32 RESISTING DECOLONISATION

Empire and Republic in post-war France

Martin C. Thomas

The French Empire has come in from the analytical cold.¹ The study of recent colonial history or, more specifically, of France’s Afro-centric colonial empire whose construction began with the occupation of Algiers in 1830, spent much of the 1970s and 1980s overshadowed by the ever-expanding range of work on the legacies of social conflict, war and occupation in twentieth-century France.

Our understanding of French colonialism continues to be enriched by the explosion of interest in colonial cultures.

Yet the turn away from the narrowly political had two other consequences that are potentially limiting. For one thing, state-centric perspectives on French imperialism are now deeply unfashionable.⁵ For another, study of the relationships between imperial politics and economic change has shifted from the macro to the micro level. Again, this is something of a curate’s egg. The effects of Western capitalism on colonial societies, from the spread of wage labour and export production to urbanisation and proto-industrialisa­tion are rightly discussed primarily from the perspective of the populations involved.⁶ By contrast, the wider strategic and economic pressures behind imperial decision-making are less readily acknowledged.

Conversely, a danger for anyone enthralled by the history of empire and the processes of decolonisation is, of course, that we assume the political actors and public audiences of the day shared the same fascination. How misguided this can be. One has only to recall Winston Churchill’s disdainful, if disarming, comment as the first Indochina War entered its final stages in 1953: ‘I have lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia.’⁷ Tragically, all too often such ‘bloody places’ register only fleetingly on the radar of Western commentators, and normally only in response to social crises that are read as affirmation of their benighted status beyond the pale of the normative standards of Western civilisation. Yet if the history of empire has one justification above all, it is surely to remind us that those normative standards dripping with disapproval of colonial back­wardness produced some of the worst iniquity and chronic upheavals of our recent past.

Put simply, the workings—political, economic and strategic—of French imperialism within the changing international system of the twentieth century perhaps merit renewed attention. That ‘international system’, however defined, underwent more fundamental change in the ‘short twentieth century’ from the start of the First World War in 1914 to the collapse of Cold War bipolarity in 1989—1991 than in the preceding four centuries.

This, it seems to me, is odd. For most of the nineteenth century and much of the twen­tieth, the one constant in French international politics was the exploitation of non-European ethnic groups through state coercion and authoritarian systems of political control. Colonial dominion, whatever the official policy monikers applied to it—assimilationism, association- ism, integrationism—followed, eventually, by the struggle against decolonisation, was always a part of the modern French political landscape.⁸ The expansion and ultimate con­traction of empire, as well as the strategic networks, economic relationships and cultural affiliations that underpinned it framed the canvas on which the French international pre­sence was drawn. The colonial dimension of this picture may, at times, have been less vivid than other aspects of international affairs, from inter-state conflict to the construction of alliance systems, even the internal consolidation of the French Republic itself. But empire was always there. The issue is thus not one of transience but of remoteness.

This chapter examines the inter-action of empire crises and French party political rivalries in the ten years from the Liberation of 1944 to the final collapse of French rule in Vietnam ten years later. To understand French imperial politics in this post-war decade we must unravel a paradox. Why was a France that seemed to have turned so sharply left in 1944—1945, and which would define its political identity afresh in terms of the republican troika of liberte, egalite and fraternite, about to launch the two bloodiest colonial wars of the twentieth century?⁹ Why did reform give way so quickly to reaction? Why, in short, were post-war French governments so determined to keep the overseas empire intact that their efforts to do so would precipitate the collapse of the Fourth Republic itself?

More directly democratic, more participatory and more liberal than either its pre­decessors or its successors, the Fourth Republic was also shockingly illiberal overseas.

