Subasta Inversa Electrónica Propiamente Dicha

There appears to have been very little general French anti-independence propaganda and most of it took the form of newspapers, published in French in the larger cities. This does not imply that there was no anti-independence activity for, as indicated above, the colonial authorities censored much written material and the Sûreté was very active in investigating anti-colonial activity. In fact, French armed forces and Sûreté activity in April and May 1931 caused the complete destruction of all Communist Party structure above the provincial level.102 _{However, there is only sporadic evidence of the effectiveness}

of French propaganda. For example, Trần Huy Liệu, writing in 1960, is quoted by Sophie Quinn-Judge as looking back at 1931 and writing that there “were grave errors which discredited the whole [Communist] movement and gave an opening to enemy [French] propaganda”.103

Much French propaganda took the form of demonstrating the superiority of French “civilisation” over Vietnamese native society. An interesting example is shown by the money and engineering skill that went into the development of railways in both Vietnam and in the southern parts of China.104 _{Natalia Starostina quotes Paul Doumer, former}

Governor-General of Indochina, writing in 1905 about the Doumer Bridge (now the Long Biên bridge) over the Red River in Hanoi:

discussion of the way in which his views became more accepted in the context of anti-colonialism as a result of the resolutions of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935.

102_{See Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh, p. 187.} 103_{ibid., p. 190.}

104_{See Natalia Starostina. “Engineering the Empire of Images: Constructing Railways in Asia before the}

Indigenous and scientific techniques which were utilized and the result which was obtained made them [the indigenous people] aware of the beneficial force of French civilization. Our scientific genius, our industrial power morally conquered the population, whose armies we have subdued.105

French propaganda extolling the superiority of French science and engineering was directed as much to the French people back home as it was to “morally conquering” the local population. Railway bridges, in particular, were used to build the image of French civilisation to the local Vietnamese population and also to demonstrate to the people of France the superiority of their own civilisation. Novels, postcards and art books were sold for this purpose.106

The reality of the railways was somewhat different to this image of French superiority. Discussing about the railway from Hanoi to Yunnan in China, Natalia Starostina points out that “there was a drastic gap between the grandeur of the French ‘civilizing mission’ as it was presented in the imagery of railways” and the reality of construction, which often involved harsh labour conditions and forced labour.107 _{There appears to have been little of}

the “moral victory” that Doumer had postulated among the peasant workers, as they had to be coerced into working for the railway. The railways were also little used and even the Doumer bridge carried only light traffic and was of no use to the majority of the people, the wealthiest of whom went by rickshaw or car, as it was purely a railway bridge. Trains throughout Indochina were also subject to attacks by “pirates” (independence militias) and so had to be constantly guarded by soldiers.108

The railways, once thought by the French colonists to be suitable symbols of Empire and symbols of the might and generosity of France were apparently less powerful at arousing the loyalty of large sections of the Vietnamese population than the simple placards and posters which were used in the later insurrections in Nghệ-Tĩnh and other parts of Vietnam.

105_{ibid., p. 186.} 106_{ibid., pp. 192-195.} 107_{ibid., p. 197.} 108_{ibid., p. 199.}

In French thinking, another important symbol for the Vietnamese people was the (French-approved) emperor (hoàng đế – a Chinese term). Bảo Đại (Vĩnh Thụy) was the son of Khải Định, an emperor committed to Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, and was sent to France for his education in 1921 at age of about 9 years.109 _{Khải Định died in 1925}

while Bảo Đại was still in France and he was to be left there, being educated and attuned to European ways in a privileged environment, so as to “take full advantage of the

opportunities for personal growth”.110 _{The return was to be the subject of a great publicity}

campaign, the Minister of Colonies explaining to the Vietnamese Council of Ministers:

...your country, after His Majesty Bảo Đại’s return, will experience one of the great moments of its history, for the homecoming of your Sovereign and the actions which your Government will then carry out will have a decisive effect on the orientation of the Protectorate’s policy.111

However he went on to explain that the French colonial authorities would still be in charge. Bảo Đại arrived in Đà Nẵng on 8 September 1932 to great ceremony amid a large public relations (that is, propaganda) exercise and set about trying to achieve some

reforms in the governance of the colony. For all of the fanfare of the arrival of the

Vietnamese Emperor changing the course of Vietnamese history, he proved to be ill-suited to the task of reform and complained of being side-lined by the French and of difficulties with the “traditionalists” at the Huế court.112 _{The symbol of the returning Emperor was}

misplaced and failed to ignite few, other than those Vietnamese who were involved in Court intrigues and political dealings with the French colonisers. The masses of the people, the peasantry, were unimpressed with the concept of a hoàng đế (Confucian-style emperor) being foisted upon the country by a European power, particularly as the Confucian ethic was declining, particularly in the countryside, and was largely seen as a relic from the past century. Possibly an indigenous Vietnamese vua (king, moral authority

109_{See Bruce McFarland Lockhart. The End of the Vietnamese Monarchy. New Haven: Council on Southeast}

Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1993, pp.31-32.

