Fig. 1. Pierre Br...
Fig. 1. Pierre Brocheux (right foreground) in the library of the Société des Études Indochinoises (inside the Botanical Gardens) in 1963
Photo credit: Denis Brocheux
1Pierre Brocheux (1931-2022) was widely known in France and around the world as a leading historian of Indochina, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. His landmark book Indochine, la colonisation ambiguë (1994), co-written with Daniel Hémery, was translated into English as Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954 (2010), and also published in Vietnamese shortly before his death, as Đông Dương: Một Nền Thuộc Địa Nhập Nhằng, Giai Đoạn 1858-1954 (2022). This thematic issue of Moussons celebrates Brocheux’s work not only as a researcher but also as a teacher, in light of the many years he spent at the Université Paris-VII Jussieu, where he trained several generations of historians specialising in Southeast Asia, and Vietnam in particular.
- 1 “Les vivants et les morts. 26e rendez-vous de l’histoire Blois, 4 au 8 octobre 2023”, p. 8 (https:/ (...)
2An initial event honouring Brocheux was held at the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire festival in Blois on 7 October 2023, in the form of a round table on “Decolonisation and the Cold War, from Indochina to the two Vietnams: the lessons of Pierre Brocheux.”1 Its large audience demonstrated the public interest in the work of a scholar who was always keen to engage with people outside the academic community and to share his knowledge with secondary school teachers and the wider public, whom he met regularly at the annual festival in Blois. The following year, a half-day colloquium on “Pierre Brocheux, historian of Indochina, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia: The man, his work, and his legacy” was held on 3 April 2024 at the Université Paris Cité, the new name for the Université Paris-VII Jussieu where Brocheux spent much of his career. This event was attended by nearly 120 people, including a large number of students taking courses on the history of Southeast Asia and the history of empires in Asia, several of Brocheux’s former students and colleagues, and members of the Vietnamese diaspora.
- 2 Institut Français de Recherche sur l’Asie de l’Est (IFRAE, UMR 8043), and École Française d’Extrême (...)
- 3 The Connaissance du Tiers-Monde research group later became the Sociétés en Développement Études Tr (...)
3I organised this half-day colloquium in partnership with Emmanuel Poisson (IFRAE) and Andrew Hardy (EFEO),2 and with support from the GIS Asie research network, and it was hosted by the Centre d’Études en Sciences Sociales sur les Mondes Africains, Américains et Asiatiques (CESSMA), which developed from the Connaissance du Tiers-Monde research group in which Brocheux played a particularly active role.3 Two of the latter’s eminent alumni gave moving tributes to Brocheux: his historian colleague and friend Daniel Hémery (who died a year later, in April 2025), and the historian of Africa Catherine Coquery Vidrovich, who ran the research group for many years. Further contributions came from Pascal Bourdeaux (EPHE) and Patrice Morlat, a series editor for Les Indes Savantes, and several international speakers who demonstrated the global impact of Brocheux’s work: Gisèle Bousquet (San José State University, San José), Christopher Goscha (UQAM, Montreal), Sophie Quinn-Judge (Temple University, Philadelphia), Philippe Peycam (IIAS, Leiden), and Bùi Trân Phượng (by videoconference from Ho Chi Minh City). Each of the speakers had attended Brocheux’s seminars as a student and/or collaborated with him in one way or another, and was thus able to provide an insight into him as a person, his work, and his teaching.
- 4 Brocheux & Hémery (2010); Brocheux (2009, 2011).
- 5 This non-governmental cultural foundation, named after the reformist scholar Phan Châu Trinh (1872- (...)
- 6 They included the first African students to work on Indochina, among them Webby Kalikiti (Universit (...)
- 7 Bousquet & Brocheux (2002).
- 8 Brocheux (1996).
