‘Revolution’ in Cochinchina: Révolution

The term for ‘revolution’ arrived in Việt Nam not, as one might expect, from Japanese or Chinese scholars grappling with the creation of an Asian neologism for the concept, as happened with so many other alien ideas, but rather appears to have done so along newly established networks established by French colonisers. It almost certainly made its first appearance in the southern reaches of the Vietnamese realm, in French Cochinchina and in the form of the French word ‘révolution’, possibly as early as the 1860s, but certainly by 1875. It was here, as Philippe Peycam and others have shown, that European ideas and the words to express them were being introduced by the earliest French colonisers to the Vietnamese with whom they interacted.Footnote ⁹ In Cochinchina the term ‘revolution’ and other new words would have been used and understood by the tiny cohort of Vietnamese scholars who were being schooled in French and who were becoming aware of the broader scope of European history. They would have become aware of the French Revolution at the very least, and it would have been in this context that the term ‘révolution’ arrived. Thus it seems fairly clear that like other modern concepts and terms, ‘revolution’ appeared in the southern region several decades before it became known to scholars in the north.

By the 1870s at the latest, Vietnamese Francophone scholars were also becoming aware of the term in its modern political sense, and were using it for their own purposes. This is significant, for it shows that by this early date it had already escaped its bound form as ‘French Revolution’, likely the form in which it first appeared in Việt Nam. The earliest published usage of the term ‘revolution’ by a Vietnamese that I have traced is in Trương Vĩnh Ký's 1875 Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine. This textbook, by a noted Vietnamese polymath who worked closely with the newly arrived French, is a lengthy survey of Vietnamese history, in which the author uses the word ‘revolution’ exactly once, and in a rather unlikely spot. The revolutionary moment identified by Trương Vĩnh Ký was the political reorganisation of the northern Trịnh court after 1573 during its lengthy struggle with the Mặc family. The extended passage reads:

Clearly, this use of ‘revolution’ is a curious one. Trương Vĩnh Ký seems to be describing a kind of political consolidation on the part of the Trịnh, rather than a political upheaval or a change of regimes, much less a transformation of the fundamental political system itself. It is perhaps not surprising that this episode, the only one described by Trương Vĩnh Ký as a ‘revolution’, was not included in subsequent surveys of earlier ‘revolutions’ in Vietnamese history.

Furthermore, this usage does not accord with Trương Vĩnh Ký's own definition of the term in his slightly later 1884 Petite dictionnaire Français–Annamite, the first Vietnamese language dictionary to feature the term.Footnote ¹¹ In it, he included not only the nouns ‘révolution’ and ‘révolutionnaire’ but also the verb ‘révolutionner’ (to carry out a revolution).Footnote ¹² The dictionary did not suggest direct Vietnamese analogues for the term, nor did it create some sort of neologism. Instead, Trương Vĩnh Ký attempted to define these terms using Vietnamese approximations. The Vietnamese terms he used were ones suggestive chiefly of political upheaval and chaos, rather than systematic transformations of political systems. His definition of ‘révolution’ began with the mechanical sense of turning or revolving, using the Vietnamese phrase sự xây vần, which is literally ‘a revolution’ as in the turning of a wheel. This meaning is reinforced with the parenthetical inclusion of the sinically-derived Vietnamese term vận (運), also meaning to turn or revolve. Only then did Trương Vĩnh Ký offer the additional glosses for ‘révolution’ in the political sense, which he rendered in Vietnamese using loạn (disorder/chaos) and biến trong Nước (internal disorder). Along the same lines, he glossed ‘révolutionnaire’ (a revolutionary) as loạn and biến loạn, or as kẻ làm loạn — a person who creates this chaos. ‘Révolutionner’ (to carry out a revolution) is similarly defined as dấy loạn (to rise up in disorder) or làm cho biến loạn (to bring about calamitous disorder). Not surprisingly, his definitions of ‘rebellion’ and ‘revolt’ also used the word loạn to indicate the idea of disorder. Trương Vĩnh Ký's dictionary is significant for demonstrating that attempts to render the term ‘revolution’ into Vietnamese were already going on in the early 1880s, anticipating the arrival of the Japanese/Chinese neologism ‘ge minh/cách mạng’ by several decades. It is also an important example of the ways in which new terms might carry multiple and inchoate senses as they entered the Vietnamese lexicographical landscape, contributing to confusion on how one might understand them.Footnote ¹³