For its overseas dependencies the Liberation of metropolitan France was no liberation at all. Instead, the return of republican democracy in France opened a decade of brutality and dissent, exceptional even by the low standards of European colonialism. It was book­ended by a disastrous, man-made famine that left over 750,000 North Vietnamese dead in the winter of 1944—1945 and the descent into eight years of warfare in Algeria from November 1954. Events such as these make it difficult to view the empire’s post-war decade as anything other than a history of organised violence—whether economic, political or military. Yet was French colonialism so exceptional? For famine in Vietnam, read British Bengal in 1944; for war in Algeria read Dutch ‘police action’ in Java in 1948 or British repression of Mau Mau from 1952.

Another discomfiting truth is that the archival record, French and colonial, as well as the oral and literary testimony of numerous overseas subjects speak only fitfully, and then often dismissively, of violence.

My suggestion is that ambitious planning meant to reinforce the bonds of empire actually broke them. The idea seems less counter-intuitive once we recognise that, with few exceptions, reforms were rarely implemented, still less locally welcomed. More fundamen­tally, it is to recognise that a bygone—and probably fictional—age had passed, in which metropolitan schemes of economic modernisation, limited enfranchisement and reductions in the differential legal rights accorded to French citizens and non-French colonial subjects could assuage popular resentment at the searing reality of colonial subjugation.

Our search for answers to the Fourth Republic’s political suicide takes us back along the road to 1945, if not to 1940. Within months of the Liberation a steely resolve to remain a colonial power had taken root among French officialdom. It was a resolve confirmed both by the merciless suppression of Algerian political violence in the weeks following VE Day in Europe and by the forms that killing took in which community vigilantism, resistance­style ‘tribunals’ and ‘people’s justice’ (actually ‘settlers’ justice’) played a critical role.¹⁵ Several factors help explain this new and uncompromising imperialism. The first is the nature and outcome of metropolitan liberation. After Vichy’s ignominious collapse in July 1944, the differing rates of liberation across southern and eastern France, and the provi­sional nature of republican government prior to the establishment of the Fourth Republic in October 1946 all added to the expectation that reconstruction of the French political system should mark a new beginning—both a deliberate rupture with the wartime past and a cherry-picking of the most attractive aspects of democratic republicanism.¹⁶ The array of new political parties to emerge from the resistance, the long overdue enfranch­isement of women, the unprecedented popular appeal of French Communism, the discrediting of much of the French right, and the still untested power of Gaullism suggested that post-war politics would be of a different stripe to the old days of Third Republic immobilism. Perhaps the new political elite would make a better job of the French Empire.¹⁷

Another reason for French imperial confidence in 1945 was less readily admitted, but no less significant. The Vichy state had paid more attention to colonial affairs than the Republic it replaced.¹⁸ This was partly circumstantial. The Vichy regime had freer rein to experiment within colonial territory than in metropolitan France. The Vichy years were certainly exceptional. And they had a Gaullist equivalent: a republican mirror-image colonialism which, although in direct opposition to Vichy itself, shared many of its under­lying imperial values. The success of Free France as an external resistance movement had an obvious colonial dimension. And both the French armed forces and the provisional government installed after the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 did a convincing job in persuading home opinion—admittedly, eager to be so persuaded—that French military forces and organised resistance units had contributed mightily in restoring the country’s freedom from Nazi occupation.¹⁹ Thus another paradox: while, on the one hand, the professional army was nursing the grievances of successive wartime humiliations, on the other, it ended the war on something of a high—restored in the eyes of a French public whose trust and respect for their armed forces were sorely diminished by the end of the Vichy period.

Yet still a civilian population scarred by the occupation does not fit easily into this picture of resurgent imperialism. Did the families coping with meagre weekly rations, or others separated by years in POW camps, by the demands of forced labour in Germany or by the sheer chaos of war really have much concern for colonial affairs? An answer to this question lies in what historians Bruce Marshall and Charles-Robert Ageron term the ‘colonial myth’. Ageron offers a balanced solution. No, Vichy’s propagandising had not turned France into a nation of empire enthusiasts. But yes, during 1944—1945 the French public endorsed provisional government plans to keep the empire intact. Hence the colo­nial myth: control of empire, it was assumed, would enable France to reclaim its rightful place on the international stage. French colonial thinking appeared so ‘frozen’ because most domestic politicians were haunted by the prospect of national decline hastened by imperial collapse.²⁰ Only worsening colonial violence in 1947 led the legitimacy of empire to be seriously questioned.

