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© Brill, Leiden, 2004
EJEAS 3.1
Also available online—www.brill.nl
EJEAS 3.1.
Proef 1. 9-4-2004:14.51, page 1.
‘THE MODERN
BARBARIAN’:
NGUYEN VAN VINH AND THE COMPLEXITY
OF
COLONIAL
MODERNITY IN VIETNAM
CHRISTOPHER E. GOSCHA
*
Abstract. This
article studies the life and socio-cultural works of Nguyen Van
Vinh in order to understand better the complexity of
‘colonial modernity’
in Vietnam. Vinh saw in an alliance with colonial
France the chance to
modernise Vietnam in Western ways. Thanks to his
translations and his
essays on Vietnamese society and culture, he helped
open the way to a
larger cultural revolution in the 1930s. It was a way
of dealing with the
humiliation of colonial domination and a way of
putting Vietnam back
on a civilisational par with the rest of the ‘modern’
world. At the same
time, Nguyen
Van Vinh served as a powerful propaganda tool for the
colonial state in its attempts to cut off Vietnam from
her Asian context
and ally her closely with colonial France through the
Vietnamese language.
Indeed, Nguyen
Van Vinh provides a revealing example of the colonial
origins of the Francophonie policy in Vietnam that
began long before French
decolonisation.
French ignorance of the Annamese is certainly great;
that of the
Annamese about us is tremendous, fabulous,
unimaginable. […] The
Annamese, the Annamese people, the Annamese masses are
com-
pletely and absolutely ignorant of us. The immense
majority under-
stand nothing about us. […] From the outset, I was
lucky to make
friends with several eminent Annamese, notably with M.
Nguyen Van
Vinh, the greatest Annamese writer of our time. It was
he who led me,
little by little, to fathom the gulf that separates us
from the Annamese.
And we asked ourselves by which means would we manage
to bridge
this total incomprehension.
E. Vayrac, 1937
The news of Nguyen
Van Vinh’s death in the mountains of Laos on 2
May 1936 seems to have caught everyone by surprise in
Hanoi.
1
It was
*
My thanks to the following for their kind comments and
assistance: David Marr,
William and Claire Duiker, Gilles de Gantès,
Emmanuelle Affidi, Peter and Cam
Zinoman, Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery, Andrew Hardy
and especially Agathe
Larcher-Goscha (who suggested the title).
1
Delegation
of Tchépone, No. 147, ‘Au sujet du décès du journaliste Nguyen Van Vinh
survenu à Keng Sep (Muong Tchépone)’
(On the death of the journalist Nguyen
Van
Vinh in Keng Sep), 5 May 1936, Archives of the
Résident Supérieur du Tonkin,
Nouveau Fonds (hereafter cited RST/NF), dossier (hereafter cited
as d.) 6884, Centre
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well known that the founder of the Annam Nouveau (New
Annam)
2
in
1931 and one of colonial Vietnam’s greatest
journalists and translators
of Western literature had come up against some very
serious financial
troubles. Since 1 March, he had been forced to give up
the direction
of his newspaper in order to find a way to repay the
debts he had
amassed since the depression of 1929. What his reading
public did
not know was that he owed 40,000 piastres to
a French associate
named de Montpezat. The police had even been
authorised to arrest
Vinh. Desperate, the latter agreed to write for one of
this family’s
newspapers in exchange for a reprieve. He got it. And
in March,
he left the Annam Nouveau.
He sold his belongings, bid farewell to
his wife and family, and headed for Laos to prospect
for silver and
gold with his longtime friend, A. Clémenti.
3
Indefatigably curious and
always with something to say, Vinh kept wiring back
his reportages
on Lao society and culture to his readers in the Annam
Nouveau.
4
Everyone expected him to bounce back; he always had.
But ironically,
the man who had advocated so passionately all his life
the need to
apply Western science and medicine to Vietnam died of
dysentery,
still searching for gold and no doubt a little
something else.
5
Like
one of his literary heroes, Alexander Dumas, Nguyen Van Vinh died
penniless.
Nguyen
Van Vinh and the Complexity of Colonial Modernity in Vietnam
Nguyen
Van Vinh was a character. He was one of those individuals
to whom one is either immediately attracted, seduced
by his sharp
wit, profound intelligence and incredible
self-confidence; or put off by
his biting satire, arrogance, or his less than
flattering views of women
des Archives d’Outre-Mer (hereafter cited as CAOM).
His death was announced in
the Annam Nouveau on 7 May
1936: ‘La mort de M. Nguyen-Van-Vinh’
(The death of Mr
Nguyen
Van Vinh), Annam Nouveau (hereafter cited as AN),
7 May 1931.
2
‘Annam’ and ‘Annamese’ were widely used during the
colonial period for
‘Vietnam’ and ‘Vietnamese’.
3
Service de
la Sûreté du Tonkin, No. 2164/S, ‘Nguyen
Van Vinh et l’Annam
nouveau’ (Nguyen
Van Vinh and the Annam nouveau), 28 February 1936, signed by
Arnoux, RST/NF, d. 4357, CAOM. A. Clémenti was the
director and founder of the
newspaper L’Argus indochinois.
It is not sure that this Montpezat is the same one as the
famous
Catholic entrepreneur, Henri de Monpezat. My thanks to
Gilles de Gantès
for pointing this out.
4
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Un mois avec des
chercheurs d’or: la maison laotienne’ (One month
with gold prospectors: the Laotian House), AN (15
March 1936).
5
For more on the cause of death of Nguyen Van Vinh, see: ‘Au
sujet du décès du
journaliste Nguyen Van Vinh’.
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and their potential role in society.
6
To say that he was sure of himself
would be a euphemism. He liked to go up against
commonly held
ideas and take up lost causes. Journalism and
translation, however,
were his passions. The paper was a forum for debate,
an exchange of
ideas, and a means by which he believed he could
attack the social,
cultural and political problems of his time.
Translation was a tool
with which he could influence Vietnamese thinking and
share his
love for literature. The range of his interests was,
indeed, remarkable.
On one page, he could defend the direct French
administration of
Indochina, while on another he could lend his ardent
support to the
peasants against mandarin exploitation, or defend a
poor rickshaw
driver against the violence of a French colon.
On one day, he could
sketch a fascinating portrait of rural culture in
Vietnam, and on
the following day publish an essay of the highest
quality on French
literature or the technical intricacies of translating
Vietnamese chef
d’oeuvres.
7
Nguyen Van Vinh was not alone, of
course. There were others
interested in similar cultural and social questions.
Pham Quynh cer-
tainly comes to mind. Both men had similar backgrounds
and were
fierce competitors on the cultural and political scene
until Nguyen
Van Vinh passed away in 1936.
8
However, if much has been written
about Pham Quynh, it is strange that such an eminent
and contro-
versial figure as Nguyen Van Vinh should have slipped through the
cracks of contemporary historiography and research. Of
course, for
post-1954 Vietnamese nationalist historiography, his
life posed some
serious problems.
9
After all, he had ‘collaborated’ closely with the
French colonial powers, advocated ‘direct’ French rule
of Vietnam
(and Indochina) and promoted French civilization and
their ‘enlight-
ened’ rule. Nor did it help his post-1945 nationalist
standing that he
had frequented colonial social circles or ridiculed,
mercilessly, out-
dated Vietnamese customs and behavior which he found
embar-
rassing and uncivilised. But most costly of all, I
think was a highly
6
See for example Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘La femme au pays d’Annam’
(Women in the
country of Annam), AN (15 May
1931).
7
See Nguyen
Van Vinh’s comments on Rabelais, Michelet and Victor Hugo, as
published by Nguyen
Van To in the Bulletin de la Société d’Enseignement Mutuel,
Nos. 1–2
(1936), cited by ‘D’, ‘Nguyen Van Vinh’, Sud-Est,
No. 16 (August 1950), pp. 28–29.
8
It was
rumoured that Pham Quynh was not among the 3,000 who attended
Nguyen Van
Vinh’s funeral. Police
de l’Indochine, Service de la Sûreté au Tonkin,
Hanoi, ‘Note confidentiel no. 5049’,
9 May 1936, d. 6884, RSTNF, CAOM.
9
There is no entry for Nguyen Van Vinh in the Anthologie de la
littérature vietnamienne
(Anthology of Vietnamese Literature), Vol. 3 (Hanoi:
Editions en Langues Etrangères,
1975).
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charged debate in 1932 with the scholar-patriot Huynh
Thuc Khang,
during which Nguyen
Van Vinh ripped apart on the front-page of
the Annam Nouveau Khang’s
mentor and one of Vietnam’s greatest
nationalist heroes, Phan Boi Chau. Nguyen Van Vinh wrote him
off
in 1932 as a failed revolutionary and a pitiful
collaborator.
10
Commu-
nist nationalist historiography has had a hard time
forgetting this.
Harder to explain is Nguyen Van Vinh’s glaring absence in French
studies of Vietnamese literature, culture and
colonialism. If Pham
Quynh looms large in French-language studies of
Vietnam, other
than
Maurice Durand’s excellent Introduction à la littérature vietnamienne,
one searches in vain for Nguyen Van Vinh.
11
Even authors pushing
the francophonie project in
their publications have, surprisingly, over-
looked Nguyen
Van Vinh. This negligence is difficult to explain, for
Vinh had latched on to the ideas of promoting the
French language
and culture as Vietnamese sites for discovering
Western ‘modernity’
and ‘culture’ long before the French Ministry of the
Francophonie
picked up on it as a way to hang on to Empire after
World War II.
12
Slightly
better treatment of Vinh exists in English, though it remains
10
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Phan-Boi-Chau: le
révolutionnaire repenti’ (The repentant rev-
olutionary), AN (24 April
1932, 28 April 1932 and 22 May 1932). My thanks to
Agathe Larcher-Goscha for bringing this article and
debate to my attention. For
more on this debate and Phan Boi Chau’s association
with the French after WWI,
see: Agathe
Larcher-Goscha, ‘La légitimation française en Indochine: mythes et réalités
de la
collaboration
franco-vietnamienne et du réformisme colonial (1905–1945)’ (French legitimation
in Indochina: myths and realities of Franco-Vietnamese
collaboration and colonial
reformism
[1905–1945]) (Paris: doctoral thesis, Université de Paris VII, 2000).
11
Maurice
Durand and Nguyen
Tran-Huan, Introduction à la littérature vietnamienne
(Introduction to Vietnamese Literature) (Paris: G.-P.
Maisonneuve et Larose, no date).
Nguyen
Van Ky does mention him in his history of modernisation in Vietnam during
the colonial
period: La société vietnamienne face à la modernité (Vietnamese Society and
Modernity) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995).
