Saloth Sar’s stint at the Ecole Technique placed him in contact with lessprivileged young people, many of whom were alienated from the French and from the country’s traditional elite. As he dirtied his hands, stepping down from his French education and his palace connections, he was still part of a privileged minority. By 1947 only a few thousand other Cambodians had progressed as far as he had in education. In 1948 he was among seventyseven students in the protectorate who took entrance examinations for the lycée system. A year later he was among the first hundred men and women sent to France with government scholarships. His conversion to political activism and socialist ideals occurred against this privileged background and before he had any experience working for a living.

Many of Saloth Sar’s contemporaries followed the same path he did, but most of them earned at least one diploma, came from a less-cosseted milieu, and made more of an impression on people than Saloth Sar did. No one I met in the course of my research who knew Saloth Sar before 1952 admitted picking him as a potential leader or professional success. Here again, we encounter the question of Sar’s personality. Was he deliberately effacing himself, was he genuinely mediocre, or was he indifferent to making a strong impression?

His classmates at the Ecole Technique were hardly peasants, but they came from lower strata in Cambodian society than did the students in Kompong Cham or at the Ecole Miche. One of them, Sok Knol, was the son of a minor official who later became prominent in the Communist movement before being purged in 1978. With classmates like this, Sar’s polite, easygoing manner would not have caused offense, and he may well have found their interests less intimidating than those of his academically gifted friends in Kompong Cham. Unfortunately no anecdotes of his time at the Ecole Technique have surfaced, and even the dates of his enrollment are uncertain, although Loth Suong and Chea Samy stated on several occasions that Sar went there immediately after his time in Kompong Cham.

An important occurrence in these years was Saloth Sar’s friendship with Ieng Sary, a student at the Lycée Sisowath. After befriending each other in 1947, Sar received a government scholarship in 1949 and Sary received one in 1951. The two spent time together in Paris, where they became members of the French Communist party. They married sisters, and after Sary returned to Cambodia in 1957 they were Communist militants in Phnom Penh. In 1963 they left the capital together for the maquis. With a handful of close associates, they guided the Cambodian revolution and the affairs of the Communist party of Kampuchea while it was in power.