Escalating war in Indo-China, rebellion in Madagascar in April, the Communists’ pullout from government a month later, strike waves and nationalist protest across North and West Africa all destroyed the post-war fiction of a French Empire reborn.²¹ Prior to this, policy-makers traded on the disinclination of French voters to engage with imperial problems. Political disputes over the constitution of the French Union centred upon the officials, the legal experts and the political actors within the key advisory commissions charged with the formulation of detailed proposals. Colonial withdrawal was not just out of the question, it was not even in the public mind.²²

Quite the reverse: it was widely anticipated in France and its dependent territories that metropolitan and imperial constitution-making could be conducted in tandem. As the provisional government and the first and second Constituent Assemblies made plans for France’s new republic, so they also produced a new schema for a more unified empire. Fourth Republic and French Union would be launched together in October 1946. The democratic legitimacy of the former was supposed to enhance the reformist potential of the latter. Old-style colonialism was dead; long live a new French imperialism grounded in the concept of federal partnership between metropole and the newly renamed overseas territories. In fact, the French Union was mired in controversy from the outset, its central tenets exposing the contradictory impulses among policy-makers and public that would render violent colonial opposition virtually inevitable. To understand this, we need to pause a moment to reflect on the underlying assumptions of this new republican colonialist thinking and the formative experiences that shaped it.

The politicians and senior colonial functionaries of the so-called tripartite period from the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 until the collapse of centre-leftist coalition govern­ment in May 1947 drew their legitimacy from years of resistance to Nazism, to Vichy and, more broadly, to the ‘mistakes’ that had brought France to its knees in 1940. Many had direct experience of life in the colonies, if only because faute de mieux so many had con­gregated in Algiers, home from mid-1943 of what would become the first proto-parliament of the Fourth Republic, the Constituent Assembly. But herein lies the clue to a very dif­ferent perspective. With few exceptions, the soon-to-be crowned heads of the new political establishment of the Fourth Republic itched to get out of the empire and back to France, away from the grubby realities of colonial hardship to begin the process of putting France back together again after four years of occupation, division and war. Established colonial interests were thus both familiar and yet, somehow, disregarded, even, in some quarters, disliked. Colonial governors’ palaces, planters’ clubs, officers’ messes and the boardrooms of that leviathan, the Bank of Indochina, had, after all, long figured among the most staunchly anti-republican and overtly reactionary centres of influence anywhere in the francophone world. For the arriviste politicians of the Fourth Republic, the colonies were essential but secondary; important but not that important.

We must, then, concede that, even from the perspective of its chief architects, the reconstruction of empire had only a bit part in the grander scheme of post-war French recovery. Those with the greatest investment in it—the African and Antillean politicians, such as the Senegalese Lamine Gueye and Leopold Senghor and the Guyanese Gaston Monnerville, working within the French parliamentary system to reverse some of the most crass injustices of pre-war imperialism (forced labour, arbitrary imprisonment, and racially configured voting systems), found themselves side-lined the closer that empire reform came to the statute book. As a result, the project to recast the French Empire as the French Union was always likely to disappoint. Combining deeper cultural integration between France and overseas France (the dread word ‘colony’ was now moot) with partnership agreements for so-called associated states and promises of long-term state-driven invest­ment to modernise colonial health, housing and industry was certainly ambitious. But how would it be funded at a time of national insolvency? More critical, to adapt Zara Steiner’s comment about the peacemaking of 1919, none of the usual foundations for state iden­tity—language, religion, ethnicity, geography, ideology—commanded universal assent as a basis either for individual colonial statehood or for common identity across the French Empire as a whole.²³ With no money and no unifying principle to guide them, where were the advocates of a French Union to begin? The dilemma was never resolved. Instead, it was fudged.

