Thiounn Mumm was a member of the most powerful nonroyal family in Phnom Penh. His grandfather, known merely as Thiounn, amassed a fortune as the minister of palace affairs under Kings Norodom, Sisowath, and Monivong. Mumm’s father, Thiounn Hol, was the first Cambodian to earn lycée and university qualifications in France. Mumm, a few years older than Saloth Sar, studied at the University of Hanoi until 1945, when he returned briefly to Phnom Penh. In 1946 he was among the first Cambodian students to be sent to France. Thiounn Mumm specialized in applied science and later had a distinguished academic career. In 1951, it seems, he joined the French Communist party. Mumm was probably responsible for bringing Sar into the party in 1952.4

Keng Vannsak’s background was less privileged, although he enjoyed some connections with the royal family. During World War II, he attended the Lycée Sisowath, where he excelled in literary studies and befriended the talented young radical Ieng Sary. Vannsak went to France to study Cambodian linguistics. Although drawn toward the left of the political spectrum, he never became a Communist. As an ardent nationalist with antiroyalist leanings, Vannsak was closer to Saloth Sar than Thiounn Mumm was and so helped form some of Sar’s political ideas.5

The “City of Light” had retained a reputation for over a century as a vibrant intellectual center. In 1949 artists, politicians, writers, philosophers, and musicians mingled in the contending schools of existentialism, postimpressionism, phenomenology, Gaullism, and communism, to name only five. New developments in these fields and many others made Paris an intoxicating place for young people engaged in tertiary study, as did the city’s traditions of liberty and revolutionary thought. Political parties, and the newspapers affiliated with them, flourished across the ideological spectrum, giving rise to lively, acrimonious debate. For students of Saloth Sar’s generation, the late 1940s and early 1950s were filled with passionate arguments about politics, art, and philosophy, with close friendships and late hours, with a sense of belonging to a world that was opening up in the aftermath of World War II. To understand Saloth Sar’s conversion to communism, we must place him among the soot-blackened buildings, leaf-strewn avenues, and smoke-filled cafés of the Latin Quarter among thousands of young men and women who were making similar decisions. By 1951, if not before, he was caught up in a wave of optimism about the potentialities of the Communist movement. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Saloth Sar never abandoned communism or regretted his decision. Instead, he made a life-long commitment to the cause.