Language: English

Speaker: Pascal BOURDEAUX (Associate Professor, École Pratique des Hautes Études)

Title: Paul Mus’s View of Early Postcolonial Vietnam (1945–1947): Comments on an unpublished political essay

Abstract: Paul Mus (1902–1969) was a famous Orientalist who ended his academic career at the Collège de France while regularly being a visiting professor at Yale during the 1960’s. As a military officer and political advisor, he was directly involved in the Vietnamese “revolution” during the mid-1940s. Opposed to the colonial spirit that still prevailed in France at the end of the Second World War, he struggled to promote new Franco-Vietnamese relations respectful of national sovereignty. As a social scientist, he always tried to observe political events through the lens of ancient history and cultural facts. From 1945 onwards, several of his writings concern Vietnamese political demands and French reactions to them. In other words he tried to define the real nature of conflicts (that he called cosmodrama) particularly in one of his most influential books: Viêt Nam: Sociologie d’une guerre (1952). A recent reading of an unpublished manuscript preserved in the Mus collection at the Institut Asie Orientale (Lyon) gives the opportunity to try to understand better the context of these crucial years as well as Mus’s political anthropology. This undated and annotated 36-sheet document (nearly 7,000 words) is entitled “Les sectes politico-religiuses et le traditionalisme annamite” (Religious-political sects and Annamese traditionalism). This complementary lesson to an earlier lecture on Vietnamese political parties allows us to specify how Mus understood Franco-Cochinchinese relations (republicanism and sectarian alternatives) in counterpoint to centrist monarchist traditions (Nguyễn legitimism) and northern conservatism (proclaiming later legitimacy going back to the Lê dynasty).

Keywords : Sectarian movements, Traditionalism, National history, Political anthropology, Southern Vietnam

Short Bio: Pascal Bourdeaux is an historian, Associate Professor at the École pratique des hautes études (Paris) where he is teaching and studying Religions in Southeast Asia. His main topics concern contemporary religions in Viêt Nam, the history of religious sciences in South-East Asia and the study of the Mekong delta riverine civilisation. He was posted to Viêt Nam as representative of the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hô Chi Minh City (2012–2015). He published this last years a trilingual annotated edition of the Lục Vân Tiên poem (2016) and co-directed a collective book, Chrétiens évangéliques d’Asie du Sud-Est. Expériences locales d’une ferveur conquérante (with Jammes Jérémy, 2016). His last book is titled Bouddhisme Hòa Hảo, d’une royaume l’autre. Religion et révolution au Sud Viêt Nam 1935–1955 (2022). He dedicated his HDR (habilitation to supervise research) to “Religions in contemporary Viêt Nam. Rethinking religious modernity (19th–21st centuries)” and presented an unpublished manuscript named: “Poetry and religious controversy in Nguyễn Đình Chiểu’s Dương Từ Hà Mậu – Historical Essay on religious fact during the first 19th Century Viêt Nam” (May 2023).