ABSTRACT
While the French government engaged in its hapless effort to monitor and shape the flow of Vietnamese students into France, by the late 1920s the leftist opposition parties within France had themselves begun to pay attention to the students. For observers from the French Right, this was evidence that the Vietnamese students were politically restless because of the anti-French machinations of the French Left. The Communist International itself had, at the time of the Tours conference, only recently decided to place a particular emphasis on colonial struggles. The Communists' proclamation that the bourgeois world had reached a revolutionary "Third Period" and their attack on social democratic parties as "social fascists", were part of Stalin's maneuvers to isolate Bukharin and the "Right" within the Soviet Communist Party. Several times in the 1920s the Socialists sought to clarify their position, and to make it plain that they supported colonial independence, at least in principle.
