Along with Sun Zhongshan and Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, he's one of three major saints of, from what I can tell, goodness. Cool.
But really and most importantly, what was Hugo's relationship to Vietnam that elevated him among practitioners of the new religion, and what was so good about him to warrant sainthood if he didn't otherwise have some connection to the region? Why him?
Sun Zhongshan is actually more clear to me, given the historical context around the establishment of Cao Đài, regardless of whether I think that was a reasonable choice or not. But the author of Les Misérables has me scratching my head, even in light of what little I know about his stances on moral issues. Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm seems pretty clear cut too.
This question has been addressed in the past years by several scholars, notably Trần Thu Dung (in her PhD, 1996, book in 2003), Alison Hoskins (2015) and Christopher Hartney (2004, 2015). Jérémy Jammes, who has studied extensively Caodaism, has also written about it. I’ll try to summarize this as follows.
As a poet, writer and intellectual, Hugo’s influence was immense both during his life and later. He was a literary and political star whose fame went beyond France’s borders. When he died, two million people followed his funeral procession, including for instance a Haitian delegation led by poet Emmanuel Edouard, who paid tribute to the author of Bug-Jargal (Le Rappel, 1885). He was “canonized” by the Third Republic, like a secular saint, and his body was placed in the Pantheon. “Hugo has been bombardé (catapulted) God,” wrote the Catholic newspaper La Croix, who did not like Hugo at all (La Croix, 1885).
In Indochina, the sons and daughters of Vietnamese families favoured by colonial authorities – merchants, aristocrats, civil servants, officers – were sent to the colonial school system, which consisted in French schools (for metropolitan families and a few chosen indigenous ones) and Franco-indigenous schools (strictly for Indochinese families). French schools provided an education similar to the metropolitan one while Franco-indigenous schools provided an education “adapted” to local conditions. In both cases, the curriculum included writers from the French canon, e.g. Lamartine, La Fontaine, Racine, Molière, and of course Hugo (Nguyễn Thụy Phương, 2004, 2013). At least three founders of Caodaism, Ngô Văn Chiêu, Lê Văn Trung, and Phạm Công Tắc, were schooled at the Collège Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon (later a Lycée in 1928), which delivered a French curriculum to French and Indochinese students (Nguyễn Thanh Xuân, 2012; Nguyễn Thụy Phương, 2013).
In addition to their early exposure to Hugo’s work through their French education, many Vietnamese were attracted by his ideals about political liberalism, human emancipation, social progressivism, and opposition to imprisonment. In 1861, Hugo had condemned the burning of Old Summer Palace by French and British troops (“Before history, one of the bandits will be called France and the other England”) (However, in 1841, he had praised the conquest of Algeria: “It is civilisation marching against barbarism.” But people change). Such ideas were obviously at odds with the actual living experience of the colonized, even when they were part of the privileged elite. Other aspects of Victor Hugo that were interesting to Asian readers were his appreciation of Asian traditions, his mysticism, and his practice of Spiritism, which he kept secret during his life and was not revealed until 1923 (Hoskins, 2015).
As a result, Hugo was a popular author in Indochina, whose works had been translated in quốc ngữ (the modern Latin writing system for the Vietnamese language) since 1913 and serialized repeatedly in newspapers and magazines (Zinoman, 2001b). He had a deep and lasting influence on Vietnamese intellectuals, to the point that conservatives, like Pham Quynh, found necessary to attack him (Hartney, 2004). Vietnamese poets were chastised for “aping” Lamartine and Hugo (Marr, 1981).
Without going into detail into the beginning of Caodaism, let’s say that it was from the start based on visions received during spirit séances. While there are strong and lively traditions of mediumship in Vietnam, the French and some Vietnamese were interested in Western-style mediumship, and manuals published by Allan Kardec, the French founder of Spiritism, were popular in Indochina. Mid-1925, a group of Vietnamese, all French-educated, among them the “intense and literary” Phạm Công Tắc, a young clerk at the Customs Office, started gathering in an apartment in Saigon for séances that were directly inspired by the “table turning” techniques used by Victor Hugo (which had just been published for the first time). The table method soon proved to be cumbersome, and a spirit instructed them to use a basket method, that was used by Kardec, but, more importantly, by Taoists as a method of literary communication with the afterworld.
On 24 December 1925, the spirit announced that he was the Jade Emperor and Supreme God Cao Đài. In June 1927, Phạm Công Tắc was transferred from Saigon to Phnom Penh by his superiors, who objected to his medium activities. After his son died, he held séances in his home, and started receiving messages from a literary spirit named Đức Nguyệt Tâm Chơn Nhơn (“spiritual teacher with a moon-pure heart”) who told him he was in fact Victor Hugo (Hoskins, 2015). Hugo’s spirit later “talked” to another disciple and it became the spiritual protector of this expatriate Cao Đài community (Hội Thánh Ngoại Giá) (Jammes, 2006). From then, the spirit of Victor Hugo, but also from his wife and daughter, regularly visited his Cao Đài “spiritual sons,” giving them versified advice and lectures, sometimes in French, sometimes in Vietnamese. Some of these lectures were critical of the colonial regime, such as these verses received on 11 December 1931:
We in Indochina are under the power of potentates / Watch out that in the eyes of the law / We may be treated as convicts / I do not speak of faith / The colonial government is crushed under / The iron rule of the Catholic Church.
Twenth-four messages from Victor Hugo were delivered between 1927 and 1935, sometimes in presence of foreigners. Hugo biographer Graham Robb describes them as follows:
He communicated in alexandrines and described a strange East-West blend of karma, Christian morality, metempsychosis and vegetarianism. The alexandrines were shaky and imperfectly rhymed but had an unmistakable tone - chatty and apocalyptic. (Robb, 1997, cited by Hartney, 2004).
In a sermon delivered in 1949, the sixty-fourth anniversary of Hugo’s death, Phạm Công Tắc revealed that Victor Hugo was in fact the reincarnation of Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Du, the author the classic Tale of Kiều. However, Hugo’s spirit no longer talked to Cao Đài mediums after that (Hoskins, 2015).
So, in a nutshell:
To quote Trần Thu Dung, Hugo’s works provided a “magic mirror in which Oriental readers encountered the political and religious thoughts of Buddhism and Taoism” (Trần, 2003, cited by Hosking, 2015). For Hartney, he was mainly a “figure of modernity and the West” for the new religion, and “he serves as a cipher for both French civilization and the West more generally.” (Hartney, 2015).
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