‘Revolution’ in Tonkin: 革命

While ‘revolution’ arrived via the French language and came to be understood by a small handful of southern scholars, its later arrival in Tonkin was considerably more complex. Furthermore, the term for revolution that appeared among northern scholar activists, 革命 (ge ming; cách mạnh), was one with a linguistic lineage that reflected long-standing Vietnamese connections to the Chinese classical language, as well as the lexicographical changes that had begun to develop among Japanese and then Chinese modernisers. Like many of the new terms coming into the Vietnamese language to describe novel concepts, things, and practices, this word for revolution must have been coined by Japanese scholars who had been assiduously transforming and expanding their own language to accommodate the broad range of new information coming into their society since the 1860s. The term was then picked up by Chinese modernisers and it would have been via their writings that it entered Vietnamese political discourse. Many of the neologisms being crafted by Japanese scholars created new combinations of characters to represent particular concepts like, for instance, the term xã hội (社會) for ‘society’. Such compounds of characters not previously used in tandem neatly served the interests of Japanese scholars trying to find ways to express the essence of new ideas via particular sinitic characters. Used together, the meanings of the individual characters within the compound suggested the new idea.Footnote ¹⁴

While many Japanese neologisms followed this pattern, others made use of existing compound terms, which were repurposed to express new concepts. The term that came to be used for revolution, 革命 (ge ming; cách mạnh), is an example of this phenomenon. By the time that Japanese scholars began to use the compound to represent ‘revolution’ in a modern sense it had already existed in classical Chinese texts for several millennia, albeit describing an event that lacked some of the elements carried by the modern term. Of the two characters 革 and 命, the former is the more straightforward. 革 means simply ‘to remove’ or ‘to change’.Footnote ¹⁵ 命 on the other hand, is a far more complex term. It can be differentially rendered as ‘fate’, ‘destiny’, ‘life’, ‘to command’, ‘a decree’, ‘a command’, or ‘the will of God’. The idea of 命 lies at the core of classical governance in East Asia, and it was absolutely essential to possess or control 命 in order for a Chinese or Vietnamese emperor to maintain his rule. Fear of the loss of 命 was an equally important element of governance, and court officials were on the constant lookout for signs and portents that 命 (in the sense of ‘the mandate of heaven’) might have been lost or that the ruler's hold on it might have become tenuous.

In classical Chinese and Vietnamese usage, the characters had been brought together as a kind of compound to describe an alteration of rulers, typically the transition from one dynasty to a new one.Footnote ¹⁶ As such, it is not surprising that Japanese scholars would have utilised this pairing of characters to speak of modern notions of revolution in the sense of political change. In its classical incarnation, however, the term was typically used to describe a more conservative action, a restoration of a political order that had gotten out of control, or a transfer of authority to a different emperor, but still an emperor. It was used to discuss the removal of the ‘mandate’ (of Heaven, which was implied) to rule, from a particular ruler or ruling house. The most celebrated, and earliest appearance of the term is in a phrase from the Classic of changes (Yijing, v. Kinh Dịch, 3rd century BCE): 湯 武 革 命 which might be rendered as ‘Tang and Wu [each] removed the mandate [to rule, from reigning dynasties]’.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus it described the transfer of political authority from one dynasty to another.

A few examples help to illuminate the ways in which the term was deployed in the early Chinese literature. The first comes from the Baopuzi (Master embracing simplicity, 抱朴子), an important Daoist text by Ge Hong (283–343). The Baopuzi includes several uses of the term 革命, of which the two following are the most pertinent to political upheaval and change:

Then, in an elaboration of the terse reference in the Classic of changes, Ge Hong comments on the early rulers and their role in causing political change:

In both examples the term ‘ge ming’ is directly linked to that for heaven, ‘tian’. This underscores the idea that the source of these ‘changes of the mandate’ lies in heaven itself, even if the change itself is enacted by people following the wishes of heaven. This ties back to the idea that 命 is a ‘fate’ related to heaven and to the authority granted by heaven for a ruler to exercise authority. A slightly different approach to the issue, also from the Baopuzi, runs as follows:

The phrase is a reference to the actions (committing suicide) of dynastic loyalists — Wuguang, Boyi, and Shuqi — in response to the fall of their respective dynasties. Here there is no explicit reference to heaven in the removal of the mandate. Rather, it is an action by a particular (future) ruler: the founder of the Shang and that of the Zhou dynasties. On the other hand, in the classical formulation the role of heaven would be implicit, given the understanding that such a ‘removal of the mandate’ could only conceivably transpire if it were permitted by heaven.

Such juxtapositions of 革 and 命 continue through the centuries, though an electronic search of major classical texts yielded only a modest number of examples. This suggests, though it is hardly definitive, that the pairing was not a frequent one. A considerably later example of the pairing of the terms is noteworthy for suggesting political upheaval, rather than merely a transition of power. This comes from the Ming (Dynasty) ‘Veritable Records’ (Ming Shi Lu), which contain a statement attributed to the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Ming Tai Zong (r. 1402–1424):

This comment thus sees 革 命 as a kind of political happening that does not merely displace one dynasty with another, but also as one that produces chaos and violence. Moreover, it sees 革 命 not as a single event, but rather as defining a period of time — i.e. using it as an adjective (‘a revolutionary era’) instead of a noun. This example suggests that there was some fluidity in the meaning carried by the term, even prior to the modern period. The instance is also useful for suggesting that earlier Chinese incarnations of the phrase had, at the very least, latent qualities of part of the meaning that ‘revolution’ in the modern sense would later come to bear. The existence of such examples would have made it an even more logical fit as Japanese scholars cast about for a phrase that could be used to represent the modern term.

Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese classical scholars had also made use of the term 革 命 in reference to government transitions, specifically those in which one monarch was overthrown by another to whom the mandate had been transferred, and who would then restore political and public order. Unsurprisingly, prominent examples of this usage are found in the Tây Sơn period of the last decades of the eighteenth century (1771–1802), a time of multiple political transitions, which saw the replacement of two ruling dynasties by new ones. Documents issued by the Tây Sơn Emperor, but written by his primary Confucian official, Ngô Thì Nhậm, illustrate this usage. In a decree issued to a group of soldiers, probably in 1789, Nhậm uses the phrase: ‘朕應天順人, 乘時革命，以兵定天下’ (We have responded to heaven and put in order the people, and have taken the opportunity of the changing of the mandate to use soldiers to settle all under heaven.)Footnote ²² In another somewhat later document, ‘Decree extending benevolence’, Ngô Thì Nhậm uses a slightly modified version of this phrase: ‘朕應天順人, 光膺景命’ (We have responded to heaven and put in order the people, and have graciously received the conditions of fate [or ‘of the commands, i.e. of Heaven]).Footnote ²³

Such uses of the phrase, and the more general references to ‘the fates’ or ‘commands’ (命) give some indication of the resonance this particular term had. It is a complex one that carried multiple meanings and numerous dimensions. On the one hand, ‘fate’ in a modern sense seems to be that which lies beyond the capacity of people to change; and yet, it is a double-edged sword, for when political circumstances are changed (by the people), this is conveniently seen as an indication of ‘fate’. The people then become the agents of heaven by enacting change. At the same time, the term that can be translated as ‘fate’ is the same one used to indicate the ‘commands’ or ‘decrees’ of the emperor. Thus, the term links the emperor with the heavens, in that the emperor creates ‘fate’ through his commands. Seen another way, the heavens can cause ‘fates’ to occur to the emperor, but the emperor can cause ‘fate’ to happen to his subjects through his use of ‘commands’. Clearly there were numerous classical antecedents already circulating in Việt Nam via texts like the Classic of changes (and probably also later texts such as the Ming Shilu, cited above) and as the Tây Sơn-era case suggests, the Vietnamese were deploying the phrase in their own political articulations.

革命 Returns to Việt Nam: Liang Qichao and Phan Bội Châu

These cases indicate that at one level the compound 革命 was already in Việt Nam prior to the twentieth century. What happened at the beginning of that century was its re-importation, now bearing a (somewhat) different meaning. As with many of the neologisms flowing into Việt Nam around the turn of the century it is extremely difficult to determine precisely when this reintroduction of 革命 took place. Indeed, it is not clear which Chinese scholar was the first to take up the reimagined phrase from the Japanese, though it was possibly Liang Qichao who would have come across it during his decade-and-a-half of exile in Japan beginning in 1898. In this respect, the term shared a historical and geographical trajectory with a large number of other abstract nouns that were similiarly coined in Japan, imported to China, and were then picked up by Chinese-trained Vietnamese intellectuals and transplanted in Việt Nam.

A strong candidate for the first text in which Vietnamese scholars might have come across the term is Liang Qichao's influential: 新民說 (Xin Min Shuo — Tân Dân Thuyết, New People), which he wrote and published in Japan as a series of articles between 1902 and 1905.Footnote ²⁴Xin Min Shuo was an extended discussion of what Liang Qichao considered crucial factors that the Chinese people should consider as they sought to renew and strengthen themselves to stimulate national revival in the face of profound political and indeed existential challenges. The work cites numerous European historical precedents for political change, making frequent references to ‘the French Revolution’ (法國大革命).Footnote ²⁵ The work also speaks of ‘nineteenth-century revolutionary unrest’ in general suggesting that the term was already being used by Chinese scholars not only in its bound form, but also in a descriptive way to label particular kinds of political upheaval.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, Xin Min Shuo includes a lengthy chronology of European historical events featuring several revolutions: not only the French Revolution, but also the ‘revolutionary upheavals’ (革命起) in Austria and Italy in 1848. Later it discusses the English, American, and even Japanese revolutions. Given his connections with Liang Qichao after his own arrival in Yokohama at some point in early 1905, it is extremely likely that Phan Bội Châu would have seen this important work, and his vocabulary as well as his larger works would have been influenced by it. Moreover, the content of the work, including its strong Social Darwinist overtones, are consonant with the essays found in the textbooks of the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục, the first modern-style Vietnamese educational institution, suggesting that by 1907 this work might well have been one of those being drawn upon by those creating the textbooks.

