The Paris Peace Conference closed in January 1920, with the inauguration o f the League o f Nations. Nguyen Ai Quoc and his compatriots were not among those who had cause to celebrate: it was the end o f their hopes that the western democracies would recognize their claim to independence. W ith the collapse o f their campaign at the Conference they seem to have lost some o f their cohesion as a militant group. As 1920 wore on, money became scarce. For a time Quoc was apparently supported by an inhabitant o f 6 Villa des Gobelins known as Khanh Ky, who had set up a small business trading in photographic supplies in the occupied Rhineland. (The French guessed that he may have been engaged in currency speculation.) Phan V an Truong set up a legal practice in Mayence in the latter part o f
1919, and defended both Vietnamese and French soldiers who were being tried in military courts. His m oney was reported to have come from his legal work in commercial disputes between French and Germans.67 Phan Chu Trinh also contributed to the group’s funds by earning 30 francs a day as a retoucher o f photographs.68 But an employee o f the Ministry o f Colonies, a Mr. Phu Bay who was probably Agent ‘Edouard’, reported at the same time that these men w ere almost all suffering from bronchitis or tuberculosis, as ‘they lack the means to lead a healthy or comfortable life’.69 H e did not view them as a serious threat to the peace o f Indochina.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was revealing fmstration in his conversations with the informers who sought him out. In early January 1920 he complained that Indochina was unknown in other 66 AOM, SPCE 364, notes de Jean, 4 May 1920
67 AOM, SPCE 364, envoi du 12 mars 1920, signed Jean 68 AOM, SPCE 364, rapport de Jean, 8 Jan. 1920
nations. W hen he spoke with international political figures, he said, he discovered that they either had no knowledge o f Indochina or supposed that it was a small frontier province betw een India and China. ‘We need to make a lot o f noise in order to become know n,’ he told Agent Jean; ‘Korea is now well-known to all nations, because the Koreans have raised their voices.’ He added, though, that he would wait a while to see what sort o f policies the new Governor General Maurice Long would implement.70 He tried to raise the cause o f Vietnamese freedom at a meeting critical o f the peace settlement in the Orient, at which the socialist deputy Marius M outet spoke, along with Professor Felicien Challaye and representatives o f the Korean and Chinese communities. Inspector Pierre Am oux him self was in the audience o f around 1,000, which included a large number o f Chinese. He reported that Nguyen Ai Quoc had distributed copies o f the ‘Vietnamese Dem ands’ in the hall, but had failed to be recognized by the chairman when he requested the right to speak.
‘Nguyen Ai Quoc’s a ttitu d e ,... his way o f insisting on taking the floor, seem to have provoked a mixture o f good-will and mockery among the audience and the speakers,’ A m oux wrote smugly.71 Soon after, Quoc organized a meeting where he spoke in the name o f the ‘Group o f Vietnamese Revolutionaries’. His talk, titled ‘The Social Evolution o f the * Far Eastern Peoples and the Demands o f the Ancient Nation o f Annam ’, attracted around
70 people, who applauded enthusiastically at the end.72 But the absence o f Vietnamese discouraged him from repeating his effort. W hen Jean suggested to him that the mention o f a group o f Revolutionary Vietnamese had frightened his compatriots away, he grew
defensive. It appears that there was not an official group with that name, but that Quoc had hoped to gain publicity by using it. ‘W e need fights and foolishness to get attention,’ he told the ever-present Jean.73
Quoc was reported at this time to be spending long hours in the Bibliotheque St. Genevieve next to the Pantheon. Part o f his publicity campaign included the intention to publish a book on the French record in Indochina, which he planned to call Les Opprimes. In order to give the work more weight, he had decided to use long extracts from French authors. The Surete compiled a list o f thirteen books on Indochina which they believed he had consulted, including Phan Chu T rinh’s report on the events o f 1908 as well as works on agriculture and the financial regime established by France.74 He spoke o f raising the m oney to print his book by finding a socialist to hire him as domestic help, but as o f
