It was a propitious time to form such an organization. After the end of World War I, Paris had become the worldwide center for agitation by anticolonial groups. Debates on colonialism took place regularly within the French National Assembly. (In an address given in Hanoi in April 1918, the silver-tongued governor-general of Indochina, Albert Sarraut, then serving briefly for the second time in that position, promised the Vietnamese people that they would soon see a perceptible expansion of their political rights.) The issue was also raised in January 1919, when the leaders of the victorious Allied powers began to gather at the Palace of Versailles to negotiate a peace treaty with the defeated Central Powers and set forth the principles by which to govern international relations within the postwar world. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had encouraged the aspirations of colonized nations throughout the globe by issuing his famous Fourteen Points declaration, which called, among other things, for self-determination for all peoples.
By early summer, a number of nationalist organizations with their headquarters in Paris had already issued manifestos to publicize their cause. Thanh and his colleagues in the Association of Annamite Patriots decided to take advantage of the situation and issue a statement of their own. With the assistance of Phan Van Truong, who offered to polish Thanh’s still inadequate French, Thanh drafted an eight-point petition that appealed to the Allied leaders at Versailles to apply President Wilson’s ideals to France’s colonial territories in Southeast Asia. Entitled the “Revendications du peuple annamite” (Demands of the Annamite People), the document was fairly moderate in tone; it made no mention of national independence but demanded political autonomy for the Vietnamese, as well as the traditional democratic freedoms of association, religion, press, and movement, amnesty for political prisoners, equal rights for Vietnamese with the French in Vietnam, and the abolition of forced labor and the hated taxes on salt, opium, and alcohol. The declaration was dated June 18, 1919, and the author of the petition was Nguyen Ai Quoc, of 56 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in the name of the Association of Annamite Patriots. Although to a Vietnamese reader the name was clearly a pseudonym meaning “Nguyen the Patriot,” the real identity of the author was unknown, except to a handful of his collaborators.
There has been considerable debate among Ho Chi Minh’s biographers and other observers of modern Vietnamese history as to whether Nguyen Tat Thanh was the author of the document, or wherher it was a group effort undertaken by several members of the Vietnamese group at Phan Chu Trinh’s apartment in the Villa des Gobelins. French authorities at the time were equally puzzled; they had never encountered the name before. Some speculated that the real author was Phan Van Truong, identified as the “evil force” (mauvais esprit) behind the group and allegedly its most intelligent member. In his own reminiscences, however, Ho Chi Minh claimed that he had been the author, although he admitted that Phan Van Truong had helped him to draft it in intelligible French.22
Whether or not Thanh was the author of the petition is perhaps not so important as the fact that it was he who was primarily responsible for publicizing it and who would within months become identified with the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, a pseudonym that he would use with pride for the next three decades. He personally delivered the petition by hand to key members of the National Assembly and to the president of France, and he walked the corridors of the Palace of Versailles to submit it to the delegations of the great powers. To make sure that it would have maximum impact, he arranged to have it published in L’Humanité, a radical newspaper supportive of socialism. He also enlisted the aid of members of the General Confederation of Labor in order to get six thousand copies printed and distributed on the streets of Paris.23
The petition received no official response from the French authorities. Although the colonial question continued to be a major issue in debates within the National Assembly and aroused considerable controversy during the peace conference at Versailles, in the end the conferees took no action to address the problem. Colonel House, President Wilson’s senior adviser in the U.S. delegation at Versailles, wrote a brief reply to Nguyen Ai Quoc’s note, acknowledging receipt of the letter and thanking the author for sending it on the occasion of the Allied victory. A second note the following day said only that the letter would be brought to the attention of President Wilson. There was no further communication from the U.S. delegation on the matter. Woodrow Wilson, in fact, had encountered stiff resistance to his Fourteen Points at Versailles, and was forced to accept compromises to reach a peace agreement, a decision that aroused anger and disappointment throughout the colonial world.24
Still, the petition caused consternation in official circles in Paris. On June 23, the president of France wrote to Albert Sarraut, now back in Paris after his stint as governor-general of Indochina, noting that he had received a copy and asking Sarraut to look into the matter and ascertain the identity of the author. In August the résident supérieur in Tonkin cabled Paris that copies of the petition were circulating in the streets of Hanoi and had provoked comments in the local press. In September, Thanh ended speculation as to the petition’s authorship by publicly identifying himself as Nguyen Ai Quoc in the course of an interview with the U.S. correspondent of a Chinese newspaper stationed in Paris. He did so, however, without revealing his real name. At about the same time, Thanh made the acquaintance of Paul Arnoux, a police official responsible for tracking the activities of Vietnamese émigrés in Paris. While attending an address by a French academic who criticized colonial policy in Indochina, Arnoux met an intense young man handing out leaflets. After several talks with Thanh in a café near the Opéra, Arnoux contacted the Ministry of Colonies and suggested that Albert Sarraut arrange to meet with him.
