Mark W. McLeod

Nationalism and Religion in Vietnam: Phan Boi Chau and the Catholic Question

article explores the role of anti-Catholic sentiment and activities in the nineteenth-century Vietnamese response to French colonialism, and the critique of anti-Catholicism made by the important nationalist figure Phan Boi Chau (i 867-1940). A virulent anti-Catholicism was an important component of anti-French resistance movements in the nineteenth century, serving as a complement to the rallying symbol of the Vietnamese monarch.1 The criticism and harassment of Vietnamese Catholics that had characterized much of the nineteenth-century opposition to French domination was rejected by Phan Boi Chau at the turn of the century. He devoted several works to the question, arguing that, for the Vietnamese anti-colonial movements of the nineteenth century, antiCatholicism had been divisive and counter-productive to achieving the ultimate goal of expelling the French. By excluding the Catholic Vietnamese from the national community, he asserted, the anti-French movement had deprived itself of a valuable potential ally. Phan Boi Chau thus advocated a more inclusive conception of unity among the Vietnamese, with the Catholics no longer excluded a priori by their religion. Phan Boi Chau incorporated this new view in his own nationalist organizational efforts in the early twentieth century, and his influence in this regard on subsequent anti-colonial movements, notably the Indochinese Communist Party, was significant.

Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (review)

Ramsay’s monograph analyzes the relationships among Vietnam’s Nguyen Dynasty, missionary Catholicism represented by the Paris-based Foreign Missions Society, and the Catholic communities of southern Vietnam between 1802—the founding of the Nguyen Dynasty—and 1867—France’s annexation of southern Vietnam’s “Six Provinces.” Exploiting dynastic annals and other primary Vietnamese sources as well as newly available missionary sources, Ramsey aims to reshape scholarly understanding in three ways. First, he tries to present preconquest Vietnamese Catholicism as a “popular religion” that had blended into local society. Second, he seeks to refine generally accepted motivations for Nguyen repression of Catholicism by stressing the dynasty’s “restoration” ideology and centralizing agenda rather than inculcation of “Confucianism” per se. Third, he attempts to demonstrate that the separation of Catholic and nonconvert Vietnamese into hostile communities dates from the conquest—not before.