Souphanouvong

Who is Souphanouvong?

Prince Souphanouvong was born into the royal family of Luang Prabang and trained as a civil engineer in France at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, working afterward in French Indochina, including Vietnam, where he was influenced by anti-colonial and communist ideas. Returning to Laos, he became a founding leader of the Lao independence movement and, alongside figures such as Kaysone Phomvihane, helped establish the Pathet Lao, the communist-led nationalist front that fought first against French colonial rule and later against the Royal Lao Government during the decades-long Laotian Civil War. His half-brother, Prince Souvanna Phouma, took the opposing neutralist path as a repeated Prime Minister, giving Lao politics an unusual family divide at its center. Known as the "Red Prince" for his royal birth and communist politics, Souphanouvong became a prominent public face of the Pathet Lao. When the communist Pathet Lao took full power in 1975, he became the first President of the newly proclaimed Lao People's Democratic Republic, serving in a largely ceremonial capacity from 1975 to 1986 while remaining a revered national symbol until his death in 1995.

Sources: Grant Evans, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between (Allen & Unwin, 2002) · Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge University Press, 1997) · MacAlister Brown and Joseph J. Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries: The Communist Movement in Laos, 1930-1985 (Hoover Institution Press, 1986)