This paper examines the nature of democracy in the modernization process in Vietnam under the French colonial rule in the early twentieth century. Since the World War I, the internal and external factors provides favorable conditions for the Vietnamese intellectuals discuss political liberalization and democracy. The Meiji Renovation movement in Japan, the K`ang Yu Wei and Liang Ch`i Chao`s Renovation movement in Chinal, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia gave lessons to the Vietnamese nationalist intellectuals. The victory of the French Socialist Party and the People`s Fronts also gave good chance for the Vietnamese to demand the political rights in the colony. On the other hand, the French colonial rule had escalated colonial industrialization and had contributed to the accumulation of the Vietnamese national capital. This development had effects on the nationalist democratic movements. With this, there appeared the new social strata such as students, teachers, officials, reporters who led the political struggles for more political rights and freedom. Among them, there were at least three groups of the Vietnamese intellectuals who led, organized, planned the political struggle for democracy against the French colonial authorities; the neo-confucian patriots, the reformists and the radicals. In the first half of the twentieth century, there were two important events in forming the democracy in Vietnam; the confrontation between the Alexandre Varenne and the Vietnamese reformists in 1926 and the dispute between the Stalinist and the Trotskyist in the Indochina Communist Party in 1937. The former event showed that the discords of the french authorities and the Vietnamese intellectuals had frustrated a good chance to transplant the western bourgeois democracy into Vietnam in a peaceful way. Alexandre Varenne had to shackle himself owing to his contradictory position as a socialist and as a colonialist. The traditional neo-confucian patriots failed to make more clear concept of democracy and concrete strategy to realize the democracy and lost their leading position in renovation movement. The reformists adhered to their position exclude the peasants and the workers in the political struggle against the French colonial government. They also kept close relationship with the French authorities and therefore also lost their legitimacy in the nationalist movement. The radicals had yet consolidated their position in the intellectual movement at the time. Both the Vietnam Nationalist Party`s members and the communists had to attempt vainly to lose themselves in forming the local organizations and in making the strategies. Therefore, each party`s devotion to realize the democracy in the colonized Vietnam was too independent to bring the western democracy into the Vietnamese society. The latter event indicated that the ideological struggle among the communist camp missed an opportunity to realize the proletariat democracy(or democratic centralism) in Vietnam. In the 1930s, the radicals, especially the communist met a favorable chance that the Third International(the Comintern), the French government of People`s Front and the Indochina Communist Party had made. However, the French government had never sent the Committee of Inspection to Vietnam because of the severe interior opposition. The traditional patriots and the reformists had no longer played an important role in the mass political liberation movement. The Stalinist included Duong Bach Mai, Nguyen Van Tao who were the main forces in the Indochina Communist Party. They revealed their limits when the Indochina Congress was not held and the People`s Front in Vietnam could not rally all social strata to fight against the French colonial exploitation. Moreover, the Stalinist were mortally wounded as they cruelly put down the Trotskyists In cluding Ta Thau, Huynh Van Phoung, Le Van Thu who organized and led the group La lutte and advocated the proletariat democracy and democratic central