If Phan Bội Châu was likely the earliest Vietnamese to be exposed to the neologism ge ming, either through the writings of Liang Qichao or (much less likely) the moderniser Kang Youwei, it is striking that he does not yet make use of it in any political tracts he produced while in Japan under the direct influence of Liang Qichao and his writings. None of Phan Bội Châu's works from this 1905–1907 period, including his most significant titles — Việt Nam Vong Quốc Sử (History of the loss of the country), Tân Việt Nam (The new Việt Nam), and Hải Ngoại Huyết Thư (Overseas letter written in blood) — uses the compound 革命. In fact, the first occurrence of the term in Phan Bội Châu's writings is in his 1908 tract, Truyện các liệt sĩ Hà Thành (Tales of the martyrs of Hà Nội), written to commemorate the Vietnamese who had participated in an uprising against the French earlier that summer. In it, Phan Bội Châu refers to the Vietnamese who had been in service to the French, but who had become ‘people of the revolutionary side’. (người của phía cách mạng).Footnote ²⁷ This is the single use of the term ‘revolution’ in this work, indicating that the term had not yet captured his imagination, as it had that of Liang Qichao.

A survey of Phan Bội Châu's extensive political writings between 1905 and 1925 reveals very few uses of the word, even in his more elaborated calls to arms such as the founding documents of the Quang Phục Hội (The Restoration League), which Phan Bội Châu organised in 1912. In fact, these documents do not even make a single reference to the Chinese Republican Revolution, which had occurred just a year earlier. Although the term ‘revolution’ is nowhere to be found in these documents, Phan Bội Châu did have it in mind at the time, and used it in letters he sent in the context of the Quang Phục Hội's creation. In one, written to his co-conspirators in Nghệ-Tĩnh, Phan Bội Châu refers to a period in which ‘the revolutionary troops are not yet able to go forth’, while elsewhere he wrote that ‘in the South and out in the North, the revolutionary movement is spreading everywhere, and will exist all over the place’.Footnote ²⁸

While Phan Bội Châu made hesitant use of the term in these early years of the twentieth century, his more moderate contemporary Phan Châu Trinh was also beginning to deploy it in his own writing. His first published use of the word ‘revolution’ occurred in a lengthy text in classical Chinese, ‘A new Vietnam following the Franco-Vietnamese alliance’, written some time before 1911. Part of this text was a survey of the political landscape of early twentieth-century Việt Nam, and in it Phan Châu Trinh sought to distance and distinguish himself from the more radical activities of his compatriot Phan Bội Châu. He wrote about the existence of two general political orientations in Việt Nam during this time, describing these as the ‘Self-rule Party’ (tự trị đảng), which represented his own position and the other as the ‘Revolutionary Party’ (cách mạng đảng), which reflected the position of Phan Bội Châu. These were not parties in any formally constituted sense, but more groups of people who might be classified under these two rubrics. He does write, however, that there were somewhat more organised groupings representing these two political orientations, Phan Bội Châu's ‘Revolutionary Support Party’ (Cách Mạng Phù Hội Đảng) and the Self-rule Support Party (Tự Trị Phù Hội Đảng).Footnote ²⁹ In this use of ‘revolutionary’ it seems quite clear that Phan Châu Trinh is using it in the sense of aggressive actions to bring about political change, rather than fundamental change to underlying structures. In this regard, his use is consonant with the prevailing use of the term that emerged among Vietnamese activists between about 1910 and 1920. Moreover, in this sense his description of Phan Bội Châu's political orientation seems quite appropriate.

After this usage of ‘revolutionary’, Phan Châu Trinh virtually gives up on the term. An examination of the rest of his oeuvre between 1912 and his death in 1926 shows almost no use of the term, even when one might expect it. In the early 1910s, for example, he produced a translation and adaptation of a Japanese novel, Rare encounters with beautiful personages, parts of which are set in the United States and which describe the heroes and episodes from the American Revolution. In the course of the translation he manages to speak at length about the American Revolution without using the word ‘revolution’.Footnote ³⁰ Later, in a 1922 open letter to Emperor Khải Định, Phan Châu Trinh similarly manages to discuss the Chinese Revolution without using the term ‘revolution’. Rather than describing what occurred as a revolution, he notes simply that ‘China is the motherland of our country's civilisation, and in the year 1912 they also overthrew their king (đuổi vua) in order to establish a democratic country.’Footnote ³¹

Another text in which one might expect to find references to ‘revolution’ is the Quốc dân đọc bản, a textbook prepared for the 1907–1908 Tonkin Free School. The school's founders had been directly influenced by the work of Liang Qichao, and the text itself engages numerous modern political topics. Indeed, it is a kind of primer of citizenship in a new world of nation-states, financial institutions, and newly conceptualised groupings like ‘society’. Despite this, the textbook contains not a single use of any of the terms for ‘revolution’. Even an essay entitled ‘Regimes’ (or Political systems — Chính thể) that includes a discussion of political changes in Europe since the eighteenth-century contains no reference to revolution in general or to the French Revolution in particular. The essay simply discusses popular efforts to place limits on the power of absolute sovereigns and, rather than using the term ‘revolution’, speaks merely of ‘changes’ (thay đổi) to the political systems. This is particularly noteworthy given the considerable likelihood (as discussed above) that the Vietnamese already had an awareness of the French Revolution qua ‘revolution’ by this time via the writings of Liang Qichao. Perhaps the closest the Quốc dân đọc bản comes to any discussion of ge ming is an essay entitled ‘Belief in the mandate of heaven is false’. This essay argued against the idea that fate was the primary controlling force in peoples' lives. In short, it was a call to action that challenged the fatalism implied in the passive acceptance of the ‘mandate of heaven’. At a deeper level, however, it also eroded belief in the idea that political rule was somehow ‘fated’ by a higher power, clearly representing a revolutionary approach to power and governance.Footnote ³²

Even later anthologies of erstwhile early ‘revolutionary’ writings had difficulty tracking down materials that made actual references to the term for revolution. A noteworthy instance of this is Đặng Thai Mai's Văn thơ cách mạng Việt Nam (Đầu thế Kỷ XX, 1900–1925) (Vietnamese revolutionary poetry, from the beginning of the twentieth century, 1900–1925). The title notwithstanding, this anthology contains virtually no texts that make use of the term ‘revolution’ in any of its variants. There are only two exceptions, Phan Bội Châu's 1912 letter (discussed above) to supporters in Nghệ-Tĩnh on the occasion of his founding of the Việt Nam Quang Phục Hội, and Ngô Đức Kế's 1917 poem, ‘On the seven days in Thái Nguyên that recovered the land’, which also contains one occurrence of the term ‘revolution’.Footnote ³³ While the title of this anthology is, of course, a post hoc label for a period in which political writings expressed somewhat inchoate aspirations, the absence of the term in the prose and poetry of this period suggests that it had not yet captured the imagination of those who were struggling to find labels to apply to their political hopes. While the term revolution does appear in a small number of texts before 1920, it had not yet achieved anything approaching widespread use.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, the limited use of the term is underscored by an examination of the Tổng tập văn học Việt Nam, which provides a broad (though not exhaustive) survey of Vietnamese literature from this period. The volumes covering the years between 1885 and 1925 show, again, only scattered use of the term, reinforcing the impression gained from my more detailed survey of the works of Phan Bội Châu and Phan Chu Trinh that the term's appearance was sporadic and inconsistent.

Not only was the term's use still quite limited in the first decades of the twentieth century, but even when it was being used, ‘revolution’ manifested signs of its orthographically transitional nature. That is, in most texts of the pre-1920 period it was still being written in the Chinese character version of 革命, while the quốc ngữ form was still extremely uncommon. While in China there was no alternative, for Vietnamese the option of quốc ngữ presented the possibility of, at least visually, separating the term from its classical roots, making it somewhat easier to insist on a modern reading of it. Scholars of this generation would still, of course, know how it might be rendered in characters, but the visual disruption caused by the romanised letters would have helped make the break. But most early Vietnamese anticolonial scholars, even those oriented toward a ‘revolution’ in the modern sense, were writing the term using characters. For example, every time Phan Bội Châu wrote the word ‘revolution’ he was writing it as 革命. Another intellectual who used it in the form of 革命 in this early period was Ngô Đức Kế (1879–1929), in his poem ‘On the seven days in Thái Nguyên that recovered the land’ (題太原七日光復記). Penned to commemorate the uprising at Thái Nguyên, the first stanza of the poem includes the line:

Another early poem to use the term was by the scholar Hoàng Tăng Bí, who had been a participant in the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục. Written in 1924 and entitled ‘Vịnh Tùng Thoại’ (A chant for Tùng Thoại), it was a lament/commemoration of a female soldier who had taken part in the 1916 Duy Tân movement. The last lines of the poem ran:

These poems are reminders that although revolution was entering the discourse of anticolonial activists, it continued to do so primarily in its Chinese character form. Very few scholars were yet using it in its quốc ngữ equivalent, whose orthography was itself unstable, sometimes being rendered as cách mạng and at other times as kách mệnh.

