admirers in France intervened. He was sent to Côn Đảo island. In 1911, after three years, he was pardoned and sentenced to house arrest. He said he would rather return to prison than have partial freedom. So instead he was deported to France, where the French continued to monitor him. He went to Paris in 1915 to get the support of progressive French politicians and Vietnamese exiles. There he worked with Nguyễn Tất Thành, Phan Văn Trường, Nguyễn Thế Truyền, and Nguyễn An Ninh in "The Group of Vietnamese Patriots". The group was based at 6 Villa des Gobelins. There they wrote patriotic articles signed with the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc which Hồ Chí Minh later used, "on behalf of the Group of Vietnamese Patriots". He worked as a photograph retoucher to support himself while he was in France. He returned to Saigon in 1925, where he died on 24 March 1926, aged 53. His funeral was attended by over 60,000 people and caused big protests across the country demanding the end of French colonial occupation. Debates with other nationalists In Tokyo, Phan told Sào Nam: "The level of their people is so high, and the level of our people is so low! How could we not become slaves? That some students now can enter Japanese schools has been your great achievement. Please stay on in Tokyo to take a quiet rest and devote yourself to writing, and not to making appeals for combat against the French. You should only call for 'popular rights and popular enlightenment.' Once popular rights have been achieved, then we can think about other things." Sào Nam commented: "Thereafter over more than ten days, he and I debated time and again, and our opinions were diametrically opposed. That is to say, he wished to overthrow the monarchy in order to create a basis for the promotion of popular rights; I, on the contrary, maintained that first the foreign enemy should be driven out, and after our nation's independence was restored we could talk about other things. My plan was to make use of the monarchy, which he opposed absolutely. His plan was to raise up the people to abolish the monarchy, with which I absolutely disagreed. In other words, he and I were pursuing one and the same goal, but our means were considerably different. He wished to start by relying on the French to