L’Écho annamite
- To the Annamite Voters of Cochinchina
- Admission by the Eyedropper at the Indochinese University
- To the Aid of Tonkin's Flood Victims
This front page of L'Écho Annamite opened with a thank-you letter from the Constitutionalist candidates, headed by Bui Quang Chieu and Nguyen Phan Long, to the Annamite voters of Cochinchina, who they said had sent their whole list to the Colonial Council by a near-unanimous vote. The signatories declared that critics could no longer dismiss them as a tiny minority and asked voters to stay in close contact for the struggle ahead. A column signed by a group of Annamite students attacked the new 19 August admission competition for the Indochinese University in Hanoi, charging that the Directorate of Public Instruction ignored the schools candidates had chosen, so that teachers who applied to the School of Pedagogy were assigned elsewhere. A correspondent's report on the Tonkin floods described thousands of people starving and began to denounce those who were profiting from the disaster.
Translation
To the Annamite Voters of Cochinchina
Dear compatriots,
By an imposing number of votes — representing the near-unanimity of the votes cast — you have sent our entire group to the Colonial Council to defend your interests there, and its homogeneity is, at first sight, a guarantee of discipline and vigour. Please accept our thanks for it.
Thanks to you, our detractors, who are ultimately yours as well, can no longer say, as they were still saying only yesterday, that we represent only a tiny minority and that the demands we formulate in your name are in no way the expression of your feelings and aspirations.
We would have the right to take pride in the mark of confidence you have shown us so emphatically. But we attribute the credit for it to your sagacity. For our part, we draw from it above all useful lessons, and the sense we had of fulfilling a duty is strengthened by it and weighs all the more on our conscience.
As much to sustain our courage during the depressing hours of struggle to come as to allow us to be your faithful interpreters in all circumstances, we ask you to maintain between you and us the contact that ensures the community of ideas necessary for fruitful action.
Once again, thank you, and now to work!
BUI-QUANG-CHIEU, NGUYEN-PHAN-LONG, TRUONG-VAN-BEN, NGUYEN-TAN-DUOC, LE QUANG-LIEM known as BAY, NGUYEN-VAN-BUOT, NGO-VAN-HUAN, HUYNH-NGOC-BINH, TRAN-VAN-DON, NG.-VAN-THINH
Under the reign of the Socialists Varenne and Thalamas
Admission by the eyedropper
Admission by the Eyedropper at the Indochinese University
…than the "diplomas", which is to say that you would not need to dull your minds pointlessly for two years over a most motley school curriculum for them to refuse you entry to the University pitilessly at the end.
Indeed, this year a competition called the "Admission Competition for the Indochinese University" was instituted on 19 August to recruit new students for the various higher schools of Hanoi. Candidates had to state in advance, in their application for registration, the school at which they preferred to continue their studies. A formality that was certainly useful and in line with common sense at the outset, but pointless afterwards, once the competition was over, because the gentlemen of the Directorate of Public Instruction take absolutely no account of the schools of preference indicated in their applications by the aspiring students.
Thus it was that two primary-school teachers — two significant examples taken from among several others — who had asked to be admitted to the School of Pedagogy discovered, to their great astonishment, that after passing the competition they were having imposed on them…
To the Aid of Tonkin's Flood Victims
Everyone knows that thousands of our compatriots in Tonkin, victims of the recent floods, are exposed every day to all the horrors of destitution and are literally dying of hunger. Even the least charitable hearts are wrung at the thought of such distress and do not hesitate to help our unfortunate brothers.
There are nevertheless, alas, human beings capable of profiting from everything, even from the ruin and death of others. Their acts are so unworthy, and they commit them so cynically, that I cannot keep from writing this article — not to hold them up to public insult, which I would not wish for anything in the world, but to…
Context
Who signed the letter to the voters
The ten names under the letter are headed by Bui Quang Chieu and Nguyen Phan Long, the leader and deputy leader of Cochinchina's Constitutionalist Party, and the letter appeared in a paper tied to one of them. Nguyen Phan Long founded the liberal newspaper L'Écho Annamite in 1920. In the 1920s and 1930s he was deputy leader of the Parti Constitutionnaliste Indochinois, a nationalist party founded in 1923 and led by Bui Quang Chieu, and he himself was elected a colonial councillor. The letter therefore amounts to the party's own victory statement in a newspaper run by its deputy leader. It claims that the whole slate went to the Colonial Council with almost all the votes cast, and it treats that result as an answer to critics who called the Constitutionalists a tiny minority. The scale of the vote and the claim of near-unanimity are the signatories' own words; the letter itself gives no figures.
