Ho Chi Minh at Versailles

Hello group,

My friend is doing a research on Ho Chi Minh's efforts to represent

Vietnam at the Versailles conference. She asked me to give her some

references on this topic.

I wonder whether you can provide me with some information on books and

articles relating to this topic. Books on Ho Chi Minh's life are also

welcomed.

Thanks you very much.

Best wishes,

Thuy-Linh Nguyen

Hello,

you can read Daniel Hemery's book : Ho chi Minh, de l'Indochine au

Vietnam, Gallimard

Best regards

M. Verney Sébastien

there is a skeptical tradition in Vietnamese scholarship on Ho which

suggests that the whole incident, if it happened, was the work of a

group calling itself Nguyen Ai Quoc, later appropriated in the

historical record by the man we know as Ho, as fictive as the prison poems.

there is a huge compendium of Ho scholarship from this point of view.

don't have the cite here and now. walk into any overseas Vietnamese

bookstore to find it.

Dan

Pierre Brocheux's Ho Chi Minh. Du revolutionnaire a l'icone (Payot, 2003)

was awarded a publisher's price in 2004. It contains an until now unknown

photograph with Ho and Leon Trotsky at the 3rd Comintern Congress in 1921

(while his official biography pretends that he hadn't visited Moscova before

1923). The photographer is unknown. Brocheux did a thorough research and his

book is a welcome addendum to Bill Duiker's biography.

John Kleinen

See also Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The missing years, 1919-1941.

Ed Miller

I in fact went to the archives in Aix after reading the emigre accounts which attempt to diminish Ho's role at the Paris Peace Conference. But there was no evidence in the archives, which is really all that any of us have as first-hand evidence, that HCM was not an equal partner in the Group of Patriots originally organized by Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Van Truong. (Ho himself admits that he relied on Phan Van Truong to write the French version of the Demands of the Vietnamese People, which was delivered to delegates to the Conference and circulated in Paris by Vietnamese activists.) I do recommend that anyone interested consult the references in my book.

On the picture of Ho with Trotsky, clearly taken in Moscow at a Comintern gathering, there is no way of knowing whether it was taken in 1924 or earlier. Trotsky did make a speech at the 1924 Fifth Congress of the Comintern. I have found that pictures taken of Ho in 1924 have also been mis-labelled as dating to 1935. But it now seems to be widely accepted that Ho was not a delegate to the Seventh Congress in that year. (Check the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi.)

Sophie Quinn-Judge

Dear group,

Maybe this will be helpful:

When Ho went to Versailles in 1946 with the government delegation, two

cameramen went around France with them and made a film. The two

cameramen were the painter Mai Trung Thu and then-amateur photographer

Pham Van Nhan, who later went on to make several feature films in the

1950s. Prints of this film (President Ho Chi Minh in France) can be

found in the Vietnam Film Institute archives in Hanoi, as well as at

the VTV studios. It includes scenes from numerous functions during the

trip, which began in Biarritz. The most current version is a composite

of three short films: Ho's visit to France, the Fontainebleau

conference with various Paris functions, and rallies with overseas

Vietnamese where Ho spoke. A musical soundtrack with patriotic songs

and then-current press images were added later.

Dean