The die was cast as soon as this more conservative version of the French Union was approved in October. An invention of the new Christian Democrat Party, the MRP, and, more broadly, a political instrument of the French centre-right, the convoluted associa- tional, electoral and legal arrangements of the French Union became a means to shut down reformist alternatives that threatened a real democratisation of colonial politics and consequent popular votes for independence.²⁴ Put simply, what was originally promoted as the means to end old-style colonial discrimination institutionalised it afresh in the smarter colours of a definitive constitutional settlement.

Poorly reconciled to this outcome, colonial politicians, labour leaders, journalists and writers were also divided over what they wanted an end to French control to signify. For some nationalist leaders, it would enable independent African nation-states to aspire to living standards and democratic freedoms akin to those enjoyed by their former rulers. Not surprisingly, this model appealed primarily to those among their fellow Africans and Asians with some stake in the economic, educational or administrative apparatus of empire, whether as industrial workers, junior bureaucrats or school-educated commergants. For others, decolonisation would free distinctively post-colonial societies to chart a distinct and more revolutionary political course, certainly not one defined in relation to Western values or capitalist organisation.²⁵ For Frantz Fanon, perhaps the most influential literary advo­cate of this model, political violence was justified not only to end colonial rule, but also as a means to destroy all remaining vestiges of colonialism in African society.²⁶ Why contest colonial domination if popular aspirations were merely to emulate Western modernity once the Westerners were gone? This would be the ultimate irony: post-colonial states would have accepted the original justifications advanced for nineteenth-century colonial­ism, namely, that European rule would bring social and material progress to backward indigenous societies.

Reactions to the challenge of the French Union may have been discordant, but most of the empire’s anti-colonialists, whether organised in parties, unions or within the civil societies of dependent territories, responded in one of two divergent ways. In much of francophone black Africa, the political parties, student groups and, above all, industrial trade unions turned the French Union’s rhetoric of rights and entitlements within a Greater Overseas France against their political masters. As Fred Cooper has shown, demands for the same freedoms, economic opportunities and workplace entitlements as their French counterparts spurred the development of West African trade unionism throughout the lifetime of the Fourth Republic.²⁷

If West Africa’s political leaders and trade union organisers chose the path of con­structive engagement with France after 1946, their counterparts in Algeria, Madagascar and Vietnam saw no alternative to violent rebellion. In each case, the most influential political groups—the Algerian People’s Party, Madagascar’s Mouvement Democratique pour le Renouveau Malgache (MRDM) and the Communist-led Vietminh coalition—all faced legal prosecution by the time the French Union was launched.²⁸ But French efforts to marginalise these groups within colonial party politics were less significant than the party political manoeuvrings of post-war France itself. From the start of the Indochina War in 1946 until the final collapse of French Christian Democracy in 1958, the movement’s representatives, the Mouvement Republicain Populaire (MRP), refused to give an inch in matters colonial. The explanation generally advanced is that Christian Democrats feared being outflanked by the Gaullists of the Rassemblement du Peuple Franqais (RPF), their chief rival for centre-right votes, who, from the luxury of opposition, could play the patriotic card if the MRP went soft on colonial questions.²⁹ That may be part of the equation, but it underplays the MRP’s commitment both to wage Cold War in the empire and to crush those that threatened its most lasting creation: the constitutional architecture of the Fourth Republic and the French Union.

1947 marked a watershed in this context. Nine months of bitter confrontation between Communists and their opponents—in parliament, in industrial relations and on the streets—dominated French politics from March to December. With a long hot summer of French labour unrest looming, the Communists, their Stalinist credentials no longer hidden up their sleeve, looked increasingly out of place inside a cabinet that aligned itself against workers’ demands at home, with imperial interests in the empire and alongside Washington in the emerging Cold War. Within a matter of months these testing policy choices caused centre-left tripartism to unravel only for a new coalition combination to take shape around the MRP and the Radical Party—the so-called Third Force.³⁰ By the end of the year France had moved firmly rightwards.