12
Nguyen Van Vinh does not appear in
the recent work of Bernard Hue, Lit-
tératures
de la péninsule indochinoise (Literatures of the Indochinese Peninsula) (Paris:
Karthala, 1999), published in collaboration with La
Collection Universités Franco-
phones, which aims to promote the emergence ‘of a
place of expression for the
French language and scientific community’, complete
with a preface by a fervent
advocate of francophonie,
Richard Féray. Nguyen
Van Vinh is also absent in Thanh
Tâm Langlet
and Thu Trang Gaspard’s article, ‘Les auteurs vietnamiens de langue
française:
un exemple d’échange culturel’
(Vietnamese authors writing in French: an example of
cultural
exchange), Etudes vietnamiennes, Vol. 2, No. 128 (1998), pp. 90–107. There
is
nothing about Nguyen Van Vinh in ‘Le Vietnam et la francophonie’
(Vietnam and franco-
phonie) by Nguyen Khac Vien, nor in ‘La
culture française au Vietnam’ (French culture
in Vietnam) by Cu Huy Can, both published in a special French edition of
the his-
torical magazine Xua va nay (Then
and Now), no. 45, (November 1997), pp. ii–iv and
viii–x respectively. For a more problematic approach
to Franco-Vietnamese cultural
relations,
see Nguyen Van Ky, La
société vietnamienne face à la modernité.
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largely limited to his views on women and journalism.
13
To my knowl-
edge, no in-depth study of his work and life exists in
any Western
language.
14
Significantly, the first serious studies of Nguyen Van Vinh and his
work were written after 1954 in the southern Republic
of Vietnam.
The best example is a special edition on Nguyen Van Vinh published
in 1970 by the literary review Van Hoc.
15
Besides this publication,
southern literary critics, Pham The Ngu and Kiem Dat,
took Nguyen
Van Vinh seriously in the 1960s.
16
That said, there does seem to be
renewed interest in Nguyen Van Vinh in Vietnam today, although
it is not clear whether it is related to a
Franco-Vietnamese political
promotion of the French language or a deeper interest
in the man’s
little-studied political, social and cultural ideas.
17
Perhaps it is a little
of both.
Yet the fact that there is not much interest in and
little written
about Nguyen
Van Vinh is not a reason in itself for undertaking
this essay. So why write about him? Admittedly, there
is an intrisic
attraction in the idea of resurrecting this controversial
poor player,
who strutted and fretted his hour so vigorously on the
lively cultural
stage of colonial Vietnam before disappearing for good
into the
mountains of Laos. While Nguyen Van Vinh’s political ideas were
indeed contested, I think that there was more to the
man than
just colonial collaboration. Through his translations,
his journalism,
theatre and his refinement of the Vietnamese language,
quoc ngu,
he acted as one of the leading Vietnamese brokers
between the
French culture introduced via the colonial project and
the Vietnamese
13
Neil Jamieson, Alexander Woodside and Hue Tam Ho Tai
take a closer look
at Nguyen
Van Vinh’s work. See: Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), pp. 65–80 and
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism
and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992),
pp. 29–30, 48, 51, 77 and 110. Alexander Woodside, Community
and Revolution in Modern
Vietnam (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1976) gives us a very subtle analysis of his socio-
cultural project.
14
Emmanuelle Affidi is writing a Ph.D. dissertation at
the University of Paris VII,
in which she will discuss in detail Nguyen Van Vinh’s life and
works.
15
Van Hoc (Saigon), No.
111 (September 1970).
16
Kiem Dat, Luan de Pham-Quynh va Nguyen-Van-Vinh (On
Pham Quynh and
Nguyen Van Vinh) (Saigon: Nha Xuat
Ban Tre, 1958) and Pham The Ngu, Viet Nam
van hoc su (A History of
Vietnamese Literature) (Saigon?: Nam At Ti, 1965; reprinted
by Co So Xuat Ban Dai Nam, no date).
17
See the commentary in Xua va nay on
Nguyen Van Vinh’s
article devoted to
French and Vietnamese linguistics, reprinted in No. 45
(November 1997), pp. 15–16
(in Vietnamese), pp. v–vi (in French), and ‘Nhat
bao’ (The Daily), Xua va nay,
No. 3
(1995), p. 18.
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civilisation which it implicitly tried to transform
and which responded
in kind. With a foot firmly planted in both cultural
worlds, Nguyen
Van Vinh used quoc ngu, the
printing press, the newspaper and the act
of translating to channel Western culture and
modernising ideas into
Vietnamese society in unprecedented and wider ways
than in earlier
times. Although he would never have admitted it at the
time, he
helped pave the way for a larger cultural revolution
in Vietnam in the
1930s, and one which, to some extent, has resumed in
Vietnam since
the reformist policy of doi moi softened
the Vietnamese Communist
Party’s tight hold on cultural expression. This is one
reason, I think,
for studying this man’s life and works.
Nguyen
Van Vinh is of interest too precisely because he saw Viet-
namese modernisation occurring in alliance with
colonial France.
18
Some will object that he betrayed Vietnam by
collaborating so closely
with the French colonial project, while others might
seek to resur-
rect him today as an authentic ‘francophone’ precursor
or a forgot-
ten
‘non-communist’ nationalist moderniser. It is true
that Nguyen
Van Vinh was no anti-colonialist revolutionary
nationalist. His ties
to French colonialism are and were clear. He was one
of their main
spokesmen and allies. And he was not the only one.
However, rather
than writing him off as a nationalist misfit, it might
be more useful
to consider why he conceived of Vietnam’s overall
modernisation in
terms of an alliance with the French colonial project
in Indochina.
The problem with anti-colonialist approaches is that
they tend to tell
us little about who these individuals really were,
what they wanted
to do at the time, how they went about doing it or
whether they
succeeded or not. This is another reason for taking
him seriously.
This might help us to shed some new light on a larger
group of
Vietnamese who saw Vietnam’s modernisation or eventual
political
liberation in terms of a contract with the French. I
am thinking of
Phan Chu Trinh, Tran Trong Kim, Bui Quang Chieu, Pham
Quynh,
Huynh Thuc Khang, and others (including the future Ho
Chi Minh
at the outset).
19
Governor-General Albert Sarraut raised their hopes
after World War I by holding out the promise of an
Indochinese char-
ter, political evolution towards self-government or
even independence.
18
On the importance of this matter, see: Larcher-Goscha,
‘La légitimation française
en Indochine’.
19
In 1911, Ho Chi Minh applied unsuccessfully to the Ecole
Coloniale. But the
historical context needs to be kept in mind: 1910 was
not 1945, or even 1925. Daniel
Hémery, ‘Jeunesse
d’un colonise, genèse d’un exil. Ho Chi Minh jusqu’en 1911’
(The youth of a
colonised, the genesis of an exile: Ho Chi Minh to
1911), Approches Asie, No. 11 (1992),
pp. 82–157.
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We now know that this would only be achieved at a
devastating cost
to Vietnam and its people; however, no one knew this
in the early
twentieth century.
Although communism and national independence were and
re-
main fundamental historical questions, they were not
the only subjects
of debate at the time, nor were they the only
perspectives for the
future. Culture, religion, technology, the economy and
social equality
were equally important avenues of activism.
20
This article represents
a modest and admittedly preliminary attempt to take
another look
at Nguyen
Van Vinh and his attempts to modernise Vietnam in
collaboration with the French. Because of space
limitations, I will
concentrate on his socio-cultural activities and what
they might tell us
about the complexity of the intersection of two
different civilizations
and cultures in a time of colonisation.
21
Nguyen
Van Vinh
Nguyen
Van Vinh was born in the village of Phuong Duc in the
northern province of Ha Dong on 15 June 1882.
22
Unfortunately,
we know little about his parents or family life.
According to Neil
Jamieson, he ‘came from a humble peasant family’.
23
He married
several times, including with a French woman. One of
his sons,
Nguyen
Giang, became a famous journalist and translator in the
1930s and 1940s; another, Nguyen Nhuoc Phap, was a well-known
poet. What is sure is that from an early age Vinh was
fascinated by
the press and determined to be a part of its
development in Vietnam.
By the age of ten, he had already acquired a good
knowledge of
the French language. He perfected it at the Collège
des Interprètes, from
which he was graduated at the age of fourteen. He then
entered into
20
See especially David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on
Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981) and Shawn
McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism,
Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern
Vietnam (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2003).
21
I have examined Nguyen Van Vinh’s heated debate with Pham Quynh on
the structures of French colonial rule and the
political boundaries of Vietnamese
and Indochinese nationalism in my Vietnam or
Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space
in Vietnamese Nationalism, 1887–1954 (Copenhagen:
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies,
1995), pp. 46–62. Admittedly, much remains to be done.
Emmanuelle Affidi will
analyse this question in much greater detail in her
forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation.
22
Vu Bang, ‘Tuong nho mot buc thay: Quan-Thanh Nguyen Van Vinh’
(Recalling a letter:
Nguyen Van
Vinh), Van Hoc (Saigon), No. 111 (September 1970), p. 12. According
to
the lunar calendar, he was born on 30 April in the
35th year of the reign of Tu Duc.
23
Jamieson, Understanding
Vietnam, p. 65.
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the Indochinese bureaucracy as a secretary. He worked
in the colonial
offices of Lao Cai, Kien An, Bac Ninh, and finally in
the tribunal of
Hanoi in 1904. While serving in these posts,
especially in Kien An
near the port of Haiphong, Vinh was able to meet
foreigners and even
began to study Chinese and some English. He had
already begun to
study Chinese characters and the basics of Vietnamese
demotic script
(chu nom). According
to an old friend, Vinh was obsessed by languages
and reading. It is also possible that he came into
contact during this
early time with French printers working for the
colonial bureaucracy.
In early 1906, for reasons which are still not clear,
he resigned from
the colonial bureaucracy and returned to his family,
his childhood
friends, and above all to his books.
24
However, he did not remain idle for long. His
curiosity was such
that he was soon taking part in small intellectual
groups like the ‘Tri
Tri School’. Impressed by this young man’s mastery of
their language
and knowledge of their culture, and no doubt keen on
keeping this
budding talent on their side, the French sent him to
Marseille in
1906 as part of the Vietnamese delegation to the
Colonial Exposition.
It was during this time that Nguyen Van Vinh, 24 four years old,
discovered French theatre, the modern printing press,
the newspaper
and their potential firepower on the cultural front.
At the colonial
exposition and elsewhere, he chatted enthusiastically
with Western
journalists about the importance of the modern
newspaper and the
printing press.
25
In a letter home to his good friend Pham Duy Ton,
Vinh shared the excitement of seeing El Cid on
stage. He explained
the impact that seeing this play live on stage had had
on him, insisting
that it was vastly more effective than just reading
it. It was also during
his trip to France that he decided once and for all
that he would have
to play a leading role in the modernisation of
Vietnamese culture and
society.
26
The young Nguyen
Van Vinh must have been very sure of
his calling, for on his return to Vietnam in 1907 he
threw himself into
creating a printing house and a Western-style press.
24
Vu Bang, ‘Tuong nho mot buc thay’,
pp. 12–14, based on Nguyen
Van Vinh’s diary.
25
‘Discours
de M. Pham Huy Luc,
Président de la Chambre des Représentants du Peuple du
Tonkin’ (Speech by M. Pham Huy Luc, President of the
House of Representatives of
the People of Tonkin), AN (11
May 1936), and ‘Biographie’ (Biography), AN (7 May
1936).
26
‘Tho cua ong Vinh viet tu Mac-Xay gui cho o. Pham
Duy Ton’ (Letter from Vinh to
Pham Duy Ton written from Marseille), in Ky niem 90
nam ong Nguyen Van
Vinh dich Kim
Van Kieu (The 90th Anniversary
of Nguyen Van Vinh’s
Translation of the Kim Van
Kieu) (1997), and Vu Bang, ‘Tuong nho mot buc thay’,
pp. 16–20, on his 1906 voyage to
Marseille.
