Vietnam: A New History (iii)

from Christopher Goscha and Vietnamese studies

Christopher Goscha told in his first chapter how Nguyen Phuc Anh first pulled together the nation of Ha Noi on the Red river and Saigon by the Mekong, connected by mountains and shore, the Viet Nam we know,

northern bust swaying willowy above the waist at Hue and southern hips, ca. 1800. That chapter is one long establishing shot. The historian brings into focus all the many histories you may read about the previous polities around those towns, their frontiers and hinterlands.

It’s a balancing act, as Chris notes, looking backward as we must now from one world while trying to look forward as the actors did from many different locales. By the left-hand page, verso, of the two shown below it is 1873. Tu Duc is the fourth and final Nguyen emperor to plausibly have ruled Viet Nam.

“While Tu Duc sought to negotiate a way out of full-scale war, local Vietnamese commanders enlisted the support of Chinese irregulars of diverse ethnic origins called the Black Flags to attack Garnier’s men. Hostilities therefore began without either the nascent Third Republic’s leaders or even the Vietnamese emperor in Hue authorizing the attacks.”

We are now looking from Hue and then Paris at Indochine. Chris tells in this second chapter how the Nguyen family gave away the store to some random Frenchies. If you sympathize as I do in my New Deal way with any anti-colonialist, but you rather have not yet acquainted yourself with any of them in the post-colonialist manner,

an invaluable tip is that not all of the colonized lost. Over the same century as the fall of the Nguyen the United States drove all empires domestic and foreign from our continent and then from the hemisphere. Japan retreated then came out to deck first Russia then England and France and the Netherlands

before losing a fair fight to the United States as we pushed west and they pushed east until Tokyo lost their cool over, what do you know, Viet Nam. The court at Siam have negotiated with every empire and so far have held their own with distinctive flair. The Nguyen did not have to collapse into Indochine.

Chris tells how from the first administration, Gia Long’s, the court kept a weather eye from Hue on their region and those invading. They failed to defend themselves, that is, they could have succeeded. What they coped with,

instanced in the sentence above, was chaos. Chris’ second chapter tells how the policy of four successive courts over the 19C added up to a double course of expanding military rule while also growing bureaucracy. Both made sense at the time and didn’t work.

“French nationalist and colonialist policies became more aggressive after 1877, when the republicans consolidated their power over the Legitimists (monarchists). At the helm of the metropolitan government was Jules Ferry, one of republican France’s most celebrated leaders. He was determined to break with France’s monarchical and Catholic past in favor of replacing it with an equally ardent Republic.”

In the paragraph that sentence begins, shown in full just above, from the right-hand page, recto, of the two shown at top, it’s 1877. The Nguyen are toast. Chris has told us how they lost. But how did Paris win? Who were these random French?

They were the great libertarian, egalitarian, fraternizing republicans of all time. Not just French citizens, but those who after revolution and reaction built Paris as the city of light. My grandmother journeyed there before the end of the century in flight in utero from some pogrom to the east.

Her mother gave up her child not to Jews as we normally do but to France, who undertook not to baptize her. The state sent her to the deepest region of the Hexagone where an anti-clericalist, landless peasant raised her, a missionary of the Republic educated her, and she lived and worked alongside many Annamites transported there to replace the men fighting or dead in the Great War.

Wait a minute. Did I lose you? Addressing once more those readers new to anti-colonialism: if at all possible try to avoid invasion by a real democracy. Their people mobilize against you, far more than the military or missionaries alone may.

The citizens take your land. Then they don’t want you to work cheap. They want you to pay them for the privilege of working for them, though they will settle for free after too many of you die. No they don’t want you to assemble, deliberate, petition, or vote.

But you know what? Sooner or later liberty, equality, and fraternity bite them in the ass. Read on with professor Chris of Kansas, Paris, and Montreal.

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 6 so far addressing Vietnam: A New History by Christopher Goscha. The first went out April 16, 2022 and the second on May 18, 2022.

Then the fourth posted on August 20, 2022, the fifth on October 17, 2022, and the sixth on November 27, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.