110_{ibid., p. 59.} 111_{ibid., p. 61} 112_{ibid., pp. 91-93.}

and protector) would have engendered more moral authority, although transfer of respect to the French colonial masters was probably an impossible task.113

Summary

There are two important aspects of Vietnamese propaganda which come out in this chapter. First the source material shows a move towards the use of symbolism – often with special meaning in the Vietnamese tradition – in addition to the text and slogan-based tuyên truyền used at the beginning of the 1930s decade, a change which gathered pace in later years and which is discussed in more detail in the following chapters. Second is the move towards a greater emphasis on Vietnamese nationalism and a lowering of the priority accorded to social revolution on the part of the Communist Party.

It is estimated that the literacy rate in Vietnam at the end of the 1930s was probably about ten percent overall and probably a great deal lower in the rural areas.114 _{Most of the}

material studied in this chapter, the leaflets, pamphlets and slogans, are very much text- based and thus would have been inaccessible directly to the majority of the peasant population and to many of the urban workers. In any case, much of the urban workforce comprised largely illiterate rural farm workers who had to raise cash to pay the taxes demanded by the Colonial Government and who had left their farms for this purpose.115 _A

few visual symbols, such as the hammer and sickle, were used to embellish the tuyên truyền material but, as described above, were not universally understood by the participants in the demonstrations and other activities. It was not until the 1940s that Vietnamese tuyên truyền was developed, with the active guidance and support of Hồ Chí Minh, that used techniques appropriate to an illiterate population, that is, use of folk poetry with its rhyme and rhythm and reference to folk heroes. It was the new propaganda of the 1940s that tapped into the idea of the “land of the ancestors”116 _{which was so much a part of rural}

Vietnam. This new development in the tuyên truyền, which had such a dramatic effect on

113_{See ibid., pp. 188-193 for a discussion of what may be expected of a Confucian hoàng đế and the}

implications of declining adherence to Confucian ideals in Vietnam.

114_{See Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, pp. 33-34.}

115_{See Duy Lap Nguyen. “The Kiểm Thảo and the Uses of Disposable Time in the National Liberation}

Front.” Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 2 (2008): 375-394, p 380 for further discussion on this point.

116_{See Benoît de Tréglodé. Heroes and Revolution in Vietnam, translated by Claire Duiker. Singapore: NUS}

the course of Vietnamese history, is discussed in the following chapters. Perhaps

ironically, it was certain aspects of French propaganda, the demonstration of the grandeur of French engineering in roads, railways and telegraph (to name a few), which was hoped by the French authorities, to appeal to the illiterate masses of Indochina prior to 1941 but which were, in their final effect, less successful than the indigenous tuyên truyền.

Nationalism can be a very powerful ideal, often backed by powerful rhetoric. In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) Soekarno was, like Hồ Chí Minh, working towards independence against a colonial regime and, in 1926, he wrote an explanation of its appeal which applies equally well to the Vietnamese situation:

Nationalism is the conviction, the consciousness of a people, that they are united in one group, one nation.

...it is certain that nationalist feeling creates a sense of self-confidence, and that this is something absolutely essential if we are to defend ourselves in the struggle to overcome conditions that would defeat us.

...it is this self-confidence which endows the revolutionary nationalists with the will to seek a Greater Indies or a Free Indonesia.117

It was this arousal of a “consciousness of a people” as a unity which was missing from much of the tuyên truyền of the1930s but which began to appear in Hồ Chí Minh’s work, especially that of the 1940s, and which is explored in the next few chapters. The socialist activists working for independence in Vietnam in the 1930s looked to Europe, and particularly to Russia, for their examples and inspiration. Many of the slogans and the techniques they used were copied from Russian successes and were not adapted

particularly to the task of persuading, or of engendering a sense of self-confidence, in the Vietnamese population. There was also some confusion evident in the aims – whether a social revolution was more important than a national revolution. An independent and self-confident nationalism was growing and, during the 1940s this, rather than a social revolution, was to prove the spark that roused the consciousness of the populace.

117_{Soekarno (1926). “Nationalism, Islam and Marxism”, translated by Karel H. Warouw and Peter D. Weldon,}

in Nationalism, Islam and Marxism, pp. 35-62. Ithaca, New York: Modern Indonesian Project, Cornel University, 1970, p. 39.

Breaking the Isolation – A Newspaper for the Rural Việt bắc