On September 6, Thanh was called to the Ministry of Colonies on Rue Oudinot for an interview, while police agents operating secretly within the Vietnamese exile community snapped his photograph and began to probe for information on his real identity.25
It is difficult to know whether Nguyen Ai Quoc, as he would henceforth call himself, had any real hopes that his plea for justice and self-determination for the Vietnamese people might receive a response, or whether he merely counted on the impact of the petition to popularize the cause of anticoloniatism and radicalize the Vietnamese community in France. It is not improbable that he initially hoped that his petition might bring about positive changes in Indochina. He had an optimistic side to his character and seemed determined to believe the best about his fellow human beings, and even about his adversaries. This attitude was not limited to his compatriots, or even to fellow Asians, but extended to Europeans as well. During a brief trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy that he took around this time, he remarked to a friend that “all are human beings. Everywhere we meet good and bad people, honest and crooked people. If we are good people, we will meet good people everywhere.” It was, he was convinced, the colonial relationship that debased and corrupted human nature. There is no doubt, however, that he was disappointed by the lack of response to his petition: Nguyen Ai Quoc complained to colleagues a decade later that many people had been deceived by Woodrow Wilson’s “song of freedom.”
It may be, too, that like many other Vietnamese he had been seduced by the words of Governor-General Albert Sarraut. In the interview which he had held with the U.S. reporter of the Chinese journal Yi Che Pao in September, Thanh had complained about the deplorable conditions in Indochina, but conceded that the first step was to obtain freedom of speech in order to seek to educate the population and then work for autonomy and national independence.26
Still, there is evidence that his patience and optimism were shortlived. The day after his interview with Sarraut, he sent him a copy of the petition with a cover letter:
As a follow-up to our talk yesterday, I send you herewith a copy of the Demands, Since you were kind enough to tell me that you were disposed to talk frankly, I am taking the liberty to ask you to indicate to us what has already been accomplished regarding our eight demands.... Because I ma
intain that the eight questions continue to be unresolved, none of them having yet received a satisfactory solution.
Please accept, dear M. governor-general, the assurance of my profound respect.
Nguyen Ai Quoc27
A few days later, two police agents were assigned to track Nguyen Ai Quoc’s every movement and political activities. By December he had been tentatively identified as Nguyen Tat Thanh, son of the ex-mandarin Nguyen Sinh Sac and the same elusive young man who had been expelled from the National Academy for seditious activity in 1908.
Whatever his motivations in authoring and promoting the petition, Nguyen Ai Quoc achieved publicity for the cause of Vietnamese self-determination. News of the petition spread quickly within the Vietnamese community in France and had a dramatic effect among his compatriots. Older patriots marveled at the audacity of the young photo retoucher. Younger ones showed new enthusiasm for the cause. The more prudent viewed him as a “wild man” and began to avoid him. What, they may have whispered, could you expect from a hardheaded buffalo from Nghe An?
Frustrated demands for national independence drove countless patriotic intellectuals from colonial countries in Asia and Africa into radical politics. Although it is probable that Ho Chi Minh was no exception, in his case it also is clear that his interest in socialist politics predated his involvement in the drafting of the petition. His involvement in labor union activities while living in England could well have provided the contacts through which he became active in similar circles soon after his arrival in Paris. Michel Zecchini, a member of the French Socialist Party (FSP) at that time, met Nguyen Tat Thanh at the end of World War I and noted that Thanh was already acquainted with such FSP luminaries as Marcel Cachin, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Léon Blum, Edouard Herriot, Henri Barbusse, and Karl Marx’s grandson Jean Longuet. It was through FSP contacts that he was finally able to obtain papers and a work permit. According to Zecchini, however, he was not accepted as a full-fledged member of the FSP until after he had obtained notoriety as Nguyen Ai Quoc in June 1919. As the author of the famous petition, Comrade Nguyen (or Monsieur Nguyen, as he was sometimes called) had earned a measure of respect.
