From Indochina to Vietnam; vol. 8. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016. xvii, 305 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28861-4.
France suffered so many devastating battlefield traumas in the twentieth century that it is little surprise its mid-century defeat in Indochina has been overshadowed by other conflicts. There were at least silver linings elsewhere—a late game rally in World War I, resurrection in World War II, and a military victory that preceded its negotiated withdrawal from Algeria—but there was little to salvage from France’s ignominious exit from Southeast Asia. Still, this “forgotten war” dragged on for nearly eight years, forced nearly half a million French troops, roughly half from the metropole, into battle, and was the first falling domino in the collapse of the French empire. The Indochina War conjures painful memories for all parties that choose to remember it, explaining why so many in France would rather ignore it entirely.
Contesting Indochina is the first monograph from M. Kathryn Edwards, an assistant professor of modern French history at Tulane University, whose earlier work has looked at the early 1990s scandal over the wartime activities of Georges Boudarel, a French Viet Minh supporter turned respected professor, and the influential right-wing lobby group the National Association of Veterans and Friends of Indochina (ANAI). It is the most recent volume in the University of California Press series From Indochina to Vietnam, a collection featuring essential works from some of the leading contemporary scholars of colonial Vietnam.
Edwards uses Contesting Vietnam to explore how the French remember Indochina, a process that reveals much about their views on the legacy of colonial rule, communism, and honouring veterans of unpopular wars. She presents the idea of “a divided memory” (209) of the Indochina War in a country where one’s politics usually determine the way it is remembered. For those on the right, including many veterans, returned settlers, and members of the Vietnamese diaspora, the war was a noble effort fought to save Vietnam from communism after steps had already been taken to grant local autonomy. On the left, including members of the Parti communiste français, antiwar activists, and academics, the war was fought to preserve an anachronistic and exploitative colonial system, denying a legitimate Vietnamese desire for national self-determination. These positions took shape while the bullets were still flying and neither side has budged in seventy years.
For all its gnashing of teeth over the evils of communist rule and general French indifference towards the sacrifices of Indochina veterans, the right won this memory war. The best-known faces associated with the Diên Biên Phú defeat in 1954, stoic commander Major Marcel Bigeard along with selfless medical professionals Major Doctor Paul Grauwin and air ambulance nurse Genevieve de Galard, all endorsed the rightist take that the rank and file had been betrayed by incompetent leadership. The most viewed and critically acclaimed French films on the Indochina War—La 317ème section (1964), Diên Biên Phú (1992), and Là-haut, un roi au-dessus des nuages (2004)—came from Pierre Schoendoerffer, a veteran whose main themes are the comradery of soldiers, their cooperation with local forces, betrayal by the government and metropolitan French, and ultimately their heroic but futile resistance. Perhaps most importantly, though, Edwards writes that thanks to many years of lobbying efforts from groups such as the ANAI, “the major state-sponsored commemorative sites and events have also promoted the idea of fraternity between the French soldiers and the Indochinese people, both civilians and the military, and have frequently emphasized the positive contributions made by the French colonial state” (89). France’s main Indochina War memorial, unveiled in 1996, is fittingly located in the Cote d’Azur town Fréjus, a conservative bastion currently run by the National Front.
When Edwards charts the left’s attempts to push back against the conservative narrative in chapter 3, it becomes clear that the effort fell short due to its inability to coalesce into a lobby group on par with the ANAI, its political diversity, and its adoption of an unpatriotic take on the war that was unlikely to find sympathy in the corridors of power during an extended period of conservative rule lasting into the 1980s. A number of salient arguments over the immorality and hypocrisy of the war have failed to gain much traction in the public mind.
The most fascinating chapter of the book, however, concerns the postwar repatriate experience of Asian and Eurasian French citizens who had been part of a privileged class under colonial rule. This cohort felt victimized by the Viet Minh while simultaneously resenting the French government for according them second-class status and providing subpar integration services through long-term refugee camps in the metropole. While they are generally viewed now as a model “outsider” group that integrated much more successfully than the Algerians who came a decade later, there is still bitterness from the Indochinese repatriates that could be soothed by incorporating their experience into a formal memory site.
After a relative upsurge in the 1980s and 1990s, French interest in the Indochina War peaked with the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of its conclusion in 2004. Outside of the circles that participated in or were directly impacted by it, this had more to do with a wave of gritty, popular Vietnam films from Hollywood than any general desire to subject the war to the same sort of critical reevaluation that was being applied to Algeria and the Vichy regime. The Indochina War generates little discussion in France these days outside of academia. The sixtieth anniversary in 2014 was a subdued affair, leading Edwards to conclude that “as veterans age and die commemoration itself may disappear with its custodians” (214).
Contesting Indochina makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary France, but there are more than enough thematic parallels to interest scholars working on Vietnam War remembrance in an American context, perhaps as a counterpart to Patrick Hagopian’s The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). It certainly belongs on the reading list for any university course on the Vietnam wars.
Sean J. McLaughlin
Murray State University, Murray, USA