4This event highlighted three of Brocheux’s major contributions. The first of these was the impact of his work and its international influence: three of his books have been translated into English,4 and in 2018 he and Daniel Hémery were jointly awarded the Phan Châu Trinh Cultural Foundation Prize5 for their major contribution to the history of Vietnam. Secondly, the speakers emphasised the importance of Brocheux’s teaching on Southeast Asia, in particular on Indochina, and the way he dedicated time to French and foreign students.6 This included giving many young French researchers, myself among them, the opportunity to be involved in the multi-contributor work that he co-edited with Gisèle Bousquet, Viêt-Nam Exposé: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society (2002),7 which brought French-language research on Vietnam to an Anglophone audience. Finally, the colloquium highlighted Brocheux’s desire to share his knowledge with the public through his involvement with organisations such as the Association Française de la Recherche sur l’Asie du Sud-Est (AFRASE),8 of which he was a founding member, and the Société Française d’Histoire des Outre-Mers (SFHOM), and by writing articles for magazines aimed at a general readership such as L'Histoire, attending the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire festival in Blois, and the many talks he gave to Vietnamese community organisations in France. This thematic issue of Moussons, the only French-language journal specialising in Southeast Asia, celebrates Pierre Brocheux’s major contribution to the history of Indochina and Vietnam.
5The issue opens with a previously unpublished interview with Brocheux conducted in 2006, which I followed up three years later with a further interview discussing his involvement with AFRASE to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding (Tran 2009). This interview provides an insight into Brocheux as a person, representing a kind of “ego-history” in which he places his journey as a historian in the context of a life led between Saigon and Paris. Pierre Brocheux was born in 1931 in the Cholon neighbourhood of Saigon, to a French father and a Vietnamese mother. He went to France to take his baccalaureate and study history at the Sorbonne, then returned to Vietnam in the 1960s to teach history and geography at Saigon’s Lycée Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while also preparing a PhD thesis at EHESS under the supervision of Jean Chesneaux. In the interview, Brocheux emphasises the extent to which he was shaped as both a person and a historian by the twenty-five years he spent in Indochina and then South Vietnam at the height of the war. He personally witnessed two major events in contemporary Vietnamese history: the August Revolution of 1945 in Saigon, as a teenager, and the Tet Offensive of February 1968, as a young teacher. The first of these events prompted him to move to France to complete his secondary education, and the second to return to France, itself in political turmoil, to complete his thesis. After working for a year as a secondary school teacher and being awarded his PhD, he joined the history department of the newly-created Université Paris-VII Jussieu (now Paris Cité). As a student he had attended Charles André Julien’s lectures on colonisation at the Sorbonne, and was now asked to work with colleagues to run an area studies course on the history of Southeast Asia, which he would ultimately teach from 1970 to 1997. The Jussieu history department wanted to move away from a Eurocentric colonial history towards a different kind of history, as seen from the perspective of the Global South (which would later develop into world history). Brocheux’s teaching covered the history of the countries of Southeast Asia over the longue durée right up to the present, and from a regional perspective. In this interview, he also discusses the political context of the 1970s and 1980s, and how witnessing the devastation caused by the escalation of the war led to his engagement with left-wing politics due to its support for peace in Vietnam. His criticism of the government of reunified Vietnam on his return from a trip to the country in 1979 had a dampening effect on academic exchanges, which had only just restarted. Finally, Brocheux reflects on his career as a historian, which spanned both social and economic history, and political history.
6Historian Agathe Larcher-Goscha studied under Brocheux at Paris-VII, and her article draws on the archives of the Connaissance du Tiers-Monde research group – which in 1994 was renamed Sociétés en Développement dans l’Espace et le Temps (Sedet) – to explore the emergence of academic knowledge at the newly-created university at Jussieu. In “L'Indochine et le Viêt Nam à l'université Paris-VII: expérience militante et militants d’expérience (années 1970-1990)” [Indochina and Vietnam at the Université Paris-VII: activist experience and experienced activists (1970s-1990s)], she describes what made Jussieu different from the Sorbonne, and places its history department in the context of the historiography of the 1970s to 1990s, which was committed to a history seen from the margins: a history of the majority groups who had often been neglected by traditional history. This included the history of the Global South, history from below, women’s history, and the history of the poor, as pioneered by Jean Chesneaux, Pierre Vidal Naquet, Michèle Perrot, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Larcher-Goscha provides a detailed description of the Connaissance du Tiers-Monde research group, which focused on what were then termed “Third World” countries. It adopted a resolutely comparative and multidisciplinary approach, considering Southeast Asia from both a political perspective (decolonisation and political regimes) and an economic and social perspective (development and rural studies), all against the background of decolonisation and the Cold War.