Revolution matures: Writing in the 1920s

As we have seen, although the term 革命 had been developed and deployed by other East Asian intellectuals to talk about revolution, the term, and its romanised version, cách mạng, had been slow to take hold among Vietnamese intellectuals. By the early 1920s, however, it began to appear with greater regularity in the writings of Phan Bội Châu and others. Commencing this increasing usage of the term, Phan Bội Châu wrote a pamphlet in early 1921 entitled ‘The doctrine that I have embraced these nine years’, which begins with a section labelled ‘How does one carry out the revolution of civilisation?’ In it Phan Bội Châu noted: ‘We have made revolution the essential [thing] for pulling [up] the roots of bad government.’Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, however, he disavowed his own earlier radicalism, in a section entitled: ‘Why have I abandoned the method of violent revolution?’ Thus, in this work, Phan Bội Châu had already made the transition from violent revolution to a revolution of ‘civilisation’. Several years later, Phan Bội Châu made even more extensive use of ‘revolution’ in a 1924-pamphlet entitled ‘Truyện Phạm Hồng Thái’ (The tale of Pham Hong Thai), a commemoration of a young Vietnamese radical's attempt to assassinate a French governor-general in Canton. Here he used it in much more descriptive fashion, both as a noun and as an adjective. He referred to the notion of ‘revolutionary consciousness’, but also described worker strikes as ‘laboratories of revolution’.Footnote ³⁸ He also made additional references to a ‘revolutionary movement’ (時革命, p. 642), a ‘social revolution’ (社會革命, p. 645), to a ‘desire for the revolution to succeed’ (欲謀革命之成功, p. 646) to a ‘national revolution’ (國民之革命, p. 647), and finally, he spoke of a ‘revolutionary party’ (革命黨, p. 650).Footnote ³⁹

While Phan Bội Châu was thinking about revolution largely within a Vietnamese context, other Vietnamese were starting to explore revolutions in a more global sense. A prominent example is found in a brief 1922 pamphlet by Hải Triều, entitled Muốn Thì Được: Ai-nhỉ-lan cách-mạng lược-sử (If you desire it, you will achieve it: A summary history of the Irish Revolution). This pamphlet is noteworthy for marking one of the earliest appearances of the quốc ngữ form of ‘revolution’ that I have found. The Irish Revolution it describes was a struggle against what had become a centuries-long British domination of its neighbouring isle. It began with a declaration of independence in 1919 and after a two-year battle succeeded in ousting the British and restoring Irish autonomy. While the pamphlet itself was probably a translation of a European-language work, the preface was certainly original, and is revealing about how its author understood ‘revolution’ in the Irish case. Significantly, the primary emphasis of this work is not on revolution as an act of political transformation, but rather on revolution as national liberation. It opens with the words: ‘Oh, Freedom! Freedom!’ Then, echoing the title of Phan Bội Châu's tract ‘Việt Nam vong quốc sử’ (History of the loss of the nation), Hải Triều describes the Irish as having ‘vong quốc’ (lost their country) to the British in the twelfth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ As such the Irish ‘revolution’ sought to oust the British and to reestablish national independence after centuries of oppression. Despite its fervour (the text is liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks), the preface is careful not to draw any explicit connections to the Vietnamese case, leaving it to the reader to connect the final dots. The implicit parallels to Việt Nam are certainly there, particularly in a paragraph in which the author describes Ireland as underpopulated, possessing rather limited resources, and with a modest land mass, all juxtaposed against the large populations, substantial resources, and general might of the English.Footnote ⁴¹

The Irish case is of course quite important as a significant departure from some of the other revolutionary precedents of which the Vietnamese had already become aware, notably the French, the Chinese, and the Russian revolutions. Clearly these were internal affairs in which existing and entrenched political systems were being uprooted and replaced with radically new ones. The Irish ‘revolution’, akin to the American case, was more about national liberation than political transformation, and also like the American Revolution, was motivated in large measure by the injustices of rule by outsiders. Thus, while there may have been elements of the Irish revolutionary forces and leadership that sought a transformation of social and economic relations, the overriding objective was to drive out the ruling powers precisely because they were alien to the local populations. Viewed from a historical perspective, the Irish case would appear somewhat analogous to the first phase of the later Vietnamese revolution in which the emphasis was upon driving out the French, while the postcolonial phase of the Vietnamese revolution — dominated by social and economic transformations — would be more comparable to the radical upheavals seen in the French and Russian revolutions.Footnote ⁴²

Debating and consolidating ‘revolution’: From Nguyễn Thượng Huyền’s Cách mệnh to Hồ Chí Minh’s Đường kách mệnh

