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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2019 The Pursuit of Equality the Continuation ofRob eColonialismrt Arthur Boucher in Vietnam Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE PURSUIT OF EQUALITY THE CONTINUATION OF COLONIALISM IN VIETNAM By ROBERT BOUCHER A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2019 Robert Boucher defended this thesis on April 5, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were: Jonathan Grant Professor Directing Thesis Nilay Ozok-Gundogan Committee Member Rafe Blaufarb Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For my parents, without your belief in me I would not have made it this far in life. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper would have been impossible without the influences of a great amount of individuals. Based on the suggestions of one of my undergraduate professors, Alfred Mierzejewski, I decided to pursue studies in Vietnamese history rather than several other ideas. Through Robinson Herrera, I was pushed far outside what I had imagined academic history was supposed to be and opened my eyes to how much I needed to read and learn. Annika Culver and Cathy McClive helped develop those ideas further and provided guidance and advice on a number of topics. Of course, I have everyone on my committee to thank; Rafe Blaufarb for helping hone the French aspects of my topic, Nilay Ozok-Gundogan for shaping the mass of ideas and threads into a more unified idea, and Jonathan Grant for allowing me to pursue the type of history that I wanted and remained supportive throughout the whole ordeal. I also have to thank all of my friends in the graduate department who read over early versions of this work and whom I also bounced all of my wildest ideas off of. Of particular mention are Zach Reddick and Dan Zylberkan. Finally, I would like to thank Tyla Harrington for managing all of the late nights, long rants, and breakdowns. Without you I could not have finished this paper. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 Sources ....................................................................................................................................15 A Note about Terminology .....................................................................................................18 Chapter Outlines .....................................................................................................................22 CHAPTER ONE “THE DECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY”...................................................25 Colonialism Before Colonialism ............................................................................................28 Colonial Differences ...............................................................................................................34 The Third Republic and Empire .............................................................................................38 Paul Doumer and the Reorganization of Indochina ................................................................43 CHAPTER TWO “CIVILIZATION AND BARBARITY” ..........................................................52 A Millennia of Confucius, A Decade of Spencer ...................................................................55 Dong Du and the New Vietnam ..............................................................................................61 The Hanoi Free School and Vietnamese Colonization ...........................................................68 CHAPTER THREE “THE COLONIAL GREAT WAR EXPERIENCES” .................................78 Colonial Experiences of the Great War ..................................................................................83 La plus grand France and Mise en Valeur: Successes and Ideals ..........................................89 Race and Space of Mise en Valeur .........................................................................................99 CHAPTER FOUR “REVOLUTION AND INTERNATIONALISM” .......................................106 A New World Order .............................................................................................................111 A Letter to Robert Lansing ...................................................................................................114 Collaboration and the Bourgeoisie .......................................................................................116 Between Collaboration and Revolution ................................................................................121 Revolution and its Aspirants .................................................................................................127 A CONCLUSION OF SORTS ....................................................................................................133 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................140 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................151 v ABSTRACT Much of the scholarship on the colonial sphere remains focused on the ways that subalterns subverted colonial power and discourse, however little focus has centered on the way that colonized at times reified and perpetuated the ideas of the civilizing mission. In the case of Vietnam, over the course of approximately four decades Vietnamese intellectuals quickly swung from seeing the French as barbarians to a dynamic, modern power that should be learned from. In the process, modernization and development came to be synonymous with everything from the West while tradition was invented as the old teachings. Importantly, while independence was achieved after much bloodshed and effort, the new Vietnamese state failed in reality to extricate itself from the grasp of European universalist ideas born out of the French Revolution. From efforts to open “New Learning” schools to demands of equality to French citizens and access to basic rights, the Vietnamese vision of a New Vietnam slowly became constrained to the path of the international community of nation-states. Ho Chi Minh would declare independence in the name of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness rather than the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. As such, this paper traces the variety of factors that influenced the manifold nature of colonialism and how rather than existing in a post-colonial world, the ideas of the mission civilisatrice have been continued by the powers which rebelled against it. vi INTRODUCTION On the Second of September of 1945, in the fading light of the Second World War, Ho Chi Minh addressed a crowd of some half-million urban and rural Vietnamese and minorities.1 It was the largest public speech gathering to date in Vietnam, an activity itself relatively unheard of forty years before.2 In a fairly short address, Ho proclaimed the independence of Vietnam from the French colonial regime, but also the layered imperial powers that imprinted themselves between 1940 and 1945. The declaration marked the symbolic end to decades of uncertainty, oppression, famine, and death and the opening of another four decades of new versions of the same. It represented the height of the August Revolution and the swelling possibilities of a new future for many of those who participated.3 Finally, it was a break and mystification from/of tradition and a definitive national shift of consciousness away from a Confucian state to the Nation-State. Historians have typically focused on Ho’s carefully crafted invocation of Liberal discourse through his direct quotation of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, claiming the heritage of “universal human rights” for the people of Vietnam. Additional focus centers on Ho’s concluding remark that 1 David Marr disputes the official party number of one million and the Allied estimate of 600,000. He figures, given the population of Hanoi stood at around 200,000 and perhaps 200,000 more came from the countryside, that a more reasonable estimate would be below 400,000. Regardless, the numbers still warrant the place of largest gathering up to that point. David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 530. 2 Vinh Sinh asserts that Phan Chau Trinh introduced the public speech alongside the curriculum of the Tonkin Free School in 1908 after learning about the practice from famed Japanese modernizer Fukuzawa Yukichi. Phan Chau Trinh. Phan Chu Trinh and His Political Writings, trans. Vinh Sinh, (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2009). 9 3 David Marr’s study on the months leading up to the Declaration of Independence arguably remains the best in terms of understanding the multiple layers of influence and chaotic nature present in Vietnam/Indochina towards the end of the Second World War. Marr, Vietnam

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