With the officially sanctioned road to prominence closed to him, Nguyễn Trường Tộ earned his living by teaching Chinese, first at home, and from 1848 onwards at Nhà chung Xã Đoài, a local Roman Catholic seminary.
To escape Huế's anti-Catholic restriction, Gauthier and Nguyễn Trường Tộ fled to Đà Nẵng in 1859, placing themselves under the military protection of the besieged European forces then occupying central coast enclaves in the vicinity.
From Đà Nẵng, Gauthier took Nguyễn Trường Tộ to Hong Kong, Penang in Malaysia, and other places in Southeast Asia where the Foreign Missions Society had established seminaries.
), Dao Duy Anh argued that there was no solid evidence for this belief except for an unofficial and unverifiable demotic script document shown to several researchers in the early 20th century by Tộ's descendants.
Although this collaboration with the invading Europeans was widely criticized by Tộ's Confucian contemporaries, many of whom forwarded petitions to Tự Đức Emperor lobbying for a death sentence for treason, most modern Vietnamese scholars (communist and non-communist alike) are in agreement that his actions were driven by a sincere, if misguided, patriotism.
According to these scholars, To's collaboration with the French was based on the assumption that a temporary peace was necessary for Vietnam to buy time to undertake nation building through Westernization, after which a renewed battle against European imperialism and political domination could be successfully fought.
Between 1863 and his death in 1871, Tộ sent the Nguyễn court more than fifteen major petitions, the most important of which were as follows: Giáo môn luận (On Religious Sects), March 1863, which defended the role of Catholicism in Vietnam during the conquest and advocated freedom of worship; Thiên hạ đại thế luận (On the World Situation), March–April 1863, argued that Vietnam had no viable alternative to peace with France in the short term; Ngôi vua là qúy, chức quan là bóng (Precious is the Throne, Respected is the Official), May 1866, which proposed political and bureaucratic reforms; Kế họach gây nên nhân tài (A Plan for Creating Men of Talent), September 1866, urged Western studies for training a new Vietnamese bureaucratic elite; Tệ cấp bát điều (Eight Urgent Matters), November 1867, lobbied for reform in eight areas, including education, fiscal policy and defense.
In June 1867 while Tộ's delegation was still in Europe, French forces seized the three Western provinces of southern Vietnam, causing a recurrent escalation in anti-French and anti-Catholic agitation among the Vietnamese elite.
In Spring 1871, learning of France's defeat by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War, Tộ urged the Tự Đức to launch a counteroffensive against French positions in the colony of Cochinchina, hoping that the politicians in Paris would be distracted with battles in Europe.
Tộ personally volunteered to lead Vietnamese troops, and although he was briefly called to Huế to discuss the European political situation with the emperor, Tự Đức stuck to his status quo policy of biding time and refused to order any attack.
Excerpts from these articles and the resulting discussions were entered at the emperor's order in the dynasty's official histories, including the Đại Nam Thực Lục (Veritable Records of the Great South).
However, Tự Đức often used his knowledge of European learning to refute, sometimes sarcastically, those who urged its widespread adoption, thereby sending messages to present and future officials that he valued Vietnam's Confucian traditions far too much to allow their contamination by foreign studies and practices that he considered barbaric.
He felt that successful resistance to French imperialism at the price of adopting Western ways would not solve the fundamental prerogative of protecting Vietnam's classical East Asian civilization from what he regarded as the subversive potential of a culturally inferior, barbaric people.
Trương Bửu Lâm argued that Tộ's reform proposals were lacking in originality and were wholly compatible with the existing imperial system, asserting that it represented a "stand of conservatism".
Boudarel said that Tộ advocated a "policy of temporization" to buy time for "essentially administrative and technical reforms" to strengthen Vietnam and then to recover the lost sovereignty and territories by military counterattack.
None of these tendencies addressed the social and political problems themselves.Boudarel however, did note that the reforms would have eliminated the scholar class and "transform[ed] the celestial bureaucracy into a modern-style techno-structure," although not challenging the upper realms of the Nguyễn system.
Based on his analysis of historical causality, Tộ argued that the reliance of European countries on "practical studies" as the criteria for training and selecting political decision makers was the secret of their rise to world dominance.
Vietnam's Confucianist obsession with humanistic and literary studies, as manifested in its mandarin examinations, Tộ believed, was the underlying cause of its lack of dynamism and inability to repel the technologically superior Western powers.
In opposition to Mencius' endorsement of rebellion against tyrannical rule, Tộ maintained that the emperor and his officials should not be held responsible for natural disasters and social wrongs, which he believed were acts of God.
Missionaries had long sought to depose the Nguyễn, either through inciting internal revolt or by lobbying for European military intervention or through a combination of both, as happened during the initial invasion of southern Vietnam.
In Tộ's analysis, the driving force in these historical transformations, which laid the foundation for the opportunity to create an age of Western imperialism, was simply a society's willingness, or conversely, a refusal to apply itself to the systematic study and the practical exploitation of the natural environment.
But from approximately the middle point of the empire's existence onward, those responsible for protecting the city only organized festivals and feasts for their enjoyment, while those on the front lines only prized literary studies as a means of advancement.
Tộ argued that the examination system that shaped and selected the imperial political elite was a Chinese anachronism directly responsible for Vietnam's inability to respond effectively to the challenges posed by French aggression.
.Studying in this way until one is old is truly a strange practice!Tộ declared that Vietnam's classical Confucianist education system had created a class of social parasites who obsessively refined their knowledge of literature in self-absorbed ignorance of the imminent dangers to their homeland: At present in our country, there are those who eat but do not plough, who do not study yet seek to become officials, whose judgement is limited but whose arrogance is boundless, who do not do their duty, and who know nothing of moralityHe said that the French "would treat our people like fish on the chopping block" and lamented the lack of foresight of the mandarins in seeing this, asking "why is it that only very few people pay attention to these matters, instead thinking only of how to compete with each other, word by word and phrase by phrase, seeking to develop a superb style?"
According to Tộ, those seeking imperial posts should be required to master "realistic studies" (những bài học thiết thực), including agricultural administration, law, mechanics, astronomy, geography and foreign languages.
Commenting on the reduced role of classical literature in such a reformed curriculum, he wrote: As for poetry, it is only used for chanting verses to the flowers and the moon; when one is hungry, it cannot be cooked to make a filling meal.
Such a scheme, he reasoned, would strengthen national defence and remove what he regarded as the pernicious influence of the scholars: Why does the court not select those among the cu-nhan and tu-tai degree-holders who are physically sound and require them to abandon literature for the martial arts?
...Would this not be better than leaving them free to meddle in ... village life?Tộ's educational reforms sought to replace traditional Confucian political indoctrination and moral cultivation with “realistic studies”, meaning an emphasis on European disciplines but with a curriculum grounded in contemporary Vietnamese reality.
On the contrary, his assertion that obeying the law “fulfills the Way of the human being” suggests that Confucian concepts of morality and duty continued to influence his understanding of European legal systems.
This contradiction is manifested in the apparent inconsistency between his Catholic Confucian defence of absolute monarchy and his advocacy of an independent judiciary charged with legislation and enforcement of laws binding upon emperor and commoner alike.