Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

On the afternoon of September 2, 1945, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of about four hundred thousand Vietnamese and an attentive handful of foreign observers in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square, the president of the provisional government, Ho Chi Minh, proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam came at the high point of the August Revolution, staged in the weeks following the surrender of imperial Japan on August 15, 1945, which ended World War II. Seizing the opportune moment, the Vietminh had taken control of the major cities of Vietnam, replaced the short-lived Japanese-backed Tran Trong Kim government, and pressured Emperor Bao Dai, who had rule for almost twenty years, to abdicate.

The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was a defining document in Vietnamese history. It signaled the long-awaited close of more than eighty years of French colonial domination and also the end point of the Vietnamese monarchy as a political institution. Internationally, however, it failed to have the same importance because the administration of U.S. president Harry Truman had already accepted France's intent to return to colonial power in Southeast Asia. This discrepancy eventually led to the unleashing of destructive forces that would engulf the eastern half of the Indochinese peninsula in three decades of civil and international warfare.

The enduring appeal of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, as with the declarations produced by the Dutch in 1581 and the American colonists in 1776, is that this most public challenge to the colonial masters was not defeated but eventually led to victory. Coming in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the declaration also signaled the onset of a major wave of decolonization. In the present-day Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Communist Party regards the document, despite its many different versions, as a key foundational text and its issuance as a legitimizing event. In the context of world history, Ho Chi Minh's presentation of the declaration continues to fascinate owing to the hybrid nature of the event, text in translation, and speech and the author's means of addressing various audiences.