Whether he had watched the demonstration or not, Saloth Sar would have heard about it from contemporaries and relatives, although politics did not yet preoccupy him or his fellow students. The boys were excited by their new school and formed a tightly knit group. All the classes were conducted in French, and students were discouraged from speaking Khmer among themselves. They studied literature, history, geography, mathematics, science, and philosophy, played soccer and basketball, learned to play musical instruments (Saloth Sar’s was the violin), and staged plays. One graduate recalled a production of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme starring a student named Hu Nim who later joined the Communist party and became minister of information in Democratic Kampuchea. In the class below Saloth Sar, the eldest son of a Kompong Cham judge, Khieu Samphan, was singled out by his contemporaries as intelligent, ambitious, and aloof. After studies in France, where he became a Communist, Samphan became Democratic Kampuchea’s ceremonial chief of state. In 1977 he took on the job of supervising the work of the Communist party’s Central Committee. By then he had served the Communist movement faithfully for twenty years. Others who attended the school with Saloth Sar and later became Communists were Hou Youn and Khieu Komar.17

The students’ favorite teacher in those years was Khvan Siphan, who arrived in 1945 to teach them mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Several former graduates remembered Siphan, then in his twenties, as “honest and inspiring” and singled him out because of his teaching skills, his fondness for the students, and his fair dealings. “He was honest, loving, and helpful,” one of them recalled. These traits contrasted sharply with the autocratic demeanor of the French teachers at the school, whose names the graduates failed to mention. In view of Saloth Sar’s later success as a teacher and his reputation for fairness, it is tempting to see Khvan Siphan as the first of several role models he chose to emulate.18

These young men must have observed the gap between the grandeurs of French history as communicated at school and the beleaguered position of the French themselves in the early 1940s. As the students learned about France’s “civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrece), they knew that France was occupied by Germany, that Battambang and Siem Reap had been taken over by Thailand, and that Japanese troops were stationed in Kompong Cham. The once omnipotent French were almost powerless.