Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

  At the beginning of the American war in Indochina certain American scholars of Vietnam argued against U.S. support for a regime in Saigon on the grounds that the Communists had already “captured” the forces of nationalism. Their intentions were to defend Ho Chi Minh, but their argument merely hardened the semantic paradox created by the administration officials who defined “Communism” and “nationalism” as mutually exclusive terms. “Nationalism” in Vietnam did not wait like a brass ring to be “captured” by the most energetic pursuer: it had to be created. After seventy years of French rule in the north, and ninety years in the south, even the idea that it ought to be created was not shared by all Vietnamese. “Vietnam” had, after all, disappeared. Since the French conquest there had been only “Indochina”19 — a loose federation that included the kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia along with the three pays of what had been Vietnam: Cochin China, Annam, and Tonkin. Many of those brought up on French maps would be deceived by this new administrative nomenclature. The Francophile Vietnamese were misled by it, but so also was the Comintern, which in the 1930’s made a false start with the “Indochinese Communist Party.” On the other hand, many Vietnamese — the Catholics being the prime example — saw the Vietnamese people, but only some of them, as forming the basis for a political movement. Many Vietnamese were “nationalists” in the sense that they looked forward to the disappearance of French rule, but few conceived of the creation of a nation-state and only one group succeeded in organizing on a national basis. Regionalism, class interests, or a traditional outlook defeated the rest of them. Because the French decided to contest Vietnamese independence, these defects showed up very plainly at the moment of engagement. Among all the anticolonial political movements, only the Viet Minh actually created a “nation” strong enough to defeat the French armies. Apart from the specific political organization the Viet Minh made from the society as it emerged from French occupation, “Vietnam” was no more than a theory.

  By the end of the Second World War no one, not even the handful of Vietnamese royalists, hoped to reconstruct the old empire. In the years of their occupation the French had altered Vietnam to the point where, like Humpty Dumpty, it could not be put back together again. Their aim had been to preserve rather than to change Vietnamese society, but the changes occurred in any case, and largely as a result of economic measures.

  Once they had conquered Vietnam, the French looked to their new colony to become a source of raw materials for their burgeoning industrial plant and a buyer for their manufactured goods. But in the mid-nineteenth century Vietnam was only a potential source. To achieve the common aim of all colonialist countries, France first had to transform what was essentially a subsistence economy serving the Vietnamese peasants and landlords into an economy that produced surpluses for the international market. Given the particular geography of the country, the French enterprise consisted of the creation of large plantations and the development of mines to extract the rich deposits of coal, zinc, and tin. The restriction of Vietnamese trade to French markets came as a corollary. To encourage and support the establishment of French colonists and entrepreneurs, the French administration built roads, canals, railroads, and market cities linking the Vietnamese interior with the shipping routes. These public works benefited the French almost exclusively at the time, but the French officials financed them largely by an increase of taxes on the Vietnamese peasantry. Following metropolitan practice, they levied taxes in money instead of kind, and upon trade in commodities more than upon property values and capital. They also established a government monopoly on salt, alcohol, and opium, and raised the prices on these goods to six times what they had been before the occupation.20 The result was a sudden growth in the number of landless and impoverished people — people ready to accept employment in the French plantations and mines under the most exploitative of terms. The French, however, took this new work force for granted, understanding it to be the normal complement of poor people that existed in this “backward” country.

  The economic enterprise of the French naturally entailed certain changes in the administration of the country. In the north and the center the French governed indirectly through the mandarinate. But the French could not reconcile their desire for an active state with the traditional Vietnamese state that governed largely by ritual. The mandarins had no part of the new activity of development with the result that their powers declined until they were serving merely as a front for a French administration that grew every day in size and importance. The second innovation, perhaps more important to the mass of the people, was that the colonial regime usurped the right of the village council to conduct the census and make up the tax rolls. With one stroke of the pen it broke through the traditional anonymity of the villages and shattered their collective responsibility. Left without any binding obligations to the community, many of the village “notables” seized the communal land for their own private property and used their judicial powers to terrorize the other villagers. Seeing this corruption (and imagining it eternally thus) the French then deprived the village councils of their power and substituted election for co-optation as a method of selecting the village chiefs. This second “reform” merely served to exaggerate the effects of the first since it replaced the natural leaders of the villages with men who, election or no election, depended for their power on the colonial administration rather than the people of the villages.21 These political disturbances were not, however, obvious to those who did not live in the villages — and particularly not to the paternalistic French colonials who believed in the maintenance of native traditions. Though undermined, the surfaces of the old political order remained intact as a deception to the French of the next generation and to much of the new Vietnamese elite as well.

  Not only did the French destroy the very foundation of traditional politics, but they did so in such a way as to render Vietnam less homogeneous than ever. Under the principle of divide and rule they left Vietnam as they had conquered it, administering each of the pays under its original status: Cochin China as a colony, Tonkin (the Red River Delta) as a direct protectorate, and Annam (central Vietnam) as an indirect protectorate, under the rule of the emperor. These administrative distinctions hardly touched the life of the peasantry, but they had a strong influence on the development of a new Vietnamese elite and on the future of Vietnamese nationalism.