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Figure 1: Pham Duy Ton, Pham Quynh and Nguyen Van Vinh, delegates
to the
Colonial Exhibition of 1922 in Marseille; source:
http://nguyentl.free.fr.
Again, he was not alone in his desire to modernise
Vietnam in
association with the French. A group of Vietnamese
intellectuals
gathered around the famous scholar-patriot, Phan Chu
Trinh, to
create the ‘Tonkin Free School’, better known as the
Dong Kinh
Nghia Thuc. Its goal was to promote a renovation of
Vietnamese
society and culture along Western lines. Nguyen Van Vinh and Pham
Duy Ton were both members of this early group of
intellectuals, who
saw Vietnam’s modernisation in terms of an alliance
with the French.
At the top of their list was the importance of
developing quoc ngu over
Chinese characters, learning French and diffusing Western
notions
of science, sports, hygiene, education, and commerce
and industry
to the population at large. Unsurprisingly, Nguyen Van Vinh taught
French to more Sino-Vietnamese-oriented intellectuals.
Revealingly,
the bible of the group was the Book of Civilisation
and Modern Studies (Van
minh tan hoc sach). In
1907, Phan Chu Trinh sent a reform package to
the colonial government asking for educational
reforms, instruction
in French, agricultural development projects, and the
Westernisation
of traditional Vietnamese dress. Attracted by
Republican ideas, Phan
Chu Trinh began attacks on the impediments to progress
represented
by the Vietnamese monarchy and its mandarins, who
would do their
best a year later to make sure he never returned from
the colonial
prison of Poulo Condor, where he had been imprisoned
following the
outbreak of revolts in Vietnam.
27
27
‘Traduction
d’une lettre en caractères chinois adressée le 15 juillet 1922 à Khai Dinh par
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Nguyen Van Vinh would make these
ideas the cornerstone of his
political ideas for the rest of his life. It is not
exactly clear why Vinh
developed such an early hatred for the mandarins. It
may be linked to
his humble origins, the worsening misery of the
Vietnamese peasantry
he witnessed as a civil servant in the north, or
perhaps his desire to
advance more quickly through a Westernised bureaucracy
with which
he was more familiar. Like Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyen Van Vinh was
also attracted early on in his life to French
Republican ideas. In 1906
or 1907, he joined the Hanoi section of the League of
Human Rights
(Ligue des
droits de l’homme). Formed in Hanoi in 1903, the League
was designed to promote Republican ideals in the
colonies, to check
the abuses of colonialism, and, not without serious
contradictions, to
make known such new ideas as ‘individual rights and
liberties’, ‘citi-
zenship’, and ‘egalitarianism’ When the Dong Kinh
Nghia Thuc was
shut down by the French in 1908 and Phan Chu Trinh
arrested on
suspicion of his role in peasant uprisings that same
year, Nguyen
Van Vinh militated within the League in order to
obtain his libera-
tion from Poulo Condor. It was also within the League
that Nguyen
Van Vinh worked with such liberal thinkers as Félicien
Challaye,
Louis Caput, Marc Casati, and Francis de Pressensé
among others.
He would also form a close intellectual and personal
friendship with
the militant republican and long-time resident in
Vietnam, Ernest
Babut.
28
All of these Frenchmen tried to focus the French
govern-
ment’s attention on its colonial duties. However, as
Daniel Hémery
has pointed out, it was less a question of promoting
‘anti-colonialism’
than backing dynamic ‘colonial reforms’ under the
watchful eye of the
French. The ‘Leaguers’ accepted French colonialism in
Indochina as
a fait accompli, but not
its excesses. While it is true that the League
itself would sometimes have a hard time accepting
Vietnamese as
full members, one of the very rare Vietnamese to join
was none
other than Nguyen
Van Vinh. This young intellectual was undoubt-
le lettré annamite Phan Chau Trinh’
(Translation of a letter in Chinese characters sent
on 15 July 1922 to Khai Dinh by the Annamite scholar
Phan Chau Trinh), pp. 1,
15, 16, 21,
d. Phan Chu Trinh, c. 371, file grouping Service de Protection du Corps
Expéditionnaire, CAOM. According to Jamieson, it was Nguyen Van Vinh who filled
out the necessary papers to open the Dong Kinh Nghia
Thuc; Jamieson, Understanding
Vietnam, p. 67.
28
Ernest Babut ran the Dai Viet tan bao,
the unofficial journal of the Dong Kinh
Nghia Thuc. Phan Chu Trinh published some of his first
articles in Chinese in this
journal. There is a French translation of one of these
articles reflecting Phan Chu
Trinh’s ideas on the need to adapt Western science and
culture in Vietnam, entitled
‘Réflexions
sur le temps présent’
(Reflections on present times), Pionnier Indo-Chinois, No. 10
(29 December
1907), pp. 104–105.
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edly influenced by the discussion and the ideas
running through the
League in the early 1900s. One of the major ideas of
the League
in Indochina was to promote ‘a Republican idea of
colonial action’,
one which would administer the colonies with
‘enlightened control’.
Nguyen
Van Vinh would promote such ideas in the political pro-
gramme he defended in the early 1930s.
29
Nguyen
Van Vinh also joined the anti-clerical and pro-Republican
freemasons in Indochina.
30
He did so, once he had returned to Viet-
nam, sometime in the 1920s as a member of the Human
Rights order
of the ‘Confucius’ lodge (Tam Diem Khong Tu).
31
Upon Vinh’s death,
the Confucius lodge organized a funeral ceremony in Nguyen Van
Vinh’s honour. Three thousand people were in attendance.
Nguyen
Van Vinh was not the only Vietnamese to join the
Freemasons. He
joined Pham Huy
Luc (1928), Pham Quynh (1925), Bui Quang Chieu,
Le Thuoc, Duong Van Giao and a number of others from
the Viet-
namese elite. While some of the French Masons in Indochina
balked
at admitting Vietnamese in light of their ‘lack of
evolution’, the open-
ing of Freemasonry doors to Vietnamese elites in the
1920s led to new
intellectual exchanges and reflections on the
development of Viet-
nam and its place within the colonial project.
32
In 1925, the Ligue des
droits de l’homme adopted a report penned by Pham
Quynh, which,
according to Jacques Dalloz, had supported the very
anti-colonialist
ideas of one of its main leaders, Félicien Challaye.
33
Nguyen Van
Vinh
29
‘Discours
de M. Delmas, Président de la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen
Section de Hanoi’ (Speech of
Mr Delmas, President of the League of Human Rights
and of the Citizens’ Section of Hanoi), AN (11
May 1936) and Daniel Hémery,
‘L’Indochine,
les droits humains entre colonisateurs et colonisés: la Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme’
(Indochina, human rights between the colonisers and
the colonised: the League
of Human Rights), Revue française d’histoire
d’outre-mer (French Review of Overseas
History),
Vol. 88, Nos 330–331 (2001), pp. 223–239.
30
Although we do not know for sure if Nguyen Van Vinh was a
member of the
Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO,
French Section of the Workers’
International)—I do not believe so—he certainly knew
its leaders, like Louis Caput.
Hoang Minh Giam, future Minister of Foreign Affairs of
the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam, was a member of the SFIO and collaborated on
Vinh’s Annam nouveau.
31
It was apparently also called the ‘Mixed International
lodge’, which was the
Vietnamese section of the larger Grand Orient lodge
with an office in Hanoi.
32
Thien Tuong, ‘Duong Thieu Thanh tu Hanoi den Bale Nguyen Van Vinh’
(From Hanoi
to Paris, Nguyen
Van Vinh), Van Hoc (Saigon), No. 111 (September 1970),
p. 37, and
D, ‘Nguyen-van-Vinh’, p.
27.
33
Jacques
Dalloz, ‘Les Vietnamiens dans la franc-maçonnerie coloniale’ (The Vietnamese
in colonial Freemasonry), Revue française
d’histoire d’outre-mer (French Review of Over-
seas History), Vol. 85, No. 320 (1998), pp. 103–118;
his ‘La SFIO d’Indochine, 1945–1954’
(The SFIO in Indochina), Approches-Asie,
No. 14 (1997), pp. 57–72; ‘Discours de M. Jan-
vier, Fondateur de la Loge “Confucius”’
(Speech by Mr Janvier, founder of the ‘Confucius’
Lodge), AN (11 May
1936).
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could not have been immune to the ideas and animated
debates circu-
lating within these Republican organisations,
especially those hostile
to the monarchy.
In spite of his time-consuming cultural and literary
activities, Nguy-
en Van Vinh still found time for politics. At the age
of 25, he started
his political career as a municipal council member. He
was a member
of the Grand Council of Economic and Financial
Interests (Grand
Conseil des
Intérêts Economiques et Financiers). In 1913, he was
elected to the Advisory House of Tonkin (Chambre
Consultative du
Tonkin), which dispatched him to the Colonial
Exposition in Mar-
seilles in 1922. Once in France, Nguyen Van Vinh probably
contacted
Phan Chu Trinh. Given their previous collaboration,
Albert Sarraut’s
promise of political liberalisation, and the disdain
they held for the
monarchy and its mandarins, it seems likely that Nguyen Van Vinh
sought advice from Phan Chu Trinh on the future tack
of non-violent
Vietnamese reformism. Both probably agreed on the need
to do away
with the antiquated monarchy. After all, it was in
1922 that Phan Chu
Trinh, in a vitriolic letter to King Khai Dinh,
lambasted the Viet-
namese monarchy, accusing it of being ‘despotic’ and opposed
to the
very political, social and cultural innovations that
would save Viet-
nam from its perilous situation.
34
Phan Chu Trinh’s ideas were exactly
what Nguyen
Van Vinh wanted to hear. But he would take them
much further in the political programme he would
promote through
the creation of the Annam nouveau in
1931.
35
The ‘Cultural Revolution’ of Nguyen Van Vinh
The Printing House
Since 1907, emboldened by his ‘discovery’ in Europe of
the modern
printing press, the newspaper and the potential of the
fine arts for
social change, Nguyen Van Vinh focused his attention on promoting a
social and cultural revolution of ‘traditional’
Vietnamese society. The
printing press, translations, newspapers, theatre and
film would be
his preferred arms. Nguyen Van Vinh learned the art of printing
on
the job, apparently without any previous training. His
long friendship
with Ernest Babut and especially the famous printer
and associate
of the Vietnamese press, F.H. Schneider, taught him
the basics of
34
‘Traduction d’une lettre en caractères chinois adressée à
Khai Dinh par le lettré annamite Phan
Chau Trinh’.
35
See my Vietnam or Indochina? pp.
46–62.
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printing, publishing, and advertising. Around 1910, he
and Schneider
opened a small publishing house called the
Bibliothèque Franco-
annamite de
Vulgarisation (Pho Thong Giao Khoa Thu Xa). The
principal idea was to publish and distribute
translations and new ideas
in quoc ngu for an
expanding Vietnamese readership. In the 1920s, he
teamed up with another Frenchman, E. Vayrac, to create
an even
more
sophisticated publication series entitled La Pensée de l’occident. In
addition to government subsidies, Nguyen Van Vinh dug into
his own
pocket to invest in modern printing equipment, paper
and chemicals
imported from Europe. During his 1922 trip to France,
for example,
he stole away from the exotic Colonial
Exposition—which in his eyes
froze Vietnamese into the very tradition he
despised—in order to
purchase new equipment for his printing press. He went
all the way
to Germany to find what he wanted.