Why a popular mandate mattered to the Constitutionalists in 1926
The letter's insistence that its detractors could "no longer say" the group spoke for a tiny minority makes more sense against the turbulent spring of 1926 in Saigon. Bui Quang Chieu's return from France coincided with the arrest of the radical journalist Nguyen An Ninh on 21 March 1926. When Ninh was sentenced, students and schoolchildren in Saigon and the surrounding region deserted their classes en masse, and more than a thousand of them were expelled. Even the crowds that had accompanied Chieu through the streets of Saigon on his return chanted "Free Nguyen An Ninh". The clear electoral success celebrated in the letter gave Bui Quang Chieu's group an argument that it, too, had popular backing. The same tension between students and the colonial education system runs through the neighbouring column on the Indochinese University.
What the Indochinese University was, and why a Saigon paper cared
The Indochinese University in Hanoi was created by the French twice, in 1906 and 1917, and grew mainly in the interwar years. The refounded institution consisted of five schools: medicine, public works, administration, teaching and agriculture-forestry. The teaching school is the School of Pedagogy that the two primary-school teachers in the students' column had asked to enter. Students from the south were a minority who had to travel to Hanoi to study: by 1929, three years after this article, 511 students attended the university, about half of them from Tonkin and around one-quarter from Cochinchina. That is why a competition run by Hanoi's Directorate of Public Instruction became a grievance for readers in Saigon. The column's kicker blamed the system on "the Socialists Varenne and Thalamas". That attribution, and the charge that candidates' stated preferences were ignored, are the student authors' own accusations.
Original
Aux électeurs annamites de Cochinchine
Aux électeurs annamites de Cochinchine Chers compatriotes, Par un nombre imposant de voix - qui représente la quasi-unanimité des suffrages exprimés - vous avez envoyé au Conseil Colonial pour y défendre vos intérêts notre groupe tout entier dont l'homogénéité est de prime abord, une garantie de discipline et de vigueur. Soyez-en remerciés. Grâce à vous, nos détracteurs, qui sont en définitive les vôtres, ne peuvent plus dire, comme ils disaient hier encore, que nous ne représentons qu'une infime minorité et que les revendications que nous formulons en votre nom ne sont point l'expression de vos sentiments et de vos aspirations. Nous aurions le droit de nous enorgueillir de la marque de confiance que vous nous avez si hautement montrée. Mais nous en attribuons le mérite à votre sagacité. Pour notre part, nous y puisons surtout d'utiles enseignements et le sentiment que avions d'accomplir un devoir s'en trouve fortifié et s'impose davantage à notre conscience. Autant pour soutenir notre courage pendant les heures déprimantes de lutte à venir que pour nous permettre d'être en toutes circonstances vos fidèles interprètes, nous vous demandons de maintenir entre vous et nous le contact qui assure la communauté d'idées nécessaire à une action féconde. Encore une fois merci, et maintenant au travail! BUI-QUANG-CHIEU NGUYEN-PHAN-LONG TRUONG-VAN-BEN NGUYEN-TAN-DUOC LE QUANG-LIEM dit BAY NGUYEN-VAN-BUOT NGO-VAN-HUAN HUYNH-NGOC-BINH TRAN-VAN-DON NG. - VAN-THINH Sous le régue des socialistes Varenne et Thalamas L'admission au compte-gouttes
L'admission au compte-gouttes à l'Université Indochinoise
que les «diplômes», c'est vous dire que vous n'auriez pas besoin de vous abêtir inutilement pendant deux années sur un programme scolaire des plus hétéroclites pour qu'on vous refuse impitoyablement à la fin l'entrée à l'Université. En effet, cette année, un concours dit «Concours d'admission à l'Université Indochinoise» est institué le 19 Août pour le recrutement de nouveaux étudiants pour les diverses écoles supérieures de Hanoi. Les candidats devaient mentionner d'avance dans leur demande d'inscription l'école à laquelle ils préfèrent continuer leurs études. Formalité, certes, utile et conforme au bon sens au début, mais vainedans la suite après le concours, car Messieurs de la Direction de l'Instruction Publique ne tiennent absolument aucun compte des écoles de préférence indiquées dans leur demande par les aspirants-étudiants. C'est ainsi que deux instituteurs, deux exemples significatifs pris entre plusieurs autres, qui demandaient à être admis à l'Ecole de Pédagogie, s'aperçurent, à leur grande stupéfaction, qu'on leur imposait, après leur réussite au concours,
Au secours des inondés du Tonkin
Au secours des inondés du Tonkin Tout le monde sait que des milliers de nos compatriotes du Tonkin, victimes des récentes inondations, sont exposés chaque jour à toutes les horreurs de la misère et meurent littéralement de faim. Les cœurs les moins charitables se serrent à la pensée de telles détresses et n'hésitent pas à secourir nos frères malheureux. Il se trouve pourtant, hélas! des êtres humains capables de tirer profit de tout, même de la ruine et de la mort des autres. Leurs actes sont si indignes et ils les commettent d'une manière si cynique que je ne puis m'empêcher d'écrire cet article, non pour les vouer à l'insulte publique, ce que pour rien au monde je ne voudrais, mais pour