While scholars were making rather limited use of the term, none had yet made a self-conscious attempt to explain precisely what a revolution was, Trương Vĩnh Ký's 1884 dictionary definition notwithstanding. As the textual examples considered so far suggest, the word cách mạng (usually as 革命) continued to be used to describe rather nebulous political upheavals, notable more for their violent form than their particularly defined objectives. It was also used in poetry in rather indistinct ways that continued to bind it to more classical meanings, whether in its juxtaposition with 英雄 (heroes) or its linkage to 大名 (great reputations). Indeed, as Huỳnh Kim Khánh observed: ‘In practice ... the term cach menh had been used loosely to identify any rebellion against political authority in the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle, every leader or group rising against the French colonial rule was usually referred to as cach menh.’Footnote ⁴³ Thus, use of the word had shifted from the classical conception of 革命 as restorative (a restoration of the ideal order), to one that emphasised an almost open-ended political struggle — cách mạng as chaotic — even as it continued to bear marks of its classical antecedents. It had not yet fully taken form as the modern sense of revolution as a fundamental and calculated transformation of the political system itself. This awaited, Huỳnh Kim Khánh argues, the efforts of Hồ Chí Minh.

Khánh identifies a particular episode as exemplifying this transition, from the muddled and uncertain use of the term ‘cách mạng’ to a much clearer modern articulation shorn of most of its classical Chinese baggage. The episode in question, one Hue-Tam Ho Tai also described in some detail in Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (1983), began with the publication in 1925 of a 22-page quốc ngữ pamphlet by an older scholar, Nguyễn Thượng Huyền, the son of Nguyễn Thượng Hiền, an early anticolonial nationalist and colleague of Phan Bôi Châu.Footnote ⁴⁴ Entitled simply Cách mệnh, this short tract was part of a broad publishing trend among Vietnamese intellectuals in this period who were writing explanations and commentaries on new concepts and terms ranging from religion to revolution.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the work's preface, Nguyễn Thượng Huyền describes his motivation for writing on this topic:

The preface was followed by a general introduction consisting of a comment on the need for revolution, followed by a brief, if somewhat ill-informed discussion of the Chinese characters that had come to represent the term:

Thus, in Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's eyes, the objectives of a revolution echo a kind of classical ideal, of supplanting evil with good, rather than being transformative of a particular political system. He concludes with a list of objectives that would preclude a political upheaval from being called a ‘revolution’.

Having offered a kind of definition of revolution and some attempt at a brief etymology of the term, Nguyễn Thượng Huyền lists what he considers the principle historical examples of the phenomenon of revolution. It is a curious list, one that begins with the first ‘revolutions’, in this case the ancient Chinese precedents established by Emperors Thang (湯) and Wu (武).Footnote ⁴⁸ From this Huyền jumps rapidly into the modern period for which he provides a haphazard and not quite chronological listing of past revolutions:

But Huyền was not finished, for he concluded his list with a series of events ‘which have unfolded in our country, which might also be called revolutions’. This list includes:

This list indicates that Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's view of ‘revolution’ had, at one level, not moved far from the classical definition of ‘cách mệnh’ as a transition from one regime to another, without necessarily seeing any fundamental alteration in the political system itself. Thus, even ‘revolts’, ‘uprisings’, and acts of ‘sedition’ could be ‘revolutions’. Juxtaposing this list of Vietnamese ‘revolutions’ with the previous list of modern ‘revolutions’ suggests that he was using the term ‘cách mệnh’ simultaneously in its original and its modernised meanings. The actions of Vietnamese historical rebels would appear to stand on equal footing with the Bolsheviks and the French radicals. In this context, Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's call to revolution was rather ambiguous, for a potential revolutionary reading this tract might be quite puzzled as to whether he or she should be following the example of the Trưng Sisters or of Vladimir Lenin. Nguyễn Thượng Huyền himself provided no real guidance, merely remarking vaguely after concluding his lists of ‘revolutions’: ‘It must be recognised that revolution is truly a grand and humane undertaking.’Footnote ⁴⁹ I would argue, following Huỳnh Kim Khánh, that Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's approach is emblematic of the difficulties that Vietnamese activists had in pinning down the term's meaning. As David Marr observed of Vietnamese political activists of the early twentieth century: ‘they still confused revolution with activism, an error that has plagued more than one militant Vietnamese party even to the present day.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Their confusion saw actions, however poorly planned or implemented, as ‘revolution’. As Marr notes, the idea that ‘revolution’ might be understood only to mean ‘doing’ was one in circulation then and now.Footnote ⁵¹

After writing Cách Mệnh, Nguyễn Thượng Huyền sent it for comment to Hồ Chí Minh.Footnote ⁵² Having read the pamphlet, Hồ concluded that it presented a useful opportunity to address publicly what he regarded as the shortcomings of existing popular conceptions of revolution. Hồ replied in a lengthy personal letter to Huyền, but responded also indirectly in the pages of his new journal Thanh Niên (Youth) and by finally writing his own articulation of the term's meaning in a brief book, Đường kách mệnh (The road to revolution). In these responses, Hồ addressed both what he saw as the ‘muddle-headed’ nature of the prevailing views of revolution, and Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's particular views on the manner in which the Vietnamese should engage the French.