36
Translations
Thanks to his printing knowledge and connections, Nguyen Van Vinh
was strategically well positioned to launch one of his
major cultural
battles: the translation of major Western literary
works. Vinh was
among the first (after Truong Vinh Ky and Huynh Tinh
Cua) to
recognise the modern potential of translations to
create a bridge
between ‘East and West’, and to change the way people
thought
by introducing new ideas and forms into Vietnam. The
translation
of the Western novel was one such example. He
published several
remarkable translations of key works of French
literature, notably
Molière’s Le
bourgeois gentilhomme,
Les femmes savantes, L’Avare,
and Le
malade
imaginaire; Victor
Hugo’s Les misérables; La Fontaine’s Les fables;
and Alexandre Dumas’ Les trois mousquetaires among
many others. He
also translated a number of English works (from the
French), such as
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
37
Many of his first translations were
published by Vayrac and La pensée de l’occident.
As we shall see, Nguyen Van Vinh undertook these translations
in order to make French culture better known to the
Vietnamese.
36
Armée du
Rhin (Army of the Rhine), ‘Au sujet du journaliste et imprimeur Nguyen
Van Vinh’ (On the journalist and printer Nguyen Van Vinh), 10
August 1922, d. 1382,
archives
repatriated from Russia, Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes,
France.
37
Recent scholarship in France has suggested that
Molière may not have written
all the works that bear his name. See for example,
Dominique Labbé, Corneille
dans
l’ombre de Molière: Histoire d’une découverte (Corneille in the Shadow of Molière:
The History
of a Discovery) (Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, Collection ‘Bâtons
rompus’,
2003).
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But there was more to it than cultural politics. The
art of trans-
lating literature from one language to another, the
idea of crossing
massive cultural divides to make one thought system
intelligible to
another in his or her native language, must be one of
the most impor-
tant intersections and signposts for studying cultural
transfers in the
world. Of course, translators existed in pre-colonial
Vietnam. They
had mainly been in charge of dealing with a variety of
European and
Asian traders or involved in domesticating Chinese
Confucian clas-
sics. However, French colonisation linked Vietnam to a
larger literary
world, not just a French one, but one which could
channel English,
American and other literatures into Vietnam via French
translations
themselves (for example, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).
Suddenly, a whole
new literary world appeared on the Vietnamese horizon.
However,
without translators, this exciting universe of new
ideas, personages,
and adventures would remain incomprehensible.
Of course, younger generations of Vietnamese would be
increas-
ingly at ease in French, and would prefer reading
these works in the
original language. However, even today circumstantial
evidence sug-
gests that they prefer reading many of Nguyen Van Vinh’s quoc
ngu
translations, for he successfully tailored the French
characters and
mentalities to their Vietnamese cultural equivalents.
If this is true,
then this is no small cultural feat. It seems quite
possible that even
young ‘Westernised’ Vietnamese got their first taste
of Dumas’ The
Three Musketeers and Hugo’s Les
misérables through Nguyen Van Vinh,
and only later via the original French version.
Moreover, in spite of
increased French language instruction in colonial
schools, a vast quoc
ngu reading public continued to
develop during the entire colonial
period. Reaching the Vietnamese ‘masses’ meant
reaching them in
quoc ngu as much as
in French.
However, Nguyen
Van Vinh’s translations are important for other
reasons. If Nhat Linh chose the modern Western novel
as his favourite
literary weapon for attacking out-dated customs and
promoting new
ideas more effectively and widely, Nguyen Van Vinh was
carefully
selecting his French plays and novels for translation
with an eye on
the socio-political messages he wanted to transmit to
his Vietnamese
readers. If carefully and effectively translated, Nguyen Van Vinh
sought to domesticate these French stories and their
modern notions
of satire, comedy and intrigue as ways of promoting
his own cultural
programme in Vietnam. In a way, he was taking the
author’s irony
and making it his own. And this built upon a deep
Vietnamese tradi-
tion for political satire. For example, there is no
denying that Nguyen
Van Vinh despised the mandarin system and had little
respect for
the Vietnamese monarchy. It is no accident, I think,
that Vinh chose
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to
translate La Fontaine’s Les Fables (1668). La Fontaine used animals
in his fables in order to criticise seventeenth
century French society,
the court’s sycophants, and the King in particular.
Like Molière, La
Fontaine considered the court to be infested with
parasites and impos-
tors, who only worsened the plight of the people they
were supposed
to rule benevolently. He used comedy and satire,
hidden in the form
of an animal society, to poke fun at the
ineffectiveness and corrup-
tion of the French monarchy and its obsequious
courtesans. Though
Vinh could not attack French colonialism in this way,
he certainly
had no qualms about using satire and irony against the
Vietnamese
monarchy. And given the French desire to avoid having Nguyen Van
Vinh translate eighteenth century political
philosophers (as he did
with Rousseau, as we shall see below), they had little
choice but to
look the other way, at least until the early 1930s,
when he took veiled
stabs at the Vietnamese monarchy.
Several other works translated by Nguyen Van Vinh also carry
this
anti-monarchical theme. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels certainly
comes to mind. So does Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque. The latter
was banned by Louis XIV after its publication in 1699,
considered
to be a satire of the court. Fénelon had written a few
years earlier
a ‘Letter to Louis XIV’, in which he spoke bluntly of
the misery of
the French peasantry and the need for ‘liberal
reforms’. Nguyen Van
Vinh was taking similar action in Vietnam against what
he saw as the
rapacious mandarins of Annam and Tonkin. It is hard to
believe that
Fénelon’s reflections in Télémaque on
good government and ‘natural
rights’ for all in society are not linked to the
Republican ideas Nguyen
Van Vinh encountered in the Human Rights League and
among the
Freemasons.And Nguyen Van Vinh’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Les
misérables reveals his
keen interest in social questions, which we see
again in Vinh’s realist and moving writings on the
Vietnamese village
and the misery that pervaded it.
38
Of course, by translating these works into Vietnamese,
Nguyen Van
Vinh also made a major contribution to the development
of Viet-
namese literature. New genres of comedy, tragedy,
satire, etc., were
introduced into an already extremely rich Vietnamese
cultural her-
itage. Nguyen
Van Vinh’s translations of Molière, especially Le malade
imaginaire and Le
bourgeois gentilhomme, were particularly important in
the development of modern Vietnamese satire and
theatre. For exam-
ple, Le bourgeois gentilhomme,
first performed on stage in France in 1670,
satirised the newly rich shopkeeper, M. Jourdain,
whose only concern
38
Nguyen
Van Vinh, ‘Le froid’ (The cold), AN,
25 January 1934.
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is to climb the social ladder as high as possible. To
this end, he is
ready to pay out large sums of money and to act in
ridiculous ways
in order to learn civilised manners, gallantry and all
those things he
needs to break into a class and a level of
civilisation which have been
out of his social reach. As Alexander Woodside has
brilliantly shown,
Nguyen
Van Vinh transformed a French bourgeois gentleman into
an equally ridiculous Vietnamese mandarin, who could
not decide
whether or not to wear his tunic to future social
occasions. As Wood-
side writes:
Perhaps the theatrical spectacle of a floundering
bourgeois nobleman
(or his Vietnamese mandarin alter ego) attempting to
learn more cos-
mopolitan ways tallied with anxieties and ambitions
common to many
Vietnamese intellectuals at that time. At least it may
have satisfied their
common intuition that even the antics of Molière’s
Monsieur Jourdain
might provide clues about how to acquire, or how not
to acquire more
‘modern’— a perhaps more effective—reflexes of
behavior.
39
However, Nguyen
Van Vinh did not limit his translations to the
French. He was no assimilationist. Already in 1907,
together with
Phan Ke Binh, he had published a quoc ngu translation
of the Chinese
classic Tam quoc (The Three Kingdoms)
and Nguyen Du’s
magisterial
Kim van kieu apparently
from its original demotic script, chu nom.
Vinh continually revised and improved upon the latter
throughout
the years. The seventh edition of 1923 would have a
print run of
30,000 copies.
40
Thus, not only did Vinh help bring French culture
to Vietnam, but he also made intelligible one of
Vietnam’s great
national classics to a population that had, by an
irony of history, been
cut off from it by the romanisation of the Vietnamese
writing script.
This was largely due to Nguyen Van Vinh’s emphasis on refining
and promoting quoc ngu and his
belief in the power of modern,
methodological translations (he was a French trained
interpreter). He
no doubt realised the effectiveness of transmitting
the Kim van kieu in
quoc ngu rather than
through oral tradition. It is also significant that he
did not translate this cultural masterpiece into
French first.
This translation of Kim van kieu served
Nguyen Van Vinh well
when
it came to diffusing it visually, apparently as
Vietnam’s first story film.
This occurred in Hanoi in 1924, thanks to Paul Thierry
and his stu-
dio,
Indochine Films et Cinémas. It was later shown elsewhere in
Vietnam.
41
Nguyen Van Vinh was also among the
first to introduce
39
Woodside, Community and Revolution,
p. 86.
40
Nguyen Van
Vinh (transl.), Kim Van Kieu (Hanoi: Hieu Ich-Ky, 1923).
41
Quoc Anh, ‘Nguoi Viet Nam dau tien co vu cho dien
anh’ (The first Vietnamese to
turn a film), Tuoi Tre Chu Nhat (31
December 1995).
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Western-style theatre to Vietnam in 1920, when he
directed his trans-
lation of
Molière’s Le malade imaginaire. This Vietnamese adaptation of
Molière was performed in Hanoi, and it was apparently
a great suc-
cess. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Western style
theatre, literature
and cinematography would continue to grow. But this
younger gener-
ation would go further than Nguyen Van Vinh. Rather than borrow-
ing and customising the French theatre or novel to
Vietnamese reali-
ties via translation or adaptations, young militants
such as Vu Trong
Phung and Nhat Linh staged their own plays in Hanoi
(Vu Trong
Phung’s Khong mot tieng vang/Not a sound)
and attack the Vietnamese
mandarinate through their own novels and leitmotifs
(Nhat Linh’s
Doan tuyet/Rupture), though
often borrowing heavily from the Western
model. Strangely, Nguyen Van Vinh never recognised the achieve-
ments of his young inheritors. He saw himself as the
only intermedi-
ary capable of negotiating the Western and Vietnamese
traditions.
Nguyen
Van Vinh, Quoc Ngu and the Vietnamese Public
42
The development of the quoc ngu newspaper
was the other way by
which Nguyen
Van Vinh counted on implementing his socio-cultural
programme. He was not the first to recognise the
importance of the
vernacular script developed by Portuguese and French
Jesuits. Pétrus
Vinh Ky, a Catholic, had gone far in popularizing quoc
ngu at the
end of the nineteenth century. The Gia dinh bao had
already served
as Vietnam’s first newspaper in quoc ngu and
Chinese characters. Yet
Nguyen
Van Vinh would take these advances even further at the
beginning of the twentieth. As he wrote on the cover
of his translation
of Kim van kieu, the future
of Vietnam depended on the use of quoc ngu.
His journalist career certainly bore this out. In
1907, Nguyen Van
Vinh joined the Dang co yung bao,
a reformist paper countenanced by
the French. Vinh directed the quoc ngu section.