69 AOM, SPCE 364, rapport de Jean, 8 Jan. 1920 70 AOM, SPCE 364, Notes de Jean, 4 Jan. 1920 71 AOM, SPCE 364, 9 Jan. 1920, signed P. Amoux 72 AOM, SPCE 364, Notes de Jean, 16 Jan 1920 73 AOM, SPCE 364, Notes de Jean, 21 Jan 1920 74 AOM, SPCE 364, envoi 34/S.R., 13 Feb. 1920
September, he was still looking for funding and hoping that Marcel Cachin at VHumanite would take care o f the printing.75 His political activity was interrupted by a hospital stay in August, when he received treatment for an abcess on his right shoulder.76 W hether this was the first sign o f a tubercular infection is unclear. By the next year, however, he was being turned out o f his job in a photographic shop on the grounds that he had tuberculosis.77
As the French grew more certain that Nguyen Ai Quoc and Nguyen Tat Thanh were one and the same, they began to strategize as to how best to control him. In France they could minimize his contacts with other Vietnamese, and by the autumn o f 1920 they had
determined to keep him there. The Director o f the Indochinese Surete in Hanoi, Rene Robin, requested that Nguyen Ai Quoc be denied a passport. He suggested that the authorities overseeing the Indochinese in Paris persuade Quoc to admit his true name, by telling him that he could only obtain a ticket for passage to Vietnam by producing authentic proof o f his identity. But Quoc would not succumb to the Surete’s pressures: he had already been summoned to the Prefecture o f Police on 20 September, where he had been photographed and interrogated. After the questioning he went straight to the Human Rights League to complain o f police harrassment.78
The Hanoi authorities were convinced that Quoc would not risk returning to Indochina, where he would be subject to the the penalties o f the Annamite code against clandestine immigration. But they feared that he might try to go to another country, where he ‘would completely escape us and we would have to expect surprises from such a determined individual... ’ ‘ A Nguyen Ai Quoc unm asked and kept under surveillance by the
Metropolitan police - we can not wish for better than that,’ wrote a M. Lacombe to Paris.79 Pierre Guesde, who relished his role as ‘General Controller o f Indochinese Troops in France’, took a particularly hard line on Nguyen Ai Quoc and his immediate circle. By the end o f 1920 he had opened 250 files on suspect Vietnamese in France, but he considered the group from 6 Villa des Gobelins to be the m ost dangerous.80
W hy Guesde found Quoc and his circle so threatening is at first difficult to understand. The Surete had already frightened away the less determined adherents to his cause, he was almost destitute and his health was beginning to trouble him. Yet by Novem ber o f 1920 it 75 AOM, SPCE 364, envoi 113 S.R., signed Dev6ze, 17 Sept. 1920
76 AOM, SPCE 364, 10 August 1920
77 AOM, SPCE 364, signed Deveze, 14 Nov. 1921
78 AOM, SPCE 364, Guesde note pour M. le Ministre, 12 Oct 1920,
79 AOM, SPCE 364, Note au sujet du tel. no. 1466 du Controleur General des Troupes Indochinoises au sujet de NAQ.
was becoming clear that some o f the Vietnamese were making common cause with the more radical faction in the French socialist party. That month Quoc and a Tran Tien Nam attended a meeting organized by the Socialist Revolutionary Party to celebrate the third anniversary o f the Soviet Republic. On November 3, Phan Chu Trinh, Quoc and three others then living at V illa des Gobelins went to a meeting o f the ‘Committee for the Third International’ organized by the Socialists o f the 13th arrondissement. Then on the 19th o f the month Quoc received an invitation to a meeting from the ‘extremist fraction’ o f the
13th Section o f the Socialist Revolutionary Federation o f the Seine. At this meeting a vote was taken on whether the Federation should jo in the Third International based in
Moscow.81 The Surete did not report the result o f that vote, but it seems fairly certain that Quoc’s mind had been made up on this issue by the time he boarded a train on 24
December 1920 to journey to Tours for the Congress o f the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He was representing the 13th Section, his neighbourhood branch, as well as the
‘Indochinese Socialist G roup’.82 It was at the Tours Congress that a m ajority o f the delegates formalized their decision to join the Russian Bolsheviks in the Third or Communist International, to leave behind the Second, Socialist International whose reputation had been tarnished in the eyes o f many radicals by its weak response to
nationalist chauvinism during the First W orld War. Quoc’s participation at this Congress made him one o f the founding members o f the French Communist Party.
