French plantocrats, rubber magnates and coal-mine owners were indulged in institutionalised cruelty towards their workforces by the colonial administration, which also imposed an artificially high exchange rate for the franc against the local piaster that further enriched the Paris exchequer. The invaders were successful in imbuing many Vietnamese with their language, education and culture. A schoolboy recalled being taught in class that his forebears were Gauls. He learned better only when his father, an NCO in the French army, told him sternly and proudly, ‘Your ancestors were Vietnamese.’ An Australian surgeon wrote of a consciousness, even among relatively humble people, ‘of their long unbroken history and ancient civilization’.
Their circumstances were slightly better than those of the Congolese ruled by Belgium; somewhat worse than those of Indians under the British. There was a contradiction about the lives of upper- and middle-class Vietnamese. Compulsorily immersed in a European culture and language, they nonetheless saw little of French people outside working hours. Nguyen Duong, born in 1943, grew up with a passion for Tintin and French spy stories. Yet like all Asians, to whom a physical blow is the worst of insults, at his school he recoiled from French teachers’ habitual slapping of dunces. He never knew his parents to entertain a colon family, nor to dine out with such people. Norman Lewis described Saigon as ‘a French town in a hot country. It is as sensible to call it the Paris of the Far East as it would be to call Kingston, Jamaica, the Oxford of the West Indies. Its inspiration has been purely commercial and it is therefore without folly, fervour or much ostentation … Twenty thousand Europeans keep as much as possible to themselves in a few tamarind-shaded streets.’
Colonial life seemed to most of its beneficiaries infinitely comfortable and agreeable – for a time. Those who lingered too long, however, risked worse diseases than malaria or dysentery: the crippling lassitude of the East, compounded by opium and access to many servants. Old French hands – les anciens d’Indo – spoke of le mal jaune. Mastery did not spare them from the disdain of Indochina’s upper-crust native inhabitants. It was a Vietnamese tradition to blacken teeth with enamel, which caused them to regard white fangs with disdain: an emperor demanded, on receiving a European ambassador, ‘Who is this man with the teeth of a dog?’ Norman Lewis wrote: ‘They are too civilized to spit at the sight of a white man, but they are utterly indifferent … Even the rickshaw coolie, given – to be on the safe side – double his normal fee, takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away. It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself an object of universal detestation, a mere foreign-devil.’
Few Vietnamese regarded French rule with equanimity, and local revolts were commonplace. In 1927 the Mekong delta village of Vinh Kim spawned a remarkable band of teenage performers called the United Women’s Troupe, which staged anti-colonialist shows and plays. The 1930s witnessed rural demonstrations, crop-burnings, insurgencies. A relentless debt squeeze caused some peasants to be imprisoned for non-payment of taxes, others to be so harrowed by loan sharks that by 1943 almost half of Vietnam’s land was in the hands of less than 3 per cent of its farmers. The colonial authority was confident that repression was the best medicine. A Vietnamese sûreté officer taunted an arrested revolutionary: ‘How can a grasshopper kick an automobile?’
Guerrilla and bandit groups nonetheless persisted in the country’s many wildernesses – ‘les grands vides’. On the terrible prison island of Poulo Condore, cells were seldom empty. There was little pretence of due process for Vietnamese consigned there, and the place became known as ‘the revolutionary university’. Many of those who later played prominent roles in the independence struggle served time there. Indeed, the man who became their leader, one of the most famous revolutionaries of the twentieth century, was among the few who did not.
Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in a central Vietnamese village in 1890. His father had risen from being a mere concubine’s son to mandarin status, but then abandoned the court to become an itinerant teacher. Ho, like Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong and Ngo Dinh Diem later, attended Hue’s influential Quoc Hoc high school, founded in 1896, from which he was expelled in 1908 for revolutionary activity. He cast off family ties, and after a brief period teaching in a village school, in 1911 became a stoker and galley boy aboard a French freighter. For three years he roamed the world, then spent a year in the United States, which fascinated him, before taking a job as an assistant pastry chef in London’s Carlton Hotel. He became increasingly politically active and met nationalists of many hues – Irish, Chinese, Indian. He spoke English and French fluently, together with several Chinese dialects and later Russian.
In 1919 he drafted an appeal which was delivered to US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace conference, soliciting his support for Vietnamese independence: ‘All subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them … in the struggle of civilization against barbarism.’ He attended the 1920 French socialist congress, at which he delivered a speech that later became famous: ‘It is impossible for me in just a few minutes to rehearse to you all the atrocities committed in Indochina by the bandits of capitalism. There are more prisons than schools … Freedom of the press and opinion does not exist for us … We don’t have the right to emigrate or travel abroad … They do their best to intoxicate us with opium and brutalize us with alcohol. They … massacre many thousands … to defend interests that are not [Vietnamese].’ Ho became a prolific pamphleteer and contributor to left-wing journals, often quoting from Lenin.
In 1924 he travelled to Moscow, meeting Russia’s new leaders and spending some months at the so-called University of Oriental Workers before moving on to Canton, where he became an interpreter for the Soviet adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. Three years later, after Chiang turned on the communists, Ho fled back to Europe. A French acquaintance described a conversation on a bridge over the Seine, during which the Vietnamese said reflectively, ‘I always thought I would become a scholar or writer, but I’ve become a professional revolutionary. I travel through many countries, but I see nothing. I’m on strict orders, and my itinerary is carefully prescribed, and you cannot deviate from the route, can you?’
‘Orders’ from whom? There are many mysteries concerning Ho’s life. He never married, and his emotional needs appear to have been fulfilled by commitment to political struggle. Who funded his global travels? Was he a paid servant of Moscow, or did he merely receive ad-hoc financial assistance from political fellow-travellers? It is unsurprising that he became a communist, because the world’s capitalists were implacably hostile to his purposes. He was less remarkable for his own writing and thinking, which were unoriginal, than for an extraordinary ability to inspire in others faith, loyalty and indeed love. A Vietnamese student wrote of a first meeting with Ho some years later in Paris: ‘He exuded an air of frailty, a sickly pallor. But this only emphasized the imperturbable dignity that enveloped him as though it was a garment. He conveyed a sense of inner strength and generosity of spirit that impacted upon me with the force of a blow.’
In 1928, Ho appeared in Bangkok, a rendezvous for exiled Indochinese nationalists. The following year he moved to Hong Kong, where he presided over a meeting of leaders of rival Vietnamese factions, held in a football stadium during a match to evade police attention. He persuaded his compatriots to unite under the banner of the Indochinese Communist Party, which in 1931 was formally recognised by the Moscow Comintern. During the years that followed, a series of revolts took place in Vietnam. The French responded with bombings of suspected insurgent villages, and guillotinings of identified leaders. Though Ho was not directly linked to the risings, he was now a wanted man, pursued through the European powers’ colonies. After a series of adventures, he escaped into China by persuading a Hong Kong hospital employee to have him declared dead. Thereafter he commuted between China and Russia, suffering chronic privations and recurrent sicknesses. A French communist agent who met him during his odyssey described Ho as ‘taut and quivering, with only one thought in his head: his country’.
Early in 1941, after an absence of three decades, he secretly returned to Vietnam, travelling on foot and by sampan, and assuming the pseudonym by which he would become known to history – Ho Chi Minh, or ‘Bringer of Light’. He took up quarters