Discussion with Georges Boudarel

A visit to George Bourdarel

Abstract: a visit to the retired teacher and author Georges Boudarel over the weekend of April 30

I had the good luck today to visit Georges Boudarel in his retirement. He looked just the same as the photo on the back of his "Cent Fleurs Eclosent Dans La Nuit Du Viet Nam." It is the standard work on the Nhan Van/Giai Pham affair, when Vietnamese unity destroyed Vietnamese democracy. I brought him a copy of "Di Tim Nguyen Huy Thiep", a collection on the author whom scholars of Viet Nam are allowed to discuss. Boudarel handled the book with eagerness. I think he would be glad to hear from other colleagues and see new publications.

Boudarel has written that Paris is the place where the different countries of Viet Nam live together. Yes. I got on the bus to his place from a pro-democracy meeting at St. Hyppolyte church. Avenue de Choisy outside was lined with the red and yellow flag of the old Republic of Viet Nam. I walked from the meeting through the projects to a bookstore named after one in Saigon in the 1960s. I got a sandwich there and walked to the bus down avenue Ivry in the rain snapping photos of the posters for a new music show slapped on top of New Year's posters and announcements for the big demo tomorrow at the Vietnamese embassy, April 30. I can't go since I'll be busy at the Catholic mission's excellent library at the edge of town. There is an afternoon pageant to celebrate their anniversary. I'll be running to it after lunch with a local translator of contemporary literature from Ha Noi and Paris.

Boudarel gets important things right. He rallied to the Viet Minh from the colonial army, serving to establish the Party that the people at Hyppolyte want to overthrow tomorrow. I admire Boudarel for joining the revolution. I was curious to see if the men at the meeting yesterday had any good ideas about retiring the Party that has been an enemy of liberty since the time when Boudarel left. But they didn't have anything new to say. The posters had suggested an open forum, inviting views from all over the community, but speakers and audience seemed to know each other well already.

I was sitting there because damn it I am going to make my career in the United States where most of the people who care about the quality of public life in Viet Nam are in fact right-wing and have been talking to each other for twenty-five years. I am going to make common cause with them. Thinking in France about teaching Vietnamese literature in the United States has led me to this conclusion. What else can I do? I went to the meeting to start while I'm here, before I go home. Opening speakers were visiting dignitaries from outside the Vietnamese community: a French general, a Hungarian anti-communist, a Paris attorney. They are all in favor of the rights of man. I left after the first two Vietnamese speakers but not before getting newspapers and leaving my name with three publishers who were working the crowd. Sooner or later someone is going to have ideas I can act on.

Ten years ago the native right-wing discovered Boudarel in Paris and made a cause of him. It all started at an academic conference at the Senate in Luxembourg Garden. A man rose from the floor and claimed to recognize Boudarel from days in the prisoner-of-war camps. The accusation made the papers and kept going all over the media. Boudarel did work in the camps. So they called him a traitor and a torturer. They spoke as retired military, French patriots, defenders of the rights of man. At that time, many of those retired from the military had as young men welcomed the Nazi army into France and assisted in the abuse of their fellow citizens. Many of them had planned and carried out a campaign of torture against the people of Algeria. Many of them had revolted against Charles DeGaulle, of all people.

The positive way to think about this is that the French enjoy an extraordinary sense of political possibility. Look at how Paul Mus and Phillip Devillers believed in the French Union and Bernard Fall did in the Republic of Viet Nam. There is moreover a sense of fair play. Boudarel was amnestied after ten years as the Americans who took up arms in support of the Vietnamese have not been. But still Boudarel's university, Paris VII, bowed to pressure and the man lost his job. This is a disgrace. When Stanford University fired Bruce Franklin from his tenured position for his support of Viet Nam that was wrong too but the man was a proud Stalinist openly working for revolution in California. Georges Boudarel was teaching literature and writing the standard account of anti-Stalinism among Ha Noi intellectuals when he got retired for being an idealist fifty years ago when he was young.

We didn't actually talk very much. I never know what to say to someone who has written well about something I care about. Gosh, well, um. If we don't discover another common interest there's just nothing to discuss. Authors don't write about things they can better talk about and they don't leave anything worth hearing out of what they write. The friend who brought me talked. I did pass on to Boudarel recent news from Ha Noi that the retired publisher Huu Ngoc is enjoying good health and leading an active life. Years ago Ngoc spoke fondly to me of his old comrade Boudarel, so I asked Boudarel if they had ever actually worked together in the prison camps. I had this wishful vision of lucky French soldiers getting to study with both Huu Ngoc and Georges Boudarel at the same time. No, Ngoc was older, in another department. They were colleagues later, in Ha Noi. I asked how he did the translations that appeared in Nguyen Khac Vien and Huu Ngoc's four-volume "Anthologie de la Litterature Vietnamienne" twenty years after he left. Boudarel said that Ngoc simply used the work Boudarel had done a long time before.

Boudarel got tired so we left. As I said, I don't think he would mind some books or magazines in the mail though he might not write back. My friend and I had dinner and a long talk about the immediate future for modern Vietnamese history in France, matters of positions and resources. I went home and started this and now it's the end of the next day.

Dan Duffy

doctoral candidate

Department of Anthropology

University of North Carolina

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Langues, Litteratures et Societies

Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales