ABSTRACT
Duong Bach Mai was stepping into a life history which would take him away from the comforts of a wealthy family in Baria and into the turbulent course of revolutionary politics in the colonial order. Baria amply demonstrates the dynamics of colonialism and the Vietnamese political response. Decolonisation had seen the Communist Party move to the fore as the only major political force, which alone had the capacity to organise the interior of the country through its network of cells linked with the disciplined command system of a national Party. Partly as a result, the communists could lay claim to being the party of patriotism and nationalism. The main ideological strand of the movement would emphasise social revolution alongside patriotism, and non-communist nationalism would be fragmented and marginal. The colonial polity was such that Montesquieu and Rousseau were considered subversive reading for Vietnamese, with the French reduced to suppressing their own radical and democratic traditions.
