The below piece was written by our Operations Manager, Laura Harrison, after she and her family visited Vietnam on holiday in July. The piece first appeared in the Guernsey Press on 10th August.
“As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.”
Staring at the wall of a modern, technicolour bright temple in southern Vietnam, I was reminded of this quotation of Victor Hugo. In front of me was a large mural, showing the famous Guernsey resident depicted as a saint. He was dressed in the robes of the Académie Francaise, holding a quill in his hand and writing the phrase “Dieu et Humanité, Amour et Justice”. Next to him, the philosophers Sun Yat-sen and Trang Trính offer their own spiritual teachings. The three together make up the central religious prophets of a popular religion in Vietnam that has adherents as far away as California, and is practiced by between 2.5 and 4 million people, depending on which survey you look at.
It was weird, it was wonderful, and as a member of the new Victor Hugo Centre team, I felt enthused to find out more about what Victor Hugo, that 19th century French Poet and Author, was doing so very far from home.
Caodiaism, or to give it its full title “The Great Faith for the Third Universal Redemption,” first emerged in 1926 after spiritual insights by a Vietnamese national who was working as the head of the French Administration. Other murals show Budda, Confucius, Jesus and LauTzu. Our guide explained to our group of bemused Western tourists that the teachings of the Cao Dai church encompassed many religions, considering the mall as offering glimpses of the ultimate truth, but it was through study of multiple spiritual and philosophical teachings that the third way emerged.
The founder of the religion was said to have received a series of insights into the ultimate truth whilst conducting séances, and claimed to have been visited by Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen (a Chinese Philosopher and first President of the Republic of China) and Trang Trính (a Vietnamese author), and these three together led him to understand the path to enlightenment that is followed by adherents of this new religion.
Victor Hugo himself conducted séances and made extensive transcripts of the “conversations” he enjoyed with luminaries that included Shakespeare, Plato, Hannibal, Rousseau, Galileo and Jesus. On one such occasion, Hugo recorded that he was told a new religion would be founded combining Western and Eastern influences, with Hugo as its prophet.
At one point Hugo was certain that he'd made contact with death itself, who commanded him to wait to publish his séance transcriptions until after his death. Specifically, Hugo was to posthumously publish his works, only once every 5 to 10 years. This is how Hugo's transcriptions outlived him and influenced Vietnamese people halfway across the world in 1925, when a book on the transcripts was published and may well have informed the Caodai leadership.
However, there are other suggested reasons for Victor Hugo to be venerated so highly in Vietnam. He was a champion of the oppressed, and vehemently opposed to the rule of Napoleon III, which is how he came to be exiled. In 1859, whilst Victor Hugo was in Guernsey, the French began to actively take over Vietnam, it later becoming part of the French colony of Indochina in 1887, along with Cambodia and Laos. Many Vietnamese people were forcibly relocated to plantations to endure dreadful conditions, working under debt servitude to grow rice and rubber, or mine coal, tin, and zinc, under threat of corporal punishment. One company, the tyre manufacturer Michelin, recorded 17,000 worker deaths in 20 years.
The French also insisted, as part of their “civilisation” programme, on a western style teaching and writing system. Temples, pagodas, and monuments were torn down, and many places were given French names. All of this exposure to the French language had the inadvertent effect of opening up the Vietnamese population to French values and writing, including the works of Victor Hugo. The French Revolution values of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality must have seemed painfully ironic to the oppressed people of Vietnam, whilst Hugo's strong anti-slavery stance and support of the oppressed, chimed with the emerging Vietnamese independence movement. Our guide spoke fondly of the book Les Misérables (which was completed in Guernsey) having read it as a child, it having been one of the only books that his parents had in their house.
Nowadays, Victor Hugo is seen by adherents of Cao Dai as a spiritual leader, due to the central themes in his work of justice, religious tolerance and support of the oppressed. Perhaps his picture on the wall in Tay Ninh is not so out of place after all.