  By 1946 the French colonial officials could with some justice claim a special status for Cochin China. At the time of the French conquest the Vietnamese villages had just begun to thicken through the lower Mekong Delta: the land lay open for a classical enterprise in plantation colonialism. Building an arterial system of roads and canals, the French administration sold the new territories off in lots of any dimension to the French and the Vietnamese planters who had the capital to pay for them. With the introduction of new crops, principally rubber and sugar, and the development of a capitalized rice production, Cochin China became a larger exporter of agricultural produce. On a strip of marshland near the old Chinese trading port of Cholon the French built a new city as the central market for all Indochina. Saigon, “the Paris of the Orient,” belonged more to the metropolis than it did to the interior. The same was true of the administration. Because the mandarins had fled north at the time of the conquest, the French had no choice but to recruit and train a new cadre of civil servants with no experience of the traditional government. They brushed away the thin web that bound the villages to Hue and to the empire, centralized the administration, and shaped it along Western bureaucratic lines. After ninety years of French rule, Vietnamese society in the south took on an entirely different construction from that in the north and center: the majority of the population was landless, dependent for wages or tenant’s rights on the French and their Vietnamese protégés. The old elite had vanished, giving place to a small but very wealthy class of Vietnamese landlords and civil servants.

  By the end of the Second World War few of the educated Cochin Chinese had either th
e disposition or the resources to take up arms against the French. They had no attachments to the precolonial government. Their fathers and grandfathers were raised out of the villages by the French and had vowed loyalty to France even before the old empire succumbed. With no tradition of mandarin culture, they had modeled themselves on their conquerors, many of them turning Catholic and building up large estates in the Delta. After several generations they had severed all but their economic ties with the country people — and for the maintenance of those ties they depended upon the French regime. Assimilés, they looked to Paris rather than Hue or Hanoi as the center of civilization; they looked to Paris for political reform. Saigon in the 1920’s and 30’s was a ferment of “Constitutionalists,” socialists, Trotskyites, and cells of the French Communist Party. Though quite as radical in rhetoric as their counterparts in France, most of these new political groups — often more cliques than parties — focused their sights on reform that would make them the equal of the French colonists rather than on Vietnamese national independence. Accordingly, the French found these groups easy to appease with better work laws for the small urban working class and consultative councils for the wealthy. Those that seemed dangerous the Sûreté disposed of easily, for, having relied on the French, the southern radicals had built no power base in their own countryside, whose rural society they considered backward and reactionary.

  In Cochin China the true anticolonial sentiment came not from the educated elite, but from the lower echelons of society — from the small farmers, merchants, and civil servants who had been touched only by the backwash of French culture. Semi-educated, culturally unfocused, their leaders lived in the disputed zone between the foreign city and the villages of the interior. In 1925 a group of second-rank civil servants discovered in their consultations with a spiritualist medium a spirit that revealed itself as the Cao Dai, or supreme god of the universe. Within a year the group had developed into a sect celebrating the “third amnesty of God” — the first amnesty being that of Christ and Moses, the second that of Buddha and Lao Tzu, and the third that appearance revealed through their spiritualist mediums. Using as their symbol the Masonic eye of God, the Cao Dai worshiped all the world’s religious leaders and placed such figures as Jeanne d’Arc and Victor Hugo along with the Taoist gods in their panoply of minor saints. The small merchant who became the first grand master of the sect built up a religious organization modeled on that of the Catholic Church and a secular administration with nine ministries that owned land, dispensed welfare, and conducted education and public works. By the end of 1926 the Cao Dai had twenty thousand adherents scattered throughout Cochin China and comprising a number of Vietnamese civil servants.22

  Little short of miraculous, the growth of the Cao Dai church showed to what extent the French presence had disturbed the traditional society of the countryside. The peasantry, once almost self-sufficient, had come to depend on the landowners, the Chinese merchants, the French administrators, and the fluctuations of the international rice market. Some of the peasants had left the land to become civil servants or small merchants. The village governments were unable to deal with the distant and incomprehensible forces at work in the society. They had lost much of their hold over the people — as had the whole system of beliefs that supported their authority. (Why worship the ancestors or the mandarin-genii when they demonstrably had no power over the future?) The Cao Dai and its cousin sect, the Hoa Hao, offered alternatives. They offered first a means of re-establishing the spiritual communion between man, heaven, and earth that the French with their abstract finances and their secular bureaucracy had swept away. A synthetic religion, Cao Daiism enhanced its largely traditional format with certain ideas and symbols associated with the European power over man and nature. It promised to renew the old patriarchate and the old sense of communal identity by welding together a new and larger community from the ruins of the clans and the villages.23

