The 12th Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award-Winning Essay

In 1931, famous journalist Louis Roubaud (1884–1941) published Vietnam : La tragédie indochinoise , a roughly two-hundred-page collection of articles published from July to October 1930 in Le Petit Parisien newspaper. Roubaud begins his text with the execution of the men who led the Yên Bái revolt in February 1930 and then widens his focus to investigate the exploitative, often violent conditions for colonial subjects in Indochina that had led to the outbreak of violence in the first place. Vietnam belongs to a now largely forgotten genre called grand reportage , defined by the author’s self-referential quest to root out and right abuses of power, during which he is expected to present conflicting perspectives without disclosing personal opinions. Adherence to such genre conventions allows Roubaud to articulate a robust critique of French colonialism on the front page of the most widely read Parisian daily at the time. Yet, these same conventions, coupled with the paper’s conservative leanings, limit the extent of that critique. To illuminate the nuances of Roubaud’s position, this article places Vietnam in dialogue with three major tenets of the philosophical current known as the ethics of care. In doing so, I demonstrate that through his attention to the particular, his undermining of state narratives, and his text’s evocative structure, Roubaud succeeds in attacking the foundation of the colonial relationship despite refusing to call for independence. Reading Vietnam through the ethics of care therefore reveals Roubaud’s ability to transcend left-wing militant circles and transmit a veritable anticolonial message to a wide swath of the French population, an accomplishment that has been largely overlooked but which merits recognition.