During this time, he
joined forces with the director of the paper, his old
friend F.H. Schnei-
der, in order to establish the foundation for a wider
diffusion of his
quoc ngu
translations and
essays on modernisation. Vinh had already
worked for Schneider in 1910 on the famous southern
newspaper, Luc
tinh tan van, as well as
two short-lived French language journals: Notre
journal (1908–1909)
and Notre revue (1910), both edited by Schneider.
Around 1911, Vinh and Schneider travelled together to
the North in
search of new experiences and work. With the support
of the colonial
42
For more on this, see: McHale, Print and Power.
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government, they launched the famous Dong duong tap
chi (Indochi-
nese Review, 1913–1916) in a double bid to head off
the violent anti-
colonialism that was on the rise at the time and to
promote the socio-
cultural development of Vietnam in collaboration with
the French. All
of these early papers, however, were severely censured
by the French
colonial government. During World War I, Vinh joined
Schneider
to run northern Vietnam’s first daily, the Trung
ban tan van (North-
ern Central Modern News) (1912–1942?). After World War
I, he also
joined another famous scholar, Tran Trong Kim, to
publish an edu-
cational and scientific review for youth, which would
run well into the
1930s.
At the outset, Nguyen Van Vinh hoped to reach a growing Viet-
namese reading public in order to promote his main
ideas. By 1917,
there were an estimated 75,000 Vietnamese school
students, and by
1921 the total number of students was estimated at
around 150,000.
43
By 1931, Nguyen
Van Vinh considered that the Vietnamese reading
public numbered around 10,000 people (apparently just
for Tonkin).
44
In the Indochinese Review,
Nguyen Van Vinh
penned hundreds of arti-
cles on Western hygiene, medicine, sports, literature
and current
events. I have not yet been able to carry out a
systematic survey of
Nguyen
Van Vinh’s articles in the Indochinese Review and the Trung
bac
tan van. However,
judging from a close reading of the Annam nouveau,
conceived by Nguyen
Van Vinh as a blueprint for creating a ‘New
Annam’, one of the interesting things about the man is
the wide range
of his essays and their depth. Like other
reform-minded colleagues,
he wrote at length on educational and political
reform, as well as the
need to develop Vietnamese commerce and society.
However, Nguyen
Van Vinh also had a curiosity for social questions,
which led him to
write some fascinating studies on popular Vietnamese
art, astrology,
gambling, cooking, law, birth certificates,
nationality, entrepreneurs
and so on.
45
It would thus be wrong to think that Vinh was merely
an elitist
who was only concerned with reading and translating
Molière from
43
Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam,
p. 80.
44
Nguyen
Van Vinh, ‘La presse
indigène libre’ (The indigenous free press), AN (20
April 1931).
45
See, for example, Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Art populaire’
(Popular art), AN (1 January
1934), ‘Géomancie’ (Geomancy), AN (28 July 1932), ‘Jeux permis et jeux interdits’ (Permis-
sible and forbidden games), AN (12
May 1935), ‘Les bonnes choses d’Annam’ (The good
things of Annam), AN (28 July
1932), ‘Etat civil’ (Birth certificate), AN (1
January 1933),
‘La
tuberculose’
(Tuberculosis), AN (4
June 1933), ‘La question du nuoc-mam vue du Tonkin’
(The question of Nuoc-mam as seen from Tonkin), AN (28
September 1933), among
many others.
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the original French. One of the less well-known sides
of this man is his
deep interest in social questions, marginal groups,
and above all in the
countryside and the plight of the peasantry. Vinh’s
very early interest
in the ‘peasant question’ undoubtedly came from his
poor, rural
background and the nine years he spent in the
countryside as a low-
level colonial bureaucrat. Few other Western-educated
Vietnamese
intellectuals had Nguyen Van Vinh’s rural background or hands-on
knowledge of peasant affairs and their misery. It may
have been
further stimulated by the novels he translated on the
misery of the
seventeenth century French peasantry or their
exploitation by the
monarchical system.
Recipients of particular scorn from Vinh in these
articles were the
mandarins, whom he considered to be exploiting the
peasants and
against whom he saw the French doing little.
46
Vinh set upon them
with a vengeance, particularly in the more
censure-free pages of the
Annam nouveau.
47
Part of his idea was to try to provoke the French into
doing something, or at least try to inform and to move
the French-
reading Vietnamese urbanites, who constituted the only
elite capable
of intervening on behalf of the peasants in his view.
Vinh dedicated
himself to finding modern solutions to these perennial
problems. He
consulted with experts such as Pierre Gourou on ways
of improving
the plight of the peasants.
48
He wrote essays on how to use modern
science and Vietnamese ingenuity in order to bring
clean, running
water to the countryside.
49
One of the most interesting social solu-
tions that Nguyen
Van Vinh suggested was the development of local
industries, such as tobacco and silk. He also put
forward plans for
developing lending associations and taxes to help fund
rural devel-
opment projects, such as electrification and the
extension of drinking
water beyond the cities.
50
While these questions cannot be studied in
detail here, it is clear from scores of articles that Nguyen Van Vinh
was very concerned about social and rural problems, as
well as trying
to find solutions to them. As he wrote in a famous
article in 1934: ‘If
46
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Misère et
colonisation’ (Misery and colonisation), AN (23
February 1933).
47
The Trung Bac Tan Van was censored
much more than Annam Nouveau.
48
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Les industries villageoise’ (Village industries), AN (28 January
1934).
49
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘La question d’eau potable dans nos villages’ (The problem of
drinking water in our villages), AN (2
July 1933) and ‘L’eau dans le village’ (Water in
the village), AN (13 August
1933).
50
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Le financement des
entreprises d’intérêt rural’ (Financing rural
businesses),
AN (24 August
1933) and ‘Projet de création d’un établissement de crédit foncier
privilégié’ (Project to
create an establishment for favourable land lending), AN (9
November
1933).
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I take it upon myself to treat all of these questions
on the village, and
this in a paper targeting almost exclusively
urbanites, it is because
the village is the key to progress in this country
which is essentially
agricultural’.
51
Any definitive judgment of Nguyen Van Vinh will have
to take into account his detailed studies of
Vietnamese villages, their
problems and possible reforms.
52
For
communist nationalists like Vo
Nguyen
Giap and Truong Chinh were not the only Vietnamese con-
cerned about ‘The Peasant Problem’, the title of a
famous essay they
published in the 1930s.
The press was important to Nguyen Van Vinh for another reason.
It was not enough to write in quoc ngu.
Like Pham Quynh and oth-
ers, he wanted to systematise and modernise it
completely, so that
it would be able to express Vietnamese scientific,
economic, literary
and cultural ideas with unprecedented precision.
Again, this subject
is a vast one that merits a separate study. Suffice it
to say that Vinh
wrote extensively in Vietnamese and French on the need
to unify and
systematise Vietnamese orthography and grammar, so as
to augment
its effectiveness, clarity and impact. He promoted a
standardisation of
quoc ngu for teaching
Vietnamese in schools. He wanted clear and con-
cise etymologies for all words, especially those
coming from Chinese.
53
He wrote at length on Vietnamese phonetics,
transliterations, adapta-
tions, and translations from French and Chinese. He
even published
his (re)translations, step-by-step, of the Kim van
kieu, explaining in a
public forum to both French and Vietnamese readers the
complexity
of the enterprise and its cultural importance. Some of
his most fasci-
nating reflections on quoc ngu and
its linguistic functioning are to be
fond in the Annam nouveau.
Through this newspaper, he tried to make
quoc ngu known not
just to the Vietnamese, but also to the French. He
was even an early advocate of teaching Vietnamese to
the French. He
believed that any educational progress between peoples
must go in
both directions. It was first on his list for bringing
together the French
and the Vietnamese, despite the racial and colonial
chasm that effec-
tively divided them in practice.
54
51
Nguyen
Van Vinh, ‘Le village et la cité’ (The
village and the city), AN (25 March
1934).
52
See especially: Martin Grossheim, Nordvietnamesische
Dorfgemeinschaften: Kontinuität
und Wandel (North
Vietnamese Village Associations: Continuity and Change) (Ham-
burg: Mitteilungen des Instituts für Asienkunde, No. 282,
1997), especially Chapters 2
and 3.
53
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘L’orthographe
du quoc-ngu’ (The spelling of quoc-ngu),
AN (25
September 1932, 29 September 1932).
54
Nguyen
Van Vinh, ‘Les noms annamites’ (Annamese names), AN (21
April 1931, 25
April 1931, 28 April 1931).
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Nguyen Van Vinh
and the Problem
of ‘Civilisation’ in a Time of Domination
More recent discussions of Nguyen Van Vinh cite with derision his
famous article, ‘Making Fun of Everything’ and Vinh’s
attacks on
what he saw as the shortcomings of Vietnamese culture,
such as cus-
toms related to childbearing, betel chewing,
corruption, superstitions,
etc. Confronted by the West via colonialism, Vinh was
determined to
regenerate Vietnam by attacking what he saw as its
social vices and
out-dated manners and dress. While it might be argued
that this was
very much a Western approach, it was nevertheless
designed with a
cultural programme if not a nationalist goal in mind:
to show that
Vietnam was just as civilised as other nations,
including the coloniser.
Between 1913 and 1915, Vinh wrote dozens of articles
and essays
about the need to changeVietnamese society in order to
make it more
‘civilised’ (van minh). Indeed,
one of his greatest preoccupations during
his career was to put Vietnam back onto the map of
‘civilised’ nations.
Troubled by the implications of Social Darwinism, Nguyen Van Vinh
saw a regeneration of Vietnam in the careful adaptation
of Western
modernisation to Vietnamese society via the French
colonial project.
To take but one example, he considered modes of dress
to be an
important indicator of a country’s level of
civilisation. In an essay
entitled, ‘A Question of Dress’, Vinh states at the
outset how he sees
this apparently superficial socio-cultural
transformation as one of the
keys to establishing parity with the West and other
‘modernising’
countries across the globe:
Like the Turks, the Siamese adopted European dress except
for one
detail. The Turks kept the fez,
the Siamese kept the sampot. Both
have just abandoned these last vestiges of their
traditional costume.
They want to affirm in this way that their nations are
completely
Europeanised and that from now on they intend to
resemble, from
the outside, all the peoples of European civilisation.
[…] In Asia, the
Japanese adopted European dress after having organised
themselves in
a European fashion. The Chinese did the same, and
after them the
Siamese. In so doing, all of them have succumbed to
the mystique
of the influence of outward appearances on inner
transformations.
Backward peoples have always thought, upon their first
encounter with
European civilisation, or at least with European
organisation, that they
had to adopt exterior manners in order to affirm their
desire to equal
the European in the eyes of the world and in their own
eyes.
55
55
Nguyen
Van Vinh, ‘Question de costume’ (The question of dress), AN
(3 November
1932).
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Turning to Vietnam, Vinh regretted the slow transition
to Western
styled clothing. He admitted that a certain
standardisation was occur-
ring thanks to the dress code required of bureaucrats
and soldiers.
