapers. France, he grandly proclaimed in a letter written during this period, was the land of Voltaire and Hugo, who personified “the spirit of brotherhood and noble love of peace” that permeated French society.22
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 3