- 9 Larcher-Goscha (1990, 2000).
7Larcher-Goscha recalls the central role played by Paris-VII in research on Indochina and Vietnam from the 1970s through to the 1990s, as the only French university to employ three historians specialising in the region (Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery, and Georges Boudarel), who trained several generations of students between them. She describes how its research seminars attracted a wide range of French, American, and Vietnamese historians, and were characterised by an open approach to both the topics studied, and to non-academic audiences (particularly from the Vietnamese diaspora). She shows that the political engagement of the “three musketeers” during this period was by no means incompatible with the research topics explored by students of economic, cultural, or political history in relation to non-communist nationalist movements. She herself studied the politics of Albert Sarraut, who served as France’s Governor-General of Indochina and Minister for the Colonies, and was the architect of “Franco-Annamite collaboration”.9 Finally, Larcher-Goscha paints a picture of the first academic cooperation initiative between France and reunified Vietnam, which was spearheaded by Paris-VII. Drawing on the archives of the Centre d’Études et d’Échanges Franco-Vietnamiens (CETEFV), she describes the various phases of cooperation between Paris-VII and Vietnam National University and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. This cooperation was important to academics working in the hard sciences, and the hosting of Vietnamese researchers and trips by Paris-VII academics to Vietnam continued even through periods of tension in the 1980s. Brocheux’s support for an end to a war whose devastating impact he had witnessed first-hand did not prevent him from expressing strong criticism of the government in an article he co-wrote for Le Monde Diplomatique with Daniel Hémery following their 1979 trip to the reunified Vietnam, “Le Vietnam exsangue” (Brocheux & Hémery 1980).
8Pascal Bourdeaux’s article “Des méandres du Mékong aux méandres de l'histoire: le Viêt Nam contemporain au regard de Pierre Brocheux” [From the meanders of the Mekong to the meanders of history: contemporary Vietnam through the eyes of Pierre Brocheux] presents an overview of Brocheux’s work. It reveals the breadth of this research not only in disciplinary terms (from economic to political and social history) but also in space and time, spanning the entire contemporary history of Vietnam, from French Indochina to the two Vietnams and reunified Vietnam. Bourdeaux, himself a specialist on South Vietnam, reveals the “southern perspective” on Vietnamese history and the central place of the Mekong Delta in Brocheux’s truly pioneering research, describing him as “a historian of the South(s)”. Bourdeaux notes that it was in the offices of the Société des Études Indochinoises in Saigon (shown in the photograph at the beginning of this introduction) that Brocheux spoke to the writer Sơn Nam about the peasantry of the Mekong Delta, a subject that interested them both. While the historians of his generation focused on political topics influenced by the challenges of a history of the present, Brocheux explored the concept of “social space”, and – despite the misgivings of his supervisor Jean Chesneaux – opted to write his PhD thesis on rural society and Cochinchina as a meeting place for the Vietnamese, Chinese, and French capitalist worlds. As Bourdeaux notes, it was not until much later on that Brocheux’s thesis was published in English, by Columbia University Press.
9In addition to Brocheux’s key field of “social history, a history sensitive to subalternity and objectively critical of colonialism”, as Bourdeaux puts it, this article also discusses the regional dimension of Brocheux’s research, which encompassed the social history of the countries of Southeast Asia and even the wider Asian region. Bourdeaux thus describes Brocheux’s involvement with AFRASE and his collaboration with research programmes on Southeast Asia in both the United States and Australia, including his research on the economic history of Vietnam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of the “An Economic History of Southeast Asia” programme led by Anthony Reid, a historian of modern Southeast Asia. Finally, Bourdeaux discusses how as a historian of the present, influenced by Marxism and the anticolonial movement, Brocheux lived through the dramatic events of the war and post-war period in Vietnam, and took up his role as a politically engaged intellectual.
- 10 One of the products of the long-standing collaboration between Bousquet and Brocheux included the b (...)
