David Marr's Vietnam: State, War and Revolution (1945–1946) is a tour de force by someone who has already contributed far more than his share to scholarship on Vietnam. Following his studies of Vietnamese anti-colonialism, early twentieth-century intellectual history, and the 1945 independence struggle, this book takes us from the August Revolution to the brink of the Franco-Việt Minh War in December 1946. While Marr's earlier volumes followed an optimistic trajectory of Vietnamese progress towards independence, this one is notable for its sober assessment of the almost insurmountable difficulties in creating a new state, one that could satisfy popular dreams of a better life. He also shows with unprecedented documentary clarity that the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was not in total control of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and demonstrates glaring policy differences between the party leadership and Hồ Chí Minh's government.

Marr deploys a complex array of sources, covering each of his themes with so much depth and granularity that the reader needs to slow down and reread portions of the book in order to absorb all the information. Each of his nine chapters covers the same time period, roughly from March 1945 to the close of 1946, but explores a special theme. Thus we view these months from a variety of angles, with the focus moving from government construction to defense; negotiations with the French; the search for foreign support; the treatment of domestic opponents; and, perhaps most importantly, the relationships among the ICP, the Viet Minh front, and the government. A final chapter covers mass mobilization.

Marr makes no claims to omniscience—he sticks closely to his documentation and makes clear when there are discrepancies among different sources. His use of the numerous newspapers published in this period, from the communist press to the opposition Nationalist Party's Việt Nam, brings to life the debates and often surprisingly well-informed viewpoints of the intellectuals, who would continue to play an important role throughout the history of the DRV. The views of more ordinary people are heard in the petitions addressed to the government's Northern Region Office (Bắc Bộ Phủ), appealing to the fledgling government to right a gamut of injustices, from abuse by security forces or seizure of property to election irregularities. Through these sources, Marr recreates the sense that, among the confusion created by a quick succession of power shifts (from French to Japanese, to Viet Minh, to Chinese, and then back to French control), the Vietnamese people are insistently claiming their ownership of the future. He points out in chapter 2, “The Government at Work,” that the second session of the National Assembly in November 1946 “has proved to be the most wide-ranging, substantive public deliberation by an official body ever to take place in Vietnam to date” (p. 106). In fact, the ICP would only solidify its monopoly on power during the war with the French that began at the end of that year.

Readers will have their own questions about the murkier events of the period chronicled here, especially in light of the work of other historians who have made their mark with accounts that overlap with Marr's. In the case of Stein Tonnesson's Vietnam 1946,Footnote ¹⁹ the key issue is the reasons for the outbreak of war on December 19; in the work of Francois Guillemot, the question is the nature of the hostilities between the DRV and the Nationalists' Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (VNQDD) and the Đại Việt party. In my view, Marr moves the debate over these questions to a new level of complexity. By delineating the policy disagreements among the Việt Minh leadership and between the DRV government and the ICP, he shows that responsibility for certain actions may be even more difficult to attribute than scholars had thought.

First, he shows that the nature of the Việt Minh front's “Tổng Bộ” or General Headquarters was extremely sketchy. The Việt Minh, created by Hồ Chí Minh in China, did not establish a clear hierarchy, Marr says, “probably because President Hồ Chí Minh and others wanted to strengthen government and military hierarchies, not disperse power to other institutions” (p. 476). Trường Chinh, the ICP's general secretary, worked through his own standing committee and gradually began to extend the party's reach within the National Guard (in spite of the fact that the party had been officially disbanded). While Hồ Chí Minh was still on his way back from negotiating in Paris, in October 1946 Trường Chinh staged what Marr calls “an audacious power play” by sending out “detailed rules of engagement” to counter the French forces who had been returning to North Vietnam since March (p. 495). The resolutions of this October meeting ignored provisions of the modus vivendi that Hồ had wrung out of the French in Paris, and signed on September 14. Trường Chinh believed that, “Sooner or later, the French will attack us and we certainly will have to attack them” (p. 495). So it seems that even if Hồ Chí Minh had tried to delay hostilities on the night of December 19, he may not have been able to curb the ICP partisans.

As far as relations with the VNQDD and Đại Việt groups go, Marr provides a detailed description of the July 12, 1946, move by General Giáp to search their offices and the discovery of evidence that they were planning violent action, perhaps an attack on the French to discredit the communists. Most of this information is presented in a long chapter on “Dealing with Domestic Opposition” that explores the government's failure to establish law-based methods for trying accused citizens. In Marr's dispassionate handling of this topic, the Việt Minh's opponents are neither martyrs nor the bad guys, but rather competitors for power who lost out because their Chinese patrons decided not to become involved in a Franco-Vietnamese war. The government and the ICP committees controlling security fell back on deportation and preventive detention as ways of dealing with these rivals, and many prisoners were eventually executed, for example when the French took over the town of Phú Thọ in October 1947 (p. 428).

In conclusion, I would say that this book may not be the one for general readers looking for a quick synthesis of the origins of the DRV. David Marr's approach is encyclopedic, and the variety of the topics he treats in depth makes this a reference on 1945–46 that students of Vietnam will be consulting for years to come.