In Vietnamese nationalist writing, Emperor Hàm Nghi (1871–1944, r. 1885–89) often plays the role of the romantic hero. As a boy of fifteen, he was secreted out of the palace under dark of night and fled to the mountains, and in the cần vương (aid-the-king) edict, he implored his subjects to break free from the French and follow him. Betrayed by one of his guards, Hàm Nghi was captured in 1889 and promptly sent to Algeria to live the remainder of his life estranged from the country of his youth.
This is where most histories of Vietnam end his saga, but it is where Amandine Dabat's massive study essentially begins. Dabat's book traces Hàm Nghi's exile from the time he enters the harbor in Algiers as an eighteen-year-old to the time of his death fifty-five years later. Dabat's book is based on documents in Hàm Nghi's personal archive, along with the personal papers of his eldest daughter, Như Mai (1905–99), and those of the family of Gabrielle Capek, the private tutor of Hàm Nghi's children, with whom he had a long and passionate affair. Dabat does not stress the reason for her access to these rare materials: Như Mai was the author's great-grand aunt, and Dabat is therefore a direct descendant of the emperor.
Dabat's book is a detailed sketch of the life and art of the ex-emperor in exile, focusing on his relations with the Algerian elite, his somewhat distanced involvement with Vietnamese personalities, and his growing prowess as an artist. She argues that Hàm Nghi should not be understood as an anticolonial revolutionary through the lens of cần vương, in which he was likely only passively involved. Instead, we should see him as a person who reinvented himself as a member of the high society of Algiers, someone who responded to restrictions on what he could say or write by expressing the solitude of his existence through oils on canvas.
Chapter 1 covers Hàm Nghi's journey from the time of his capture in the mountains to the first years of his exile in Algeria. Dabat highlights the tensions between the government of French Indochina, which viewed Hàm Nghi as potentially dangerous, and the colonial government of Algeria, which regarded him as one of its own. Hàm Nghi befriended two Vietnamese students in Algiers: future Constitutionalist Party leader Bùi Quang Chiêu (1873–1945) and Kỳ Đồng (1875–1929), who was eventually exiled to Tahiti for posing as a soothsayer who could make his followers impervious to bullets. Despite this direct link to an anticolonial agitator, Dabat suggests that Hàm Nghi was indifferent to Vietnamese political affairs.
Chapter 2 describes the ex-emperor's pursuits as he adjusts to life in Algiers. Hàm Nghi learned tennis and the piano, but he distinguished himself as an artist. His most remarkable paintings depict the landscape and local life around Algiers. Chapter 3 focuses on two close French acquaintances of Hàm Nghi's in Algiers: military officer and colonial administrator Charles Gosselin (1852–1929) and writer and poet Judith Gautier (1845–1917). Dabat proposes that while Gosselin exploited Hàm Nghi to promote his career by using his notoriety to make contacts with colonial officials and write his book, the relationship between the ex-monarch and Gautier—which was an intimate friendship, at the very least—was genuine, mutual, lasting, and creative. The final chapter narrates Hàm Nghi's home life from the time of his 1904 marriage to Marcelle Laloë (1884–1974) until his death. Hàm Nghi was able to use his contacts to secure a generous pension and build new living quarters after marriage, in tacit exchange for his statements of loyalty to France. The chapter also details the deep and long-lasting love of Hàm Nghi for his mistress Gabrielle Capek.
Dabat's book does an admirable job of weaving a narrative thread through Algiers to developments in the metropole and in Indochina. But the book leaves one wondering about how to understand Hàm Nghi's role in the history of colonial Algeria—a history fraught with racial tension. How does Hàm Nghi's acceptance into the tennis-playing, landscape-painting elite French square with the systemic discrimination faced by Arabs and blacks in Algiers?
There is also something elusive—something undecidable—about Dabat's Hàm Nghi. He was indifferent to colonial politics but somehow also right in the middle of them. He integrated himself into high society, but he had to remain guarded, worrying that his friends actually had him under surveillance. Dabat's portrait of Hàm Nghi is of someone who seemed to give friendship and love quite easily but never revealed himself fully.
Dabat seems to mirror the elusiveness of her great-great grandfather. She offers us five hundred pages of (sometimes excessively) intricate detail of Hàm Nghi's life, presented straightforwardly, and the interpretation is given in a minimalist way. Yet it would be easy to read this book quickly and not even notice Dabat's personal relationship to the subject of her study. Nevertheless, finishing the book, having read so many drafts of his personal letters, makes one feel as if one knows Hàm Nghi as one might a close friend. It is a satisfying feeling.