An article which Quoc wrote for VHumanite before the Congress gives some idea o f the strength o f his views at the time. (This may, again, have been written with Phan Van Truong’s help. All the same, a friend in the 13th Section said his draft required some stylistic improvements. W hether the ornate version in the French archives is the edited version is unclear.) Quoc called his article ‘Colonial Policy’. It reflects his exposure to Lenin’s ‘Theses on National and Colonial Questions’, which had been unveiled at the Second Comintern Congress in July 1920 and printed in VHumanite on the 16th and 17th o f that month. Lenin’s analysis o f imperialism, inherent in these Theses, provided Quoc with a theoretical framework for his visceral hatred o f colonialism.
The hydra o f western capitalism has for some time now been stretching its horrible tentacles towards all comers o f the globe, as it finds Europe too restricted a field o f
80 AOM, SPCE 364, 28 Dec 1920
81 AOM, SPCE 364, envoi no. 160 S.R. Paris, 15 Jan 1921
82 Branko Lazitch and Milorad Drachkovitch say in their Biographical Dictionary o f the Comintern,
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1973), p. 150,, that NAQ became a militant in the 18th Section
of Socialist Youth in Paris, and then joined the Ninth Section of the SFIO, whose members were newspapermen. After his move to Impasse Compoint in July 1921, he seems to have joined the 18th Section, but I have seen no archival evidence for the other affiliation.
action, and the blood o f the European proletariat insufficient to satisfy its insatiable appetite, English, German and French capitalists are all equal, as are their crimes, but for the fact that the capitalists o f other countries at least have the modesty not to dress up their egoism with the pompous phrase o f ‘Civilizing M ission’. But behind the three colours o f liberty, equality and fraternity, France introduces alcohol, opium and prostitution to all o f her colonies and sows misery, ruin and death along with her ill- gotten riches.
In the face o f these hateful practices, does the Socialist Party have a colonial policy which is truly socialist? No, not yet has the party tried to aid any o f the colonies to free itself by revolutionary means. This inactivity would have carried on if the rightist war had not laid bare the lies and hypocrisy o f bourgeois democracy and if the Russian Revolution had not violently stirred up the energies o f the Proletariat o f the Universe. Since the majority o f the Party decided to join the Communist International and Lenin presented his Colonial Theses to the Second Congress, our comrades have begun to talk about the colonies.. . 83
Q uoc’s intervention at the Tours Congress was less heavy-handed, but raised the same criticism o f the Socialist Party. W hen Deputy Jean Longuet tried to protest that he had spoken out on the colonial question, Quoc asked him not to interrupt. Still, he sounded a more diplomatic note than in his Humanite article. In closing his short speech, he called on all members o f the Socialist Party, right-wing as well as left-wing, to come to the aid o f Indochina. He got a warm response from the hall, where cries o f ‘Down with the colonial sharks!’ could be heard among the applause.84
Q uoc’s speech is less well-known than the picture snapped o f him by one o f the delegates. It shows a smooth-faced Vietnamese looking like a well-dressed schoolboy in suit and tie, standing among the seated, bewhiskered French delegates. One right-wing press account described him as a prize circus attraction presented by the P.T. Bam um o f the Tours Congress, Deputy M arcel Cachin. But Q uoc’s contemporary Paul Vaillant-Couturier, gave him a glowing review: ‘his intervention was admirable in its concision, describing the agony o f a nation o f 20 million people,’ he commented.85 In later years Quoc would apparently make a point o f keeping a low profile during doctrinal debates in the Comintern. But it seems unlikely that, as he later claimed, he came to Tours Congress without a clear understanding o f what the issues separating the radical and moderate socialists were. After all, he had been attending political meetings and reading the left-wing press in Paris for a- year-and-a-half by the time he arrived in Tours.