He saw in the adoption of Western clothes and styles
an increase in
civilisational status for Vietnam, closer to that of
the Europeans and
further from what he saw as backward Vietnamese
practices and cus-
toms. However, changes in dress had to go hand-in-hand
with shifts
in ways of thinking. Vinh deplored social misfits who
dressed in West-
ern garb, but who were more interested in social
acceptance by the
French than in the modernisation of thought that
should accompany
this sartorial change. In this context, one can better
understand why
Nguyen
Van Vinh was so keen to transform Molière’s M. Jourdain
into a status-seeking, ridiculously dressed mandarin.
Like Phan Chu
Trinh, Nguyen
Van Vinh also attacked what he saw as out-dated feu-
dal rituals (the lay
56
in particular) of the mandarins and their king. For
Vinh, civilised Vietnam had to follow the examples of
independent
Thailand, Turkey, China and Japan. Like Vietnamese
cadres slipping
into slick Western suits today, the same ones dressing
up ‘hill-tribes’
in colourful garb for foreign tourists,
57
Vinh regretted terribly that for-
eigners continued to see Vietnamese dressed in tunics
and traditional
garb, observing them like museum pieces from the past
(‘spectacles amu-
sants
pour les Européens’,
as he wrote).
58
Westernisation was ineluctable,
even a good thing he argued, in order to demonstrate
the develop-
ment and advanced nature of the nation and its place
in a wider
civilised order:
There are thus profound reasons behind the changes
adopted by the
Turks, the Egyptians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the
Siamese, in both
the details and in the whole of their traditional
dress. It is a step
towards the unity of man in the manifestations of his
collective life,
to the chagrin of fans of the picturesque and of local
colour.
59
However, clothing was not enough. Nguyen Van Vinh wanted to
show the French that the Vietnamese could be just as
civilised as them
in the fine arts. His desire to stage Molière’s Le
malade imaginaire with
Vietnamese actors in the early 1920s was specifically
conceived, at
least in part, to show the French that the Vietnamese
were entirely
capable of understanding and interpreting this complex
piece of
Western culture. As an internal French police report
even conceded:
56
A type of low bow with joined hands.
57
Similar to the Euro-Americans who liked to dress their
‘Indians’ in traditional
garb for photo opportunities, world fairs and museum
objects.
58
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Question de costume’.
59
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Question de costume’.
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Vinh’s version of Molière’s work had the ‘aim of
showing the French
population in Annam that the inhabitants of this
country know just
as well as [the French] how to appreciate the works of
Molière and
other famous [Western] writers’.
60
Culture was a weapon for erasing
the humiliation of colonial domination.
Nguyen
Van Vinh had similar ideas in mind in putting Kim van kieu
on the big screen. As he wrote in the Trung bac tan
van, this film showed
the French and the world that the Vietnamese were not
a ‘savage
race’ (going moi ro). This film
would allow the Vietnamese ‘to let the
world know’ that the Vietnamese were also ‘a part of
humanity’, and
not a primitive or backward people. Interestingly, he
added that the
film was one of the newest, fastest and effective ways
to get Vietnam’s
message heard.
61
Of course, Nguyen
Van Vinh, like many others across Asia, Europe
and elsewhere, was buying into the Western definition
of ‘civility’,
‘civilisation’ and ‘manners’.
62
And for those who focus on the ‘pre-
colonial’ period or on the uniqueness of Vietnamese
tradition, culture
or identity, Nguyen
Van Vinh’s westernising programme might seem
strange, superficial, or even annoying. All the same,
I still think that
Vinh should be taken seriously, for he was not alone
in his thinking.
Indeed, one should not forget that similar ideas
linking ‘civilisation’,
‘Westernisation’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘nationalism’
could be found in
Japan, Thailand, China, and even in the United States.
63
The adapta-
tion of Western culture, manners and dress modes in
Meiji-era Japan
provides revealing comparisons (as does the West’s
borrowing from
Asia for centuries). For young Meiji nationalists,
adopting Western
methods was seen as a way of establishing
civilisational parity with
the Western powers themselves.
64
The cultural policy of the ‘New
Life’ programme in Republican China also comes to
mind. In South-
east Asia, one need only think of the ‘cultural
mandates’ adopted by
Pibul Songkram at the end of the 1930s, which called
on the Thais to
wear western clothing, greet each other with a
friendly ‘hello’ (sawat-
60
Armée du
Rhin, ‘Au sujet du journaliste et imprimeur Nguyen Van Vinh’, p. 1.
61
Nguyen Van Vinh, Trung Bac Tan Van, cited in Quoc Anh, ‘Nguoi Viet
Nam dau
tien co
vu cho dien anh’.
62
On the process of civilisation and culture, see the
classic work of Norbert
Elias, Civilisation
des mœurs (Civilisation
of Manners) (Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1999), 2nd
edition.
63
Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American
Tourists in France from Jefferson to the
Jazz Age, (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 3–84.
64
See the
excellent study of Lionel Babicz, Le Japon face à la Corée à l’époque Meiji
(Japan and its Relations with Korea during the Meiji
Era) (Paris, Maisonneuve &
Larose,
2002), Chapters 4–7.
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24
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dii), or kiss their wives
goodbye on the cheek before going off to work.
For Pibul, these were all signs of ‘civilisation’ (siwilai).
In fact, some
of the literary, artistic and manner changes that we
find in colonial
Vietnam are remarkably similar to those occurring in
Thailand and
no doubt Meiji Japan.
65
The Westernisation of a country did not nec-
essarily require direct European colonial intervention
66
—even if, fas-
cinatingly, Meiji-era Japan behaved exactly like the
European colo-
nial powers when they were in Korea, delivering a
remarkably simi-
lar mission
civilisatrice.
67
Thus what Nguyen
Van Vinh was doing with
discourses on ‘progress’, ‘civilisation’ and
‘modernity’ was not just a
Franco-Vietnamese or francophonie affair.
68
The complex intersections
that occurred in colonial Vietnam were therefore part
of a larger his-
torical process of global interactions accelerated
during the colonial
period, but which, it should never be forgotten, had
long existed in
Asia before the ‘arrival’ of the West.
69
It is in this context of van minh,
I think, that one should also judge Nguyen Van Vinh’s attacks
on tra-
ditional society and culture, as well has his
proto-nationalist desire to
establish civilisational equality with the coloniser
and the rest of the
‘modern world’. His desire to wear Western clothes, a
colonial hat,
65
For more on the question of civilisation in Thailand,
see the excellent article
by Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The quest for “Siwilai”: a
geographical discourse of civ-
ilizational thinking in late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century Siam’, The Journal
of Asian Studies, Vol. 59,
No. 3 (2000), pp. 528–549, as well as Annette Hamilton’s
article in Craig J. Reynolds (ed.), National
Identity and Its Defenders, Thailand, 1939–
1989 (Clayton: Monash University,
1991). Most studies (especially those in French)
put the French colonisation of Indochina in a
problematical and geographical vac-
uum, cut off from Asia, and anchored in a
schematically ‘francophone’ framework,
too often isolated from comparisons of a larger scope.
Two excellent exceptions:
the multidisciplinary study of Denys Lombard (ed.), Rêver
l’Asie: Exotisme et littéra-
ture coloniale (Dreaming of
Asia: Exoticism and Colonial Literature) (Paris: EHESS,
1993) and
Claudine Salmon (ed.), Récits de voyage des Asiatiques: genres, mentalités,
concep-
tion de
l’espace (Asian
Travelogues: Genres, Mentalities, Conceptions of Space) (Paris:
EFEO/EHESS,
1996).
66
I will treat the subject of French and Vietnamese
perceptions of non-colonial
modernisation in Thailand and Japan elsewhere.
67
Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (eds), Colonial
Modernity in Korea (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
68
Like Siam at the time, Vietnam could have developed
without the direct
colonisation of France, or else under the aegis of
another European power. France
was never destined to colonise Vietnam. For more about
Thailand, see the excellent
article by Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The quest for
“Siwilai”’, pp. 528–549.
69
A type of modernising globalisation that even France
has not escaped in
the face of other ‘imperialisms’ or ‘mondialisations’.
See: Hubert Védrine and
Dominique
Moïsi, Les cartes de la France à l’heure de la mondialisation (France in an Age
of Globalisation) (Paris: Fayard, 2000; English
translation, Washington: Brookings
Institution,
2003).
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or to speak French with his Vietnamese friends may
have been more
than showing off or a symbolic desire to be French
instead of Viet-
namese.
70
Interestingly, many Vietnamese, not least of all Nguyen Van Vinh
and Pham Quynh, took the French discourse on
civilization which
had so troubled them, linked it to a pre-existing
Vietnamese sense
of regional cultural superiority, and came up with
their own dis-
course of civilisational superiority in relation to the
Lao, the Khmer
and other colonised ethnic groups sharing Indochina
with them.
For constructing a discourse on civilisation also
meant having favor-
able comparisons to lesser developed peoples.
71
While France justified
her domination over Vietnam by the superiority of
Western civili-
sation and modernity, Nguyen Van Vinh and others defended their
French-favoured position in colonial Indochina by
arguing that they
were more ‘modern’, ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’ than
the other
Indochinese members. This gave the Vietnamese a
privileged place
within the Franco-Vietnamese development of colonial
Indochina
and allowed them to say that they were superior to
those much
needed ‘others’.
72
In response to a Khmer nationalist’s opposition to
Vietnamese immigration to Cambodia, the Annam
nouveau responded
that the Vietnamese had come to Cambodia for the same
Darwinist
reasons that the Europeans had gone into Asia and the
Japanese into
Manchuria in 1931: ‘Unless the Cambodians want to
remain isolated
like savages in central Africa, it is in their
interest to receive with open
arms all the messengers of civilisation [meaning the
Vietnamese].
Such does not seem to be the way of thinking of
several of them
[the Cambodians]’.
73
This complex
idea of civilisation clearly cut in
70
A very pertinent analysis of this complex question of
civilisation was done by
Norbert
Elias, Civilisation des mœurs. That said, it would be interesting to know what
Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans and other Asians sent to
the European fronts of WWI
thought of this butchery. Clearly, Elias’ view of a
progressive amelioration of Western
civilisation had regressed barbarically. See: Stéphane
Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette
Becker, 14–18:
retrouver la guerre (Paris:
Gallimard, 2000), pp. 44–50. Nguyen
Van Vinh
was in France during WWI, interpreting for Vietnamese
soldiers. I do not know if
this contradiction struck him. It does not seem so.
71
Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The quest for “Siwilai”’, pp.
528–549. Alexander
Woodside,
again, has some illuminating thoughts on earlier periods of Vietnamese
history.
Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model (Cambridge, Mass., Har-
vard
University Press, 1988), p. 235.
72
For Pham
Quynh and Nguyen Van
Vinh’s thinking on this matter, see: Goscha,
Vietnam
or Indochina?
73
Hy Tong, ‘Que
se passe-t-il au Cambodge?’ (What is happening in Cambodia?), AN
(20 August
1933); and also Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina?
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many
directions. And how the French colonial discourse hooked up
with more
ancient Vietnamese notions of civilising missions is one of
its more
interesting offshoots. The other, of course, was the modernist
communist
ideology young Vietnamese spread in their revolutionary
missions in
Laos and Cambodia, and this well into the 1950s.
74
This
hierarchic
Western conceptualising of civilisation might seem absurd
in this day
of ‘Asian values’ and ‘clash of civilisations’. However, it was
a real
concern for many at the time and a complex cultural process
that merits
much greater attention, even today.