10In her article “Land Conversion: Micro Urban Development of the Hanoi Metropolis after Doi Moi”, Gisèle Bousquet, a long-standing friend and colleague of Brocheux,10 uses empirical data collected over the last thirty years from a former village on the outskirts of Hanoi (Khương Hạ) to show how farmers have become the main actors in the micro urban development of the city. Extending her original approach to urbanisation in Vietnam, which is based on studying the impact of urban expansion on rural communities, she highlights the role of rural actors (Bousquet 2015). Bousquet describes how the latter have managed to leverage their land use rights by converting them into property, despite attempts to expropriate this land in the context of the urban development policies pursued by the state as part of the Đổi Mới reforms. Notably, the article places this highly contemporary study of the strategies pursued by farmers in the Red River Delta to leverage their land assets under a socialist market economy in the context of Brocheux’s historical analysis of the strategies pursued by peasants in the Mekong Delta to leverage the opportunities offered by a free-trade economy based on rice monoculture during the colonial period.
11Bousquet contrasts urban development policies at the level of the state with the strategies of periurban communities at the level of the village, showing how the latter have used family networks and solidarity to maintain the access of family members to land and housing, and how they have managed to circumvent state urban development policies amid very strong pressure on the land market. Another notable feature of this article is that it highlights the role played by women in these strategies for converting arable land into land for construction, either for their families or for the growing numbers of rural migrants. They are combining this strategy with the development of urban gardens to boost household income.
- 11 See Bùi’s entries on Vietnamese women in Didier, Fouque & Calle-Gruber (2013 [2015 expanded ed.]).
12Bùi Trân Phượng, who studied under Brocheux at Paris-VII, pays tribute to his work on Vietnamese elites by exploring the lives of women who played a significant role in the emergence of new Vietnamese elites in the first half of the twentieth century. Her article, “Femmes et modernité : éducation, presse et féminisme au Viêt Nam (1918-1945)” [Women and modernity: education, the press, and feminism in Vietnam (1918-1945)], notably expands on her earlier work highlighting Vietnamese women published in Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices.11 Here, Bùi presents a detailed analysis of biographical journeys based on an original corpus of rarely used printed materials that include autobiographical and biographical accounts, along with a large number of articles published in the women’s press of the period.
13Bùi explains how girls in Indochina had even less access to education than boys, since the supply of teaching was limited and variable, and families prioritised sons, and highlights the numerous obstacles that girls had to overcome, beginning with the challenge of leaving their home village to move to a town or city and access new professions. Yet, as the author describes, they used strategies to get around these obstacles and successfully assert themselves as “intellectual women” in the predominantly male world of the press: firstly, financial support from illiterate mothers enabled their daughters to pursue higher primary education, and secondly, girls actively decided to pursue new careers as journalists, writers, and editors. Here, the biographical approach, which Brocheux himself used to describe the emergence of new urban elites and the press as their favoured means of expression, provides invaluable insight, since it reveals how women also asserted themselves in both rural and urban Vietnamese society in order to express anticolonial and modernist political demands as well as feminist demands, thus laying the foundations for the first wave of Vietnamese feminism (Bùi 2008).
14My own article, “Gaston Phạm Ngọc Thuần (1914-2002): de la bourgeoisie cochinchinoise au communisme. Contribution à l'histoire des élites au Viêt Nam au xxe siècle” [Gaston Phạm Ngọc Thuần (1914-2002): from the Cochinchinese bourgeoisie to communism. A contribution to the history of elites in Vietnam in the twentieth century] explores the history of elites in Vietnam through the life of Gaston Phạm Ngọc Thuần (1914-2002), a member of the French-speaking Cochinchinese bourgeoisie who was closely connected to the Constitutionalist Party leader Bùi Quang Chiêu, and was inspired to join the Vietnamese Communist Party due to his nationalist sympathies. It builds on Brocheux’s work on the Cochinchinese bourgeoisie, including his chapter entitled “Élite, bourgeoisie ou la difficulté d’être”, which was published in Saigon 1925-1945. De la « Belle colonie » à l’éclosion révolutionnaire ou la fin des dieux blancs (1994), edited by Philippe Franchini. Brocheux not only explored the history of Vietnam through studying the major structures of social and economic history, but also political history through the genre of biography. In addition to his two biographies of Hồ Chí Minh, published in France by Éditions Fayard and Presses de Sciences Po, he devoted several articles and chapters to members of the Cochinchinese elites such as Bùi Quang Chiêu and Gilbert Trần Chánh Chiếu.