83 AOM, SPCE 364,13 Dec. 1920
84 AOM, SPCE 364, signe: Deveze, 12 Jan. 1921
At Tours Nguyen Ai Quoc gave his allegiance to a force which would dominate the rest o f his life. The world communist movement w ould become both his family and his chief employer. But in the winter o f 1921 it did little to alleviate his personal problems or raise the spirits o f his Vietnamese collective. From the 14 o f January until the 5 o f M arch Quoc -was in the Cochin Hospital to have his shoulder abcess removed. W hen he left hospital, he
refused to pay for his treatment on the grounds that he had no income.86 At 6 Villa des Gobelins he found Phan Chu Trinh in deep depression. His only son, Dat, recently
returned to Vietnam from France to cure his tuberculosis, had died. Trinh's friends reported that he was not the same after this tragedy.87 He him self would not get perm ission to return to Vietnam until 1925. At the same time, some o f the habitues o f Villa des Gobelins claimed to be unhappy with Quoc’s high-visibility radicalism. Khanh-Ky and Tran Tien N am blamed the problems they were having with the police on Quoc’s behaviour, a Surete report said. Tran Tien N am was reported to have said that only Phan Van Truong, Phanh Chu Trinh and a Vo Van Toan shared Quoc’s extremist opinions. He also claimed to be unable to comprehend why these men would ‘give their entire confidence to a compatriot o f whose true name and origins they were ignorant’.88 Meanwhile Khanh-Ky, the group’s m ain breadwinner, complained that he could not pay o ff the rent which had been allowed to accumulate during the last years o f the w a r .89 Both Phan Chu Trinh and Quoc started to look for new living quarters after this. As a result, Quoc had no alternative but to cut back his political activities and start earning his own living. In July he moved across the Seine to northwestern Paris, a hotel at 9 Impasse Compoint. He found work as a photo retoucher next door to the hotel at 40 francs per week, the wage paid to apprentices. With his frugal life style, this was enough to cover food and his 40 francs monthly rent. At the end o f July the Surete reported that he was leading a quiet life, going out only rarely to visit his friends at V illa des G obelins.90
Quoc’s journalistic efforts seem to have been receiving only luke-warm support from his socialist friends. The draft pamphlet on French colonialism which Quoc had completed in
1920 was still without a publisher. Marcel Cachin gave evasive replies about the
possibility o f having it published by VHumanite - he explained that the paper’s circulation had dropped since the Socialist schism at the Tours Congress and that he could not afford to pay an advance.91 Still Quoc did publish the odd article: one in Charles Rappoport’s
86 AOM, SPCE 364, Deveze, 28 March 1921
87 AOM, SPCE 364, Pierre Guesde to Gov. Gen. in Hanoi, Feb. 1921 88 AOM, SPCE 364, signed Deveze, 27 Dec. 1920
89 AOM, SPCE 364, Devize, 29 April 1921 90 AOM, SPCE 364, note of 29 July 1921. 91 AOM, SPCE 364, Deveze, 12 Jan. 1921
monthly Revue Communiste o f 14 April 1921, and another in L 'Action Coloniale o f 10 June. The first o f these, buried on page 133, was a variation on what was to become his constant refrain - the failure o f communist parties to act on the colonial question. This inactivity was astonishing, he wrote, ‘especially now that there is no longer an internal debate in the purified p arty ... ’. His article in Action Coloniale made a comparison between the relatively liberal colonial policy o f Japan in Korea and French policies in Indochina. The Japanese had decreed in August 1919 that their colony w ould have