Imagining America: The United States in Radical Vietnamese Anticolonial Discourse

Abstract

In the winter and spring of 1919, as the Paris Peace Conference delib erated over the postwar peace settlement for Europe, members of the Vietnamese expatriot association known as the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites often gathered in a small Parisian apartment in the thir teenth arrondissement. Inspired by the Wilsonian rhetoric of self-de termination, their meetings focused on drafting a proposal for the gradual emancipation of Vietnam from French colonial rule to present to the leaders of the Great Powers in Paris. The final document, en titled du Peuple Annamite, set forth an eight-point program that included calls for a general amnesty for political prison ers, equality of legal rights between French and Vietnamese, freedom of the press, the right to form political associations, and permanent Vietnamese representation in the French parliament. Although the drafting of the proposal had been a collective effort that included the participation of Phan Chu Trinh, among the most famous and influential of Vietnamese anticolonial leaders, the Revendications bore the signature of a relative unknown, Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Nguyen the Patriot. Shortly before the deliberations in Paris came to a close, the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites submitted its Revendications to the heads of various national delegations, in cluding President Woodrow Wilson, asking that their proposals be added to the conference agenda. Their request was ignored.1