Vietnam. Heroes and revolution in Vietnam . By Benôit de Tréglodé; translated by Claire Duiker. Singapore: NUS Press in association with IRASEC, 2012. Pp. 244, Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Heroes and revolution in Vietnam By Benoit de Treglode; translated by Claire Duiker Singapore: NUS Press in association with IRASEC, 2012. Pp. 244, Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000241 The concept of the 'body politic' has its historical origins in Western medieval political theology and it minimised the distinction between the political body (the state) and the physical one (the king). Antoine de Baecque, using an impressive array of textual sources, detailed the role corporeal metaphors played in efforts to decouple these two bodies in eighteenth-century revolutionary France. The political intent behind these metaphors, de Baecque argues, was to delegitimise the old regime and legitimise a new one by representing subjects as citizens, narrating national rather than dynastic histories, and devising rituals to commemorate popular sovereignty (i.e. government created by and subject to the will of the people). Benoit de Treglode explores similar issues in his book, but with an important difference. He documents the extent to which the Vietnamese Communist Party relied upon pre-revolutionary understandings of heroism to mobilise rural populations to build a 'new society' in the post-revolutionary one. In the course of doing so, de Treglode provides a nuanced account of the important yet overlooked role 'heroic exemplarity' played in the the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Communist Party's subsequent consolidation of state power (c. 1948-64). But, unlike de Baecque, he directs sustained attention to the paradox at the centre of this process. The Communist Party urgently needed to rupture ties with the past yet retain selected aspects of it to legitimise its growing control over political, economic, and cultural affairs. This tension, as other scholars have noted, takes its clearest form in official discourse, which represents the Communist Party as the leading agent of radical change and the latest in a long line of patriots that defended the nation against foreign aggression. The heroic individuals featured in the book, de Treglode asserts, embodied both. The book can be divided into two sections. The first half, which draws extensively on documents held in State Archive No. Ill in Hanoi, provides a genealogical account of heroism in the Vietnamese context (Chapters 1-4). The second half traces the transfiguration of these exemplary individuals and their postmortem incorporation into the 'national patriotic imaginary' (Chapters 5-7). Brief case studies are included in each of the chapters, and the details effectively ground the author's arguments concerning heroic actions at the local level and their relationship (or lack thereof) with national developments. I summarise the key points made in each half of the book below. The discussion of 'heroic exemplarity' initially covers familiar ground, and rightly emphasises the importance of neo-Confucian values in defining exemplary models of behaviour for others to emulate. But, unlike other studies of this transitional period, the author convincingly argues that Sino-Soviet definitions of the communist 'hero' did not replace Vietnamese nationalist ones. …