and after three years his parents called him home to help on the farm. Chhay went on to study at the highly regarded Lycée Sisowath, the oldest secondary school in Cambodia. Sâr took the admission exam, but failed and was fortunate to secure a place as a boarder at a newly opened junior middle school, the College Preah Sihanouk at Kompong Cham, fifty miles north-east of Phnom Penh on the Mekong river, where he moved in the autumn of 1943.
The first half of the 1940s was a period of jarring change in Cambodia, both for the Khmer population and for its French rulers.
The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe and France’s defeat by Germany meant that from July 1940, Cambodia was administered by Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist regime in Vichy, under the tutelage of Germany’s ally, Japan. The following winter Thailand, sensing French weakness, invaded the border provinces of Battambang, Sisophon and Siem Reap. The imperial Japanese government imposed an armistice on the belligerents and, after negotiations in Tokyo in the spring, awarded most of the disputed area to the Thais. Cambodia was allowed to retain only Siem Reap town and the Angkorian temples. A month later, King Monivong, then sixty-five, humiliated by the loss of territory, died at the hill resort of Bokor, with Sâr’s sister, Roeung, at his bedside. Among the hundreds of potential successors, the Pétainist Governor-General, Admiral Jean Decoux, chose eighteen-year-old Norodom Sihanouk, then attending
secondary school in Saigon where his favourite subjects were said to be philosophy and music.
It must have seemed a clever manoeuvre — an artsy, teenage monarch who would be putty in French hands. But Sihanouk’s accession in April 1941 brought a change of generation and, with time, a change in political style beyond anything the colonial authorities could have imagined.
The French defeat brought other changes, too. In the last years of the Third Republic, political and social life in France had been a gay, decadent cocktail of corruption, incompetence, joie de vivre, prostitution,
pauses-aperitif,
crooked lawyers and dishonest politicians. Vichy’s political credo — ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’, or TFP, lampooned by its detractors as ‘Travaux Forces en Perpetuité’
*
— was moralistic and puritanical. At the older-established French schools in Indochina, genuflexions to Vichy’s ‘National Revolution’ were perfunctory at best. But at the new college at Kompong Cham, where the staff had been recruited after the Vichy regime took office, commitment to Pétainist values was a professional requirement.
Instead of reciting the catechism each morning, Sâr and his schoolmates now sang:
Marshal, here we are!
Saviour of France, before you,
Your boys swear to serve you,
And follow in your path.
There was also a blasphemous prayer — which would not have been lost on Sâr after his time at the Ecole Miche — entreating the aged marshal: ‘Our Father, Which Art Our Leader, Glorious Be Thy Name . . . Deliver Us From Evil.’ The Pétainist anthem, with its exaltation of order, unity, and labour, stuck in the boys’ minds well enough for Khieu Samphân, more than fifty years later, to start singing it when the subject of the war years came up in conversation. There were other aspects of Pétainism, too, which seemed to find unconscious echoes among the Cambodian communists many decades after. Youths were enrolled in mobile labour brigades,
les chantiers de la jeunesse,
or
chalat
in Khmer; officials who womanised or got drunk risked dismissal; the peasantry were romanticised as the incarnation of the nation’s vital forces; and city life was decried as inherently depraved.
The weakening of French authority and the growing clout of Japan did not escape the notice of the young men who ran
Nagaravatta.
From 1940, the newspaper acquired a pronounced anti-colonial (and anti-Vietnamese)
slant, denouncing Annamite
The first half of the 1940s was a period of jarring change in Cambodia, both for the Khmer population and for its French rulers.
The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe and France’s defeat by Germany meant that from July 1940, Cambodia was administered by Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist regime in Vichy, under the tutelage of Germany’s ally, Japan. The following winter Thailand, sensing French weakness, invaded the border provinces of Battambang, Sisophon and Siem Reap. The imperial Japanese government imposed an armistice on the belligerents and, after negotiations in Tokyo in the spring, awarded most of the disputed area to the Thais. Cambodia was allowed to retain only Siem Reap town and the Angkorian temples. A month later, King Monivong, then sixty-five, humiliated by the loss of territory, died at the hill resort of Bokor, with Sâr’s sister, Roeung, at his bedside. Among the hundreds of potential successors, the Pétainist Governor-General, Admiral Jean Decoux, chose eighteen-year-old Norodom Sihanouk, then attending
secondary school in Saigon where his favourite subjects were said to be philosophy and music.
It must have seemed a clever manoeuvre — an artsy, teenage monarch who would be putty in French hands. But Sihanouk’s accession in April 1941 brought a change of generation and, with time, a change in political style beyond anything the colonial authorities could have imagined.
The French defeat brought other changes, too. In the last years of the Third Republic, political and social life in France had been a gay, decadent cocktail of corruption, incompetence, joie de vivre, prostitution,
pauses-aperitif,
crooked lawyers and dishonest politicians. Vichy’s political credo — ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’, or TFP, lampooned by its detractors as ‘Travaux Forces en Perpetuité’
*
— was moralistic and puritanical. At the older-established French schools in Indochina, genuflexions to Vichy’s ‘National Revolution’ were perfunctory at best. But at the new college at Kompong Cham, where the staff had been recruited after the Vichy regime took office, commitment to Pétainist values was a professional requirement.
Instead of reciting the catechism each morning, Sâr and his schoolmates now sang:
Marshal, here we are!
Saviour of France, before you,
Your boys swear to serve you,
And follow in your path.
There was also a blasphemous prayer — which would not have been lost on Sâr after his time at the Ecole Miche — entreating the aged marshal: ‘Our Father, Which Art Our Leader, Glorious Be Thy Name . . . Deliver Us From Evil.’ The Pétainist anthem, with its exaltation of order, unity, and labour, stuck in the boys’ minds well enough for Khieu Samphân, more than fifty years later, to start singing it when the subject of the war years came up in conversation. There were other aspects of Pétainism, too, which seemed to find unconscious echoes among the Cambodian communists many decades after. Youths were enrolled in mobile labour brigades,
les chantiers de la jeunesse,
or
chalat
in Khmer; officials who womanised or got drunk risked dismissal; the peasantry were romanticised as the incarnation of the nation’s vital forces; and city life was decried as inherently depraved.
The weakening of French authority and the growing clout of Japan did not escape the notice of the young men who ran
Nagaravatta.
From 1940, the newspaper acquired a pronounced anti-colonial (and anti-Vietnamese)
slant, denouncing Annamite
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