Hồ began his letter by politely praising Huyền for his bravery in writing on a complex issue in quốc ngữ and then damns him with faint praise by stating that the documents clearly reflected ‘someone who liked to read’. Such ‘niceties’ aside, however, most of Hồ's reply to Nguyễn Thượng Huyền was extremely critical, and he launched his opening salvo without holding back:

Clearly for Hồ it was insufficient simply to describe revolution. If one was to take up the topic at all it had to include some attempt to use it as a point of departure for action. Hồ’s reply is interesting for how it situates him within the lineage of Vietnamese nationalists who ascribed many of the fundamental problems to the Vietnamese themselves. This was a particular mantra of Phan Châu Trinh and, to a lesser extent, of Phan Bội Châu as well. Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's pamphlet, by contrast, had focused on the crimes of the French, and their suppression of Vietnamese political aspirations.

This exchange was also a stark reminder that the term ‘revolution’ had become a strongly contested one, in part precisely because of the historical baggage that it carried. Huyền could not (or chose not to) separate its classical meaning from its modern one, and as such lumped all political transitions, of whatever nature, into the same broad category. Hồ clearly viewed this as both careless and dangerous. For his part, Hồ fully rejected the classical meaning of the term, and focused only on the modern sense of a radical transformation of socio-political systems. Indeed, he criticised Huyền for using too many classical allusions, and even questioned his etymology of the term ‘revolution’.

More importantly, however, Hồ sought very clearly to distinguish ‘revolution’ from what he considered as lesser kinds of political actions, such as rebellions, revolts, and the like:

Furthemore, as Khánh notes,

Hồ went so far as to point out that ancient precedents from the Yi Jing being cited by Nguyễn Thượng Huyền were hardly revolutionary:

While Hồ responded to Nguyễn Thượng Huyền directly, he also responded indirectly, most notably in writing his own revolutionary tract — Đường kách mệnh. This document served as an indirect response in that it implicitly challenged the idea of ‘revolution’ articulated by Nguyễn Thượng Huyền, which was about action, but not about direction. By spelling out a ‘road’ to revolution, Hồ was addressing one of the fundamental weaknesses of existing discussions of revolution: their lack of structure and direction. But he also pointed out, in his brief justification for producing the work — ‘Why have I had to write this book?’ — that there remained considerable confusion about the term revolution itself. This was not, as Hồ saw it, because of a lack of material, but rather because of French censorship and restrictions: ‘Many books have been written about the theory and history of revolution. The French fear these, and thus have prohibited us from studying them, and prohibited us from seeing them, and consequently our compatriots are very confused regarding the two characters cách mệnh.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Hồ Chính Minh almost certainly had Nguyễn Thượng Huyền (among others) in mind when he wrote this.

Given this basic problem of definition, Đường kách mệnh begins in precisely the same manner as Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's Cách mệnh, namely by asking the direct question: ‘What is revolution?’ (Cách mệnh là gì?) Unlike Nguyễn Thượng Huyền, Hồ's answer is quite concise: ‘Revolution is the destruction of the old and its replacement with the new, and it is the destruction of the bad, and its replacement with the good.’ (Cách mệnh là phá cái cũ đổi ra cái mới, phá cái xấu đổi cái tốt.)Footnote ⁵⁹ As this introduction suggests, the entire volume is written as a series of questions, followed by explanations. In this respect, it follows in the existing tradition of published explications of particular terms mentioned earlier. It is also a reflection of the fact that Đường kách mệnh was largely a compilation of the instructional materials Hồ had been using as a teacher for those coming to join Thanh Niên for its crash course on Marxism and revolution. The book was very much a revolutionary primer in the true sense of such a work.

Deeper analysis of the rest of the content of Đường kách mệnh goes beyond the scope of this paper.Footnote ⁶⁰ What I suggest here, along the lines already sketched out by Huỳnh Kim Khánh, is that in some respects this text served to bring to a close the earlier phase of the use and expansion of the word ‘revolution’ in the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle. Prior to the dissemination of Đường kách mệnh, the term had primarily been used in a rather vague way, describing a range of political actions of an anticolonial nature, whatever their scope, structure, or guiding principles. This usage was, as I indicated, emblematised in the ways in which Nguyễn Thượng Huyền used it in his study of the term. Hồ's sustained critique of Nguyễn Thượng Huyền's work marked a definitive rejection of this earlier and inchoate usage. It did not, of course, bring an end to the struggle over the term, which remained bitterly contested. What it did do, however, was to articulate some clear guidelines to define the terms of the debate.