  With its elaborate rites, its pyramidical hierarchy, and its multiplicity of spirits, the Cao Dai filled much the same space that the Confucian state had occupied. The Hoa Hao, on the other hand, rose out of a landscape still new to Vietnam. Its prophet, Huynh Phu So, whom the French called the “mad bonze,” came from the northwest corner of the Delta, from the region west of the Bassac river, where the Vietnamese had settled among Cambodians and colonized the vast, uninhabited wasteland of mountain, scrub, and marsh. Since the days of the Nguyen empire the region had been a refuge and a breeding ground for prophets, magicians, and faith healers, and for the secret societies that flourished in the underground of the Confucian orthodox world. In the 1830’s a philosopher called Phat Thay Tay-An had predicted that “men from the West” would destroy the Vietnamese empire. His teachings, widely propagated, became the basis for two local revolts against the French in 1875 and 1913, and the basic education of Huynh Phu So.24 In 1939, the year of signs in the heavens, So, a sickly young man who had trained with the most famous of the sorcerers, became possessed of the spirit and was miraculously cured. From that moment on he preached of his revelation about the Enlightened Sage who, after the departure of the French, would come to rule the Vietnamese in the brotherhood of the Three Religions. By his teachings and his book of oracles and prayers, he showed the way to a species of reformed Buddhism based on the common people and expressed through internal faith rather than elaborate ritual. The Hoa Hao religion (the name is that of So’s home village) required no pagodas, no expensive ceremonies for birth and death such as the Confucian ancestral cult demanded. One of the four prayers of the day was devoted to “the mass of small people,” whom So hoped would have “the will to improve themselves, to be charitable, and to liberate themselves from the shackles of ignorance.”25 The Hoa Hao doctrine was both progressive and democratic by contrast with the traditional beliefs of many of the Delta villagers. Indeed, within a milieu of poor farmers and sharecroppers oppressed by high rents and taxes, it seemed to point to a revolutionary social movement. In 1940 the French arrested So, and after a futile attempt to silence him by removing him to another village, they committed him to an insane asylum, where after a few months he converted the Vietnamese psychiatrist in charge of his case. The prophet was released the next year, but escaped a new French attempt to exile him through the intervention of the Japanese. During the Second World War he continued to make converts and to build up a small army with arms supplied by the Japanese. (He escaped the opprobrium of being called a “Japanese puppet” by prophesying the defeat of Japan well before the end of the war.) After a short-lived period of “coexistence” with the Viet Minh, the Hoa Hao troops foolishly attacked a Viet Minh stronghold and there was mutual bloodletting for a period of years. In 1947 the Viet Minh command assassinated their prophet and earned the hostility of what was then an important political force in the Delta.26

  The prewar French hostility to the sects — the Cao Dai as well as the Hoa Hao — arose out of the suspicion that they were subversive organizations intent upon raising a peasant rebellion against colonial rule. This suspicion was largely unfounded. The main achievement of the sects was to fill in the traditional social and religious gaps the French had left open in substituting their colonial administration and economic system for that of the old empire. The sects built up secular administration and military forces during the Second World War, but they did not intend to take on the French directly by military force. They were merely waiting for the will of Heaven to change, at which point (so they were convinced) the French would disappear and all the Vietnamese would become Cao Dai or Hoa Hao. Their true rival was not so much the French state as the Catholic Church in Vietnam that under the very eyes of the French clergy had developed much the same kind of political control over its adherents as the native sects possessed. But even with the Catholic Church, rivalry did not imply conflict: heaven was either with them or it was not. Traditionalist, mystical, the sects were the real voices of the Mekong Delta, of the Vietnamese who had left behind them in Tonkin and Annam the phil
osophic strain of Mahayana Buddhism and rationalist Chinese social thought. The Delta would not on its own give rise to a revolution.

  Having neither agricultural nor industrial potential, the second pays, Annam, did not interest the French. Hue, the seat of the emperor, remained alone with its past, walled in by its court rituals, its illusions of empire. In a country of poor farmers and poor aristocrat-scholars, it became a haven for the old Confucian values, for a fierce traditionalism, and a concomitant xenophobia. While the emperor and the mandarins of the court gave their submission to the French, many of the central Vietnamese scholars withdrew from the capital and continued their resistance in the provinces. In the 1880’s and 1890’s Phan Dinh Phung and others led armed revolts against the French in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh. A participant in one of these early revolts, a scholar called Phan Boi Chau, left Vietnam in the early years of the twentieth century to look for foreign support for an anticolonial movement. Chau was a monarchist who saw the necessity for modern education and reform. Looking for foreign assistance and education for Vietnamese students, he went to Japan, the only country in Asia to become a modern nation on its own terms. Along with the Prince Cuong De, his chosen contender for the throne, Chau remained in exile for most of his life. He was unable to obtain substantial help from either the Chinese or the Japanese, and he was restricted from playing an active role in Vietnam by his own Confucian elitist notions of politics. His followers founded the Dai Viet or “Greater Vietnam” Party, a small secret society that was eventually to attract a number of the highly placed Vietnamese civil servants. But the early central Vietnamese resistance movements bore other kinds of fruit. They created a tradition of anti-French activity, particularly in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh. Ho Chi Minh was born in Nghe An in 1890, the son of a provincial mandarin. During the 1920’s a group of civil servants in the Nghe-Tinh region created the Tan Viet, the New Vietnam Revolutionary Party. But as time went on and the French established themselves throughout the rest of the country, Annam gave place to Tonkin as the center of the anti-colonial struggle, the new territories to the Red River Delta, which had been the old base of empire.