Ho Chi Minh was probably attracted to the French socialists because, in his words, they “had shown their sympathy toward me, toward the struggle of the oppressed peoples.” At the same time, his ideological bent toward socialism can be seen as a natural consequence of his dislike of capitalism and imperialism. Like many Asians, his first experience with the capitalist system was a product of the colonial exploitation of his country, which had produced such a brutal impact on the lives of many of his compatriots. Such views were undoubtedly strengthened by his years at sea, sailing from port to port through the colonial world, and perhaps by his period of residence in Great Britain and the United States. In later years he frequently commented on the exploitative nature of American capitalism, although he occasionally expressed admiration for the dynamism and energy of the American people. It seems likely that, as with many Asian nationalists, his initial interest in socialism came as a result of discovering its hostility toward the capitalist order.28
Yet the trend in Asian nationalist circles toward socialism should not be ascribed totally to expediency. For many Asian intellectuals, the group ethic of Western socialist theory corresponded better to their own inherited ideals than did the individualist and profit-motivated ethic of Western capitalism. And nowhere was this more pronounced than in Confucian societies like China and Vietnam. Chinese and Vietnamese nationalists from scholar-gentry families often found the glitter of the new commercial cities more than vaguely distasteful. In the Confucian mind, Western industrialism was too easily translated into greed and an unseemly desire for self-aggrandizement. By contrast, socialism stressed community effort, simplicity of lifestyle, equalization of wealth and opportunity, all of which had strong overtones in the Confucian tradition. Under such conditions, the philosophical transition from Confucius to Marx was easier to make than that to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who stressed such unfamiliar concepts as materialism and individualism.29
In 1920, Monsieur Nguyen began to attend regular meetings of the FSP and the General Confederation of Labor, as well as the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (an organization not unlike the American Civil Liberties Union), and to take an even more active role in political discussions. There are ample signs, however, that he began to find the attitude of many of his colleagues exasperating. To Nguyen Ai Quoc, the central problem of the age was the exploitation of the colonial peoples by Western imperialism. He discovered that for most of his French acquaintances, colonialism was viewed as only a peripheral aspect of a broader problem—the issue of world capitalism. Marx had been inclined toward Eurocentrism, and most of his progeny in Europe had followed his lead. The colonies, after all, represented economic wealth to France, and jobs to her workers. So Monsieur Nguyen elicited little response when he raised the colonial questions at political meetings, leading him to exclaim to one colleague in his frustration, “If you don’t accuse colonialism, if you don’t side with the colonial peoples, how can you make revolution?”
A serious split was developing within the ranks of the socialist movement between moderate leaders such as Jean Longuet and Léon Blum and more militant figures like Marcel Cachin and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, who appeared to hold more radical visions of the future of human society. Nguyen Ai Quoc sided with the radicals. One of the issues over which the two camps divided was the Bolshevik revolution. A militant group within the party began to coalesce around support for several key initiatives: opposition to the Versailles peace settlement; the creation of a new and more radical international socialist movement (in 1889, Marx’s original First International had been replaced by a more moderate Second International, aimed at achieving socialism by parliamentary means); sympathy for the oppressed peoples of the colonial areas; and firm support for the Bolshevik revolution. At the end of 1919 a committee to advocate adherence to Lenin’s new Third International—which took a firm stand in favor of the necessity of violent revolution and the formation of a dictatorship of the proletariat—was formed within the FSP. Nguyen Ai Quoc took an active part in the proceedings, and frequently attended meetings to collect money to help defend the Soviet revolution from its capitalist enemies.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was still a novice in the world of radical politics. A number of his colleagues during those formative years later remarked that at the time he knew almost nothing about theory, or the differences between the Second and Third Internationals. On one occasion he asked Jean Longuet to explain the meaning of Marxism. Longuet demurred, saying that the question was too complex and suggesting that he read Marx’s Das Kapital. Nguyen Ai Quoc thereupon went to a library near the Place d’Italie and borrowed a copy of that magnum opus, which he read along with a number of other Marxist works. Afterward, he remarked in his autobiography, he kept a copy of Das Kapital under his head as a pillow.
It was, however, Lenin’s famous “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” presented to the Second Comintern Congress in the summer of 1920, that set Nguyen Ai Quoc on a course that transformed him from a simple patriot with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary. In an article written for a Soviet publication in 1960, he admitted that during discussions between advocates of the Second and Third Internationals within the FSP he “could not understand thoroughly” the course of the debates. All that mattered to him was which side supported the colonial peoples. Then, in the middle of July 1920, someone gave him a copy of Lenin’s “Theses,” which had just been published in L’Humanité. The result, he recounted, was electric:
There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled in me! 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 nee
d, this is the path to our libetation.
Shortly after, he sent a letter to the Committee for Affiliation with the Third International, requesting admittance as an individual member. The application was accepted.30
Cut loose from its ideological baggage, Lenin’s message was simple and direct. Communist parties in the West, in their struggle to overthrow the capitalist system in advanced industrial countries, should actively cooperate with nationalist movements in colonial areas in Asia and Africa. Many of these movements, Lenin conceded, were controlled by the native middle class, who, in the long run, were not sympathetic to social revolution. So any alliances with bourgeois nationalist groups should be implemented with care, and only on condition that local Communist parties maintain their separate identities and freedom of action. But given such limitations, Lenin viewed the national liberation movements of Asia and Africa as natural, albeit temporary, allies of the Communists against the common enemy of world imperialism. It was the ability of the Western capitalist countries to locate markets and raw materials in underdeveloped countries that sustained the world capitalist system and prevented its ultimate collapse.
Imperialist control over colonial areas not only put off the inevitable day when the social revolution would destroy injustice and inequality in the West, it also prevented the emergence of progressive forces in African and Asian societies. The local bourgeoisie, prevented from playing an active role in industrial and commercial development in their own society by the Western imperialist dominance, remained weak and undeveloped; it was thus unable to play its assigned progressive role in waging the capitalist revolution against feudal forces in society, a necessary first step in the advance to global communism. The colonial middle class would need help from other progressive forces—such as the poor peasantry and the small but growing urban proletariat—to overthrow feudalism and open the door to industrial and commercial development.
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