French Involvement in Vietnam from 1885-1954

The French colonization of Vietnam, which did little for the Vietnamese, most of whom resented it, was ended in March 1945 by the Japanese. In 1945-1946, the French attempted to reimpose their rule on Vietnam amidst the chaos and confusion following the end of World War II, but they made a fundamental miscalculation concerning the nature and intensity of Vietnamese nationalism. After negotiations between the French and the communist-dominated Vietminh broke down, the French Indochina war erupted in late 1946 which lasted until 1954 and ended with the defeat of the French by the Vietminh at Dienbienphu and a de facto partition of the country under the Geneva accords between a communist North and a non-communist South. The French military and political effort in Indochina during this period was fundamentally flawed and ultimately failed. After 1949 the French Indochina war became a cockpit of Cold War tension and conflict, which drew the United States into supporting the French war effort, but failed to enable the French to avoid suffering a tragic debacle in Vietnam.

Until the French arrived in force in the mid-19th century, the Vietnamese had a long history of resistance to foreign invaders, the Chinese, who ruled them, except for short intervals, between 111 B.C. an

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h Union. French troops could enter Vietnam peacefully and maintain jointly with the Vietnamese bases but would evacuate by 1952. The unification of Cochin China with Vietnam was to be decided by a referendum. Sainteny and Leclerc believed that some accommodation with Vietnamese nationalism was necessary. Admiral Thierry D'Argenlieu, DeGaulle's Commissioner for all of Indochina, and the French settler community, vehemently disagreed. During the spring and summer of 1946, the March 6 agreement unraveled as D'Argenlieu consolidated French control over Cochin China and otherwise flouted its spirit. Franco-Vietnamese discussions at Fontainebleau in France in July-August 1946 broke down over French insistence on full military and political control of Vietnam. DeGaulle left the French government on January 20, 1946. His successors, a weak leftist coalition, yielded to demands of D'Argenlieu and LeClerc's successor as Commander-in-Chief that the Vietminh, who had consolidated their hold over Tonking, be 'taught a lesson.' A series of clashes, the most important of which were a French naval shelling of Haiphong on November 23, 1946, which killed 6,000 Vietnamese civilians, and a less lethal but deliberate attack by Vietminh militia on Fren
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Approximate Word count = 2542
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)