15This biographical article on the Cochinchinese bourgeoisie, who viewed themselves as an elite, is situated at the crossroads of Brocheux’s social, economic, and political work. Brocheux was interested in this new social group, and his research revealed its complex nature, and how it was torn “between respect for legality and conformism on the one hand, and defiant opposition, or even rebellion, on the other” (Brocheux 1994: 140). I draw on Brocheux’s concept of the “Gilbert Chiếu syndrome” to show how part of this social class, which was eager for modernity and recognition, and on which the French colonial authorities relied, turned against them by supporting a revolutionary party to which it appeared diametrically opposed. The particular journey of Gaston Phạm Ngọc Thuần reveals the full complexity of the formation of Vietnamese elites and the diverse intersecting networks that transcended social, political, cultural, and religious identities at the level of families, regions, and the country, and across national, imperial, and bloc borders.
- 12 Indian journalist Nayan Chanda, then Saigon correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, publ (...)
16This thematic issue concludes with Paul and Sophie Quinn-Judge’s personal account of events in Saigon shortly before, during, and after the fall of the South Vietnamese regime in April 1975, five decades ago. Sophie Quinn-Judge is a renowned historian of contemporary Vietnam who is particularly known for her biography Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2001), and as an expert on the history of communism in Asia (Quinn-Judge 2017; Westad & Quinn-Judge 2006; Naimark, Pons & Quinn-Judge 2020). She also took part in the events held in honour of Brocheux (her French counterpart as Hồ Chí Minh’s biographer) in Blois and Paris. But her contribution to this issue, written jointly with her husband Paul Quinn-Judge, is a personal account rather than an academic article. For in 1973, before she became a historian and Paul Quinn-Judge a journalist covering Asia, the Middle East, and the USSR for the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and Time Magazine, they both joined up as young volunteers for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker-based organisation working for peace in South Vietnam. Several journalists were present at the fall of Saigon and rapidly evacuated from the city, and have written well known accounts of their experiences,12 but Sophie and Paul Quinn-Judge were among the small number of Westerners who did not leave Saigon until early July 1975.
17This joint personal account, which is illustrated by photographs taken in the streets of Saigon and at Vạn Hạnh Buddhist University during these weeks, stands in contrast to the panicked accounts and images of Americans and Vietnamese escaping by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy. The couple describe the period not from the point of view of American or South Vietnamese political or military leaders, but from that of a young American and a young British volunteer who were stationed between Saigon and the town of Quảng Ngãi north of Huế, where the medical clinic was located. They worked closely with their Vietnamese colleagues in the AFSC, and recount their day-to-day lives during these two months, and their surprising freedom of movement, including outside the city. They describe the flight of Vietnamese people from March onwards, notably from the US military base in Da Nang, the sense of relief felt in Saigon at the end of a gruelling war, the reunion of members of the National Liberation Front (NLF) with their families after years underground, and the very young bộ đội (soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam) who were curious to talk to young people from Saigon and to a young American woman and a young British man who were barely older than themselves. Being present at key moments in Vietnam’s contemporary history (independence in 1945 and the Tet Offensive in 1968 for Brocheux, and the fall of Saigon in 1975 for Sophie Quinn-Judge) clearly had an enduring impact on both biographers of Hồ Chí Minh. This detailed personal account by two Westerners focuses specifically on the two months following April 1975, and is consistent with those from the journalists Michaël Laurie and Tiziano Terzani in recounting that to great surprise the arrival of North Vietnamese and NLF troops was not accompanied by the expected “bloodbath”. As such, it does not cover the very painful years that followed the reunification of the country by the North: the re-education camps, forced labour in the special economic zones, the occupation of Cambodia, and the many Vietnamese people who chose to risk their lives to leave the country. Fifty years on, the conflicting nature of memories of April 1975, which some remember as a “Day of Liberation of the South and Reunification of the Country” (ngày giải phóng miền Nam, thống nhất đất nước), and others as “Black April” (Tháng Tư Đen), remains acutely felt. This is apparent in the contrast between the lavish official commemorations held in Ho Chi Minh City and throughout the south of the country, and the events held across the Vietnamese diaspora to mark the loss of South Vietnam and all those who died in the war and at sea in the years that followed, along with the many research colloquia held on the subject, notably in Vietnam, the United States, Australia, and France.