Interestingly,
just as unfortunate misunderstandings between Viet-
namese and
the Khmer weakened the Vietnamese civilising discourse
in western
Indochina, so too did ‘Franco-Annamese collaboration’
suffer from
colonial encounters pointing up the inherent inequality
between the
coloniser and colonised, civilised or not. One such inci-
dent (it
was not the first one for Nguyen
Van Vinh) came to the
fore in
1933, when a fight broke out between Vietnamese and French
movie-goers
in the Cinéma Majestic. Nguyen
Van Vinh lamented this
painful
incident in print, arguing implicitly that it stemmed from a
form of
colonial racism. He asked everyone to consider all sides of
the issue
before pinning the blame on the Vietnamese simply because
they were
Vietnamese. He asked the French to abandon their colonial
superiority,
which was at the root of this sort of humiliating problem.
75
But what
really hurt Nguyen
Van Vinh was that shortly after the pub-
lication of
his article, he received an official warning from the colonial
government
accusing him of being ‘anti-French’ in his writings on this
incident.
76
Vinh could
not understand such an unfair label: ‘By golly,
it is a
handy term, and clever is he who will come and give us a defini-
tion of the
word anti-French’.
He finished by saying that ‘the day when
all the
French living here will accept that all malice be punished, from
wherever it
comes, even from a Frenchman; that the Annamese are
also human
beings; that they must react individually to unjust aggres-
sions; and
that in so doing they will have all good Frenchmen with
them, then
on that day Franco-Vietnamese collaboration will cease to
be a
meaningless term’.
77
Colonial ‘civilisation’ thus had serious con-
74
For more on
this subject, see my ‘Vietnam and the world outside: the case
of
Vietnamese Communist advisors in Laos (1948–1962)’, South East Asia Research, in
press.
Communist Vietnamese modernisers were well aware of the civilising discourse
of Nguyen Van Vinh regarding
Western Indochina. See: Van Kien Dang, Vol. II (Party
Documents)
(Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Su That, 1977), pp. 476–477.
75
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Autour d’un incident
pénible’ (On a
painful incident), AN (15
June 1933).
76
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Antifrançais’ (Anti-French), AN (27 August 1933).
77
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Rapprochement’ (Reconciliation), AN (6 July 1933).
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tradictions,
precisely because the French and the Vietnamese were
not equal.
And Nguyen Van Vinh
knew it.
Nevertheless,
Vinh’s conviction that the modernisation of Vietnam
could only
happen via an alliance with the French corresponded
with the
official colonial credo. And this concordance facilitated
French
efforts to ‘associate’ Vietnamese like him to the French colo-
nial
project in Indochina, especially since the French were not the
only ones
who wanted to gain the confidence of the Vietnamese.
Nguyen Van Vinh and the Colonial Roots of French Francophonie
French
civilisation was not the only choice available to the Viet-
namese
during the colonial period. And French colonial administra-
tors of the
time were perfectly aware of this.
78
Indeed, the
desire of the
French to
accelerate this cultural influence in Vietnam after World
War I
stemmed from the fear that their culture and ideas were not
reaching
enough Vietnamese elites and certainly not the masses. In
fact, they
worried that other cultures, both the Chinese and Anglo-
German
ones, could exert potentially greater influence over the Viet-
namese. And
the French decision to bet on Nguyen
Van Vinh is the
best proof
of this.
Governor-General
Albert Sarraut (mandates: 1911–1913, 1917–1919)
and his
director of political affairs, Louis Marty, were determined to
prevent
German propaganda and Chinese influence from reaching
the
Vietnamese elite via Chinese translations and Chinese cultural
bonds that
continued to link Vietnam to the outside world in spite of
the French
colonial state. Sarraut informed the Ministry of Colonies
that Asians
in general and Vietnamese in particular still knew lit-
tle about
France: ‘English being the only European language that
is widely
used in the Far East’, he wrote, ‘editors of Chinese books
in Shanghai
and other ports can only find good translators for this
language
among their compatriots’. By extension, the Chinese trans-
lations
that continued to make their way into Vietnam did not spread
information
about France, but rather about other European coun-
tries, the
British and the Germans.
Sarraut was
shocked to learn that much of what the Vietnamese
knew about
the world and Europe still came from non-French publi-
cations,
like Kang Youwei’s (K’ang-Yeou-Wei) multi-volume account
of his
voyage to Europe. To support his argument, Sarraut cited a
78
See: McHale,
Print and Power,
Chapter 1.
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report from
the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient penned by Noël
Péri in
1911 on the exams taken by the mandarins. This report
revealed
that the French were not the ‘masters of public opinion’. Péri
and others
explained that Chinese publications still loomed large on
the shelves
of local mandarin libraries in upper Vietnam. More wor-
rying, ‘the
works of K’ang-Yeou-Wei continued to be in great demand
and
circulated throughout the colony, despite the prohibitions that
had imposed
a ban on all Chinese pamphlets, whatever they be’.
79
The
translation into Chinese of scores of German works only rein-
forced
these fears during World War I.
This was
the context within which Sarraut and a remarkable
team of
Vietnamese specialists recruited francophone intellectuals like
Pham Quynh,
Bui Quang Chieu, and Nguyen
Van Vinh to promote
French
works in Indochina and weaken foreign influences on this
Vietnamese
‘public opinion’ still operating outside of French colo-
nial
control. Sarraut’s team placed these Vietnamese at the head
of major
government-backed newspapers, such as the Nam phong for
Pham Quynh,
La tribune indigène for Bui Quang Chieu and Dong duong
tap chi and then the Trung bac tan van for Nguyen Van Vinh. Sarraut
relied in
particular on Marty and Schneider to implement a ‘method-
ical plan’
to sever Vietnam from its Asian context and to block non-
French
influences from reaching Vietnamese elites. Instead they were
to favour
the promotion of French cultural projects in Indochina. The
French
wanted to make French culture, literature, modernisation, and
civilisation
known to the Vietnamese, and, most importantly, in Viet-
namese. Sarraut’s team needed quickly to
fill in the gap of ‘incompre-
hension’
that separated these two peoples, as Vayrac’s opening cita-
tion to
this article pointed up.
Even after
the war, the importance of making modern France
known in
Asia and in Vietnam remained a colonial priority. Marty
reminded
Sarraut in March 1919 that, ‘in modern Chinese literature,
books
inspired by post eighteenth century French works, or transla-
tions of
them, are extremely rare. In contrast, the Far East is over-
flowing
with books on all subjects translated from English or from
German.’
Marty hailed Sarraut’s decision to ‘create and develop in
collaboration
with M. Schneider, French propaganda organs written
in the
national Annamese language and which have immediately won
over public
favour. These are the organs which need to be maintained
while
simultaneously completing the organisation of our propaganda
79
‘Le
Gouverneur-Général de l’Indochine à M. le Ministre des Colonies’ (The Governor
General of
Indochina to the Minister of Colonies), 15 September 1917, Collection
Indochine,
Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine, 65409, CAOM.
Page 29 |
‘the modern
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29
EJEAS 3.1.
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institutions’.
For Marty, these propaganda institutions had to func-
tion ‘in an
independent manner in appearance, but under the very
close
control of the Government of the Colony and its local admin-
istrations’.
It was imperative, he said, that they ‘inform and instruct’.
In short,
they were designed above all to make France known to the
Vietnamese
and in their language, as well as French modernity and
culture and
the importance of the mère patrie in the world. What was
needed was
an official propaganda outlet for the colonised:
Our subjects
and protégés need to have at their disposal an infor-
mational
paper, one which can inform them precisely, with explica-
tive
commentaries that satisfy their legitimate curiosity, without any
unwholesome
or tendentious insinuations, about the overall situation
of the
country as well as external affairs. It is also necessary that the
government
be able to bring about, through intelligent advertising,
the
preparation of a number of administrative measures and reforms
that will be
even better accepted [by the Vietnamese masses] in that
they will
have been well explained and better understood. This organ
[…] must
have an essentially educative role. It must allow the indige-
nous
[Vietnamese] to understand the utility and the intensity of the
immense
labour that is being done for their own good. They must also
learn to
always know better France, her generous ideas, the works of
her thinkers
and philosophers. It must in a word contribute to bringing
them to
realize very clearly that the protecting Nation [France] is not
taking them
for a ride. If it is sufficiently developed, it must work to
create
imperceptibly a genuine public spirit.
80
The
colonial state needed Nguyen
Van Vinh. Vayrac, a censor of the
press in
Tonkin, had recruited Nguyen
Van Vinh for this project and
was one of
his close friends. In 1937, he explained the basis of this
French
propaganda and the role of Nguyen
Van Vinh in it in an
internal
report entitled: ‘The efforts undertaken in Tonkin over the
previous
twenty-five years to furnish good reading to the Annamese’.
If we can
believe Vayrac, well before World War I, Nguyen Van
Vinh had
actually been more interested in translating the works of
eighteenth
century French political thinkers than the comedies of
Molière and
the satires of the preceding century. Vayrac did not hide
the fact
that Vinh had first ‘translated those French philosophers who
paved the
way for the Revolution. We came to believe that he had
made six or
seven successive translations of the Contrat social, which
circulated
in secret’. Vayrac did his best ‘in conversations to persuade
[Nguyen Van Vinh] that
these were not the works he should translate
80
‘L. Marty
à M. Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine’ (L. Marty to the Governor
General of
Indochina), 3 March 1919, Collection Indochine, Gouverneur Général
de
l’Indochine, d. 65407, CAOM. See also: Agathe Larcher-Goscha, ‘La
légitimation
française
en Indochine’, Vol.
I, pp. 122–131.
Page 30 |
30
christopher
e. goscha
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first, for
the Annamese, in their present state of evolution, could not
gain any
benefit from them’. Vayrac claimed to have ‘taken years
to convince
M. Vinh that he should start with books which were
universally
admired and translated into all languages, like the Fables of
La Fontaine
and Perrault’s Contes’.
81
It is clear
that Nguyen Van Vinh
did not
choose all the Western works he translated. It is clear, too,
that the
French did not want the revolutionary side of their national
literature
and cultural patrimony to be distributed in Vietnamese for
fear of the
challenges it could pose to their colonial rule. The major
cultural
works of the seventeenth century were apparently much more
appropriate
for the colonised. There were thus limits on which parts
of French
francophone literature could be broadcast in the colonies in
a time of colonisation.
Vayrac
explained that Vinh had already founded and run several
periodicals
in quoc ngu and
in Chinese characters; that he had briefly
run the Imprimerie
tonkinoise; and
that he had even been determined
to publish
a newspaper in quoc ngu, without colonial authorization,
‘in order
to get himself arrested and cause a scandal’. It was at
this point
that Vayrac stepped in and managed to convince Vinh
to move one
step closer to him and to the colonial government,
which
recognised that ‘there was a force to be used [in Nguyen Van
Vinh], but
in an orderly and legal way’. This overture to Nguyen Van
Vinh
coincided with Sarraut’s desire to put an end to foreign cultural
and
political influences in Vietnamese minds by promoting French
culture and
civilisation via the Vietnamese language itself. Nguyen
Van Vinh
was their man for upper Vietnam. Since Sarraut’s first
mandate,
Schneider and Vinh had already worked together to run
the Dong
Duong Tap Chi, and
then moved on to the Trung Bac Tan Van.
Vayrac
stated clearly that, ‘M. Vinh had finally found his calling. He
would
become the translator of the great works of French literature’.
Working
under Sarraut since the Governor General’s first mandate,
Schneider
had promoted French propaganda (that was the word)
through the
use of quoc ngu.
After World War I, this program would
continue in
French and in Vietnamese in order to reach the massive
non-French-speaking
Vietnamese readership. Louis Marty took over
from
Schneider after the war.
81
‘Rapport
au sujet des efforts faits au Tonkin depuis vingt-cinq ans environ pour fournir
de
bonnes
lectures aux Annamites’
(Report on the efforts undertaken in Tonkin over the
previous
twenty-five years to provide good reading for the Annamese), 17 February
1937, signed
E. Vayrac, Chef du Bureau des Publications Indigènes, RSTF/NF, d.
05219, CAOM.
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31
EJEAS 3.1.
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Indeed, the
role given to Nguyen
Van Vinh in the promotion of
French
culture in Vietnamese was primarily due to the French fear of
seeing
‘Asian opinion’ grow to their detriment in Vietnam, especially
if it was
manipulated by other Western powers (like the Germans
during the
World War I). There is thus a political side to Nguyen Van
Vinh’s
cultural and literary career that cannot be ignored. Looking
back on
this period in 1931, Nguyen
Van Vinh explained that his
role had
been to contribute to the development of a Vietnamese
public
sphere, since it was true that ‘Chinese language newspapers,
if not
dealing specifically with Annamese issues, still engendered an
Asian
opinion with regard to the European imperialist powers’.
82
Moreover,
well after World War I, Chinese characters continued to
occupy an
important place among Vietnamese intellectuals, writers
and even
readers. Until the end of the 1920s, for example, the French
used Nguyen Van Vinh to ‘fight
against the invasion of Chinese
novels’ by
creating for him the translation and publishing collection,
Lectures
Tonkinoises. In
1927 and 1928, Résident Supérieur René Robin
founded the
Almanach annamite and
the collection of translations La
pensée
de l’occident already
mentioned with exactly the same idea in
mind. Robin
put Vinh at the head of both collections and each
was
financed by the colonial state. However, severing the link with
the
Chinese-influenced world was not going to be an easy task.
Into the
1930s, according to Vayrac, many Vietnamese continued to
read
Chinese almanacs printed in Guangzhou or Shanghai. They
were,
Vayrac claimed, published in the ‘hundreds of thousands and
undoubtedly
millions of copies’. A large number of these Chinese
almanacs
sold in Indochina for as little as ten or twelve cents. Vayrac
explained
in his report that ‘only the administration [could] finance
an affair
that appear[ed] in such disastrous conditions’. The French
administration
bought and distributed most of Nguyen
Van Vinh’s
almanacs in
the course of this politico-cultural war, while La pensée
de
l’occident published
65,000 volumes of translations, and 1,800,000
short pamphlet
translations, of which one million were distributed
free thanks
to the colonial state.
83
The
pre-existing Asian context underpinning Vietnamese civili-
ation would
not disappear overnight. Unable to make themselves
understood
by the Vietnamese ‘masses’, colonial administrators had
82
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘La presse
indigène libre’, AN
(20 April, 1931).
83
From the ‘Rapport
au sujet des efforts faits au Tonkin’ pp. 9–11. ‘In all, La Pensée de
l’Occident
published 1,800,000
pamphlets of excellent translations, of which 1,000,000
were
distributed free of charge, and 65,000 volumes.’ These numbers seem wildly
exaggerated.
Page 32 |
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to redouble
their efforts to promote French culture and progress. In
other
words, colonial Westernisation had its limits, as Denys Lombard
has
correctly pointed out, even for the French in Indochina.
84
This is
why
knowledge of France, its language and the transmission of its
works in
eastern Indochina had to be carried out as much in French
as in
Vietnamese. And this is what made both translation and Nguyen
Van Vinh
such powerful tools
for diffusing colonial propaganda and
ideology.
85
Vayrac, who
knew the situation from the inside, conceded
as much, as
we saw in the introductory citation to this article. And
this is why
he felt even greater sadness upon learning of the death
of his
close friend, Nguyen
Van Vinh. One cannot deny the effects
of French
culture and language in Vietnam during the colonial era,
especially
in the cities and among the youth who were much more
versed in
French by the 1930s. However, one cannot claim either that
the French
language and culture immediately took hold in colonial
Vietnam by
displacing pre-existing forms, for it did not.
86
The French
decision to
develop a colonial francophonie project emerged precisely
because
Vietnamese knowledge of the French, their culture, and their
oeuvres was not sufficiently developed and
broadcast, and because the
French were
not the only ones competing for Vietnamese hearts and
minds.
French colonisers (like their British and Japanese counterparts
elsewhere)
badly needed ‘Nguyen
Van Vinhs’ to ‘bridge this total
incomprehension’
between two different peoples, to counter compet-
ing
influences to the French colonial presence, and to anchor French
colonisation
and civilisation in a foreign soil, one with a foundation
in Asia and
not in the West. Colonial modernity was complex; nor
was its
success a foregone conclusion. And culture was also a weapon.
Nguyen Van Vinh knew this, too.
84
Denys
Lombard, Le carrefour javanais, I: les limites de l’occidentalisation (The Javanese
Crossroads,
I: The Limits of Westernisation), introduction.
85
Paradoxically,
Vinh perhaps did more to spread French culture in Vietnam
during the
colonial era than later francophone Vietnamese writers would do during
the period
of decolonisation. The fact that he introduced French language and
culture into
Vietnam in the Vietnamese language and not in French is perhaps
why Nguyen Van Vinh, even to
this day, does not appear in the histories of French
‘francophonie’, which were more concerned with
works in the French language. The
case of Nguyen Van Vinh suggests
that the dissemination of French culture and
language in
Vietnam came through other means than, justement, the French language
itself.
86
Even less so
in Laos and Cambodia, where we find relatively little French
influence
and little interest in this modernity of which Nguyen Van Vinh and so
many other
Vietnamese dreamt.
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‘the modern
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33
EJEAS 3.1.
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Conclusion
It seems,
however, that Nguyen
Van Vinh was caught somewhere
between the
past and the present towards the end of his life, not
knowing
exactly which path to take in the end. The fact that he
was
financially destitute did not make things easier. Vinh still believed
in Western
modernisation and in the concomitant development of
a new
Vietnamese civilisation. Indeed, he provides us with a good
example of
someone who conceived of the modernisation of Viet-
nam in
colonial terms, and illustrates the difficulties that arise with
such a
position. In the early 1930s, when Chiang Kai-shek turned
to
‘traditional’ Confucian cultural politics in opposition to the hyper-
Westernisation
then in fashion in urban China, Nguyen
Van Vinh
responded
in an essay that it would indeed be necessary to renovate
and develop
a new and modern form of Confucianism in Vietnam, a
sort of
state ideology, but one which would be closely linked to ‘sci-
entific
progress’. Confucianism, Vinh stressed, would make a great
contribution
to Asian peoples because it contained the merit of allow-
ing
‘extraordinary stability’.
87
He would
never have said that twenty
years
earlier, but then again the Indochinese colony had just been
rocked by
nationalist revolts in 1930 and 1931 and a large fraction of
increasingly
Westernised Vietnamese youths were defecting to more
radical
politics—nationalism and communism being the most impor-
tant.
Ironically,
French colonial administrators who felt deeply Viet-
namese
after decades in Vietnam would try to push tradition and
authenticity
long before they were forced to under Vichy. Shaken
by the
nationalist rebellions of 1930 and worried by what he saw as
a young
generation of ‘uprooted’ Westernised Vietnamese (déracinés),
Pierre
Pasquier turned towards the past, towards the Annam d’autrefois
(Annam of
yesteryear), when he began to bring back Confucianism
and the
monarchy, whose power and authority the French had them-
selves
undermined. This occurred as young Vietnamese, under the
impetus of Nguyen Van Vinh and
others, were demanding new polit-
ical
institutions, more Western in style, to create a Nouveau Annam and
a real
national culture. One should not be surprised to find that Vinh
87
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Mouvement de la
nouvelle vie en Chine’
(The New Life movement
in China), AN
(11 October 1934).
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34
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and others
were enthusiastic supporters of the Siamese revolution
of 1932 and
the fall of the absolute monarchy there in favour of a
‘salutary
democracy’.
88
This
tension between ‘modernisation’ and ‘Westernisation’ on the
one hand
and the need to rethink ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ on the
other was
not unique to Vietnam. The difference is that in the con-
text of
French colonial domination, of censorship and surveillance,
Vietnamese
intellectuals did not have the real chance to ‘nationalize’
these
borrowings from the West, like their Japanese or Thai neighbors
could. The
Vietnamese did not run their own country independently,
since the
French had claimed that role for themselves. Nguyen Van
Vinh could
not become an independent minister of culture in Viet-
nam like
the famous Vichit Vathakan in Thailand. There could be no
Japanese kokugaku
let alone kokutai
in colonial
Vietnam, because such
nationalist
policies, even in cultural forms, would have inevitably been
tagged as anti-français.
89
The
‘nationalising’ of Western modernity in
Vietnam
similar to that in Japan or in Thailand could not fully take
place until colonial control had been relaxed or
overthrown. Nguyen
Van Vinh seems to have grasped this conundrum towards
the end of
his life.
But by the early 1930s, for all of his self-assurance
and zeal, Nguyen
Van Vinh did not know really which way to turn. Broke
and sidelined
by the French with the resurrection of the monarchy, Nguyen Van
Vinh was tired and perhaps increasingly bitter. Let us
end this study
of a complex character placed within a complex
colonial situation by
giving him the last word. Perhaps he will be better
able to reveal to
us the nature of the dilemma of colonial modernity. In
1934, he wrote
to the reformist scholar Huynh Thuc Khang of his
predicament. He
used the third person to reflect on his personal
odyssey:
It is the gulf separating the real scholar that I am
but who no longer
believes in the ideas and the methods of the past from
that of the
modern barbarian I believe myself to be. The product
of a mixed and
incomplete education, I tried to find something real
in this same past,
one which I certainly do not know as well as M. Huynh
Thuc Khang.
The [latter] appeared nonetheless to me as an
unsuspecting source of
life and light. We crossed paths on the same road and
each of us claims
88
‘La leçon de la révolution siamoise’
(The lesson of the Siamese revolution), AN (3 July
1932).
89
One has to applaud the new Alliance Française in Hanoi
for organising in the
summer of 2003 and to a packed house a reading of one
of Nguyen Huy Thiep’s
latest novels—in Vietnamese and French and with Nguyen Huy Thiep centre-stage.
Nguyen
Van Vinh dreamed of such a day.
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‘the modern barbarian’
35
EJEAS 3.1.
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to be on the right path precisely because it is not
yet known. But since,
after all, we are both going in search of the truth,
it is not imperative
that we have to take the same road.
90
Institut
d’Asie Orientale, Lyon
christopher.goscha@iao-lns.fr
90
Nguyen Van Vinh, ‘Une réponse de
M. Huynh-Thuc-Khang’ (A response to Mr
Huynh Thuc Khang), AN (22 May
1934). My thanks to Agathe Larcher-Goscha for
sharing this document with me.