Worsening ideological polarisation also poisoned French political culture. Reasoned discussion of colonial abuses became impossible. Central to this breakdown was the Com­munist Party’s refusal to vote military credits for the Indochina War in early March 1947. The unedifying spectacle of Communist ministers disavowing their own defence budget proved the ‘final straw’ for an already fractious coalition. It catalysed the Paul Ramadier government’s decision to break with them on 5 May.³¹ A combination of factors made the Indochina conflict an acutely divisive issue in French politics. One was the increasing militancy of the Parti Communiste Franqais (PCF) rank and file, epitomised by Communist dockworkers’ refusal to load war supplies destined for Vietnam. Another was the closer identification of the centre-right ‘Third Force’ parties with support for outright military victory. It was here that a final consideration came into play. The formulation of Indochina strategy was falling under the sway of an inner circle of government members who sat on a key policy committee, the Interministerial Committee on Indochina—known as the COMININDO. This committee was already the preserve of colonial hardliners from the MRP, Georges Bidault, Paul Coste-Floret and Jean Letourneau prominent among them.³²

Formerly members of the tripartite coalition, the MRP’s senior politicians were more comfortable with the centre-right political complexion of the ‘Third Force’. But their freedom of manoeuvre over the Indochina War should not be exaggerated. The fact remained that the French public, still quiescent about the deepening crisis in Indochina, would only tolerate so much. This effectively ruled out the dispatch of young national servicemen to a colonial war, but it also left room for an escalation of the expeditionary force’s campaign. There were other reasons for public acquiescence in the war. Within eighteen months of the start of hostilities, France claimed to be fighting for something far more liberal than the mere reimposition of colonial authority. These claims became more credible once a plan emerged to install a new Vietnamese leadership, albeit one that ultimately proved hopelessly unrealistic. By December 1947 Robert Schuman’s govern­ment, dominated like most ‘Third Force’ administrations by the MRP and the Radical Party, seemed wedded to the idea of restoring Bao Dai, former Emperor of Annam, as ruler of a unified Vietnam. In South-east Asia the new French republic vested its hopes of colonial salvation in a dissolute monarch.

Did this mark a new beginning, more in tune with the French Union aspirations that the Vietnamese territories should become an autonomous ‘associated state’ of France? Tempting as it is to scream ‘No!’, the investment in Bao Dai allowed successive Third Force governments to claim that their war effort was endorsed by a Vietnamese national government supportive of the French Union. Above all, the success of French policy was now harnessed to Bao Dai’s ability to cultivate Vietnamese support. To do this, his supporters had to prove their effectiveness as a bulwark against Communism by building a working coalition from diverse nationalist parties and religious sects. They also had to ensure that economic conditions outside Vietminh-controlled areas compared favourably with those inside. Finally, the South Vietnamese regime would have to construct a viable ‘national’ army, one that could ultimately take the place of the French colonial expedi­tionary force. The Bao Dai solution failed on the first two counts and achieved only limited success with the third. The National Army of Vietnam (Quan doi quoc gia Viet Nam) created in 1948, a force of almost 230,000 at its peak, was poorly trained, internally divi­ded and never allowed to develop an identity separate from its French mentor.³³ In microcosm, the army’s limitations pointed up the inherent inadequacies of French Union reformism as a whole: externally imposed, locally unpopular and an untenable halfway house between colonial control and national—in this case, Vietnamese—independence.

In fact, from the beginning of the First Indochina War to its dramatic end, French governments never wholeheartedly pursued any of the objectives for which France was supposedly fighting. The initial war of colonial reconquest, allegedly integral to the reassertion of French international power, was all but abandoned by the end of 1947. There was an inherent contradiction thereafter between a French military campaign to guarantee the survival of a loyal Vietnamese state and the fact that the war itself sapped residual Vietnamese loyalty to any non-Vietminh alternative. Regardless of Bao Dai’s shortcomings as playboy turned national leader and the instability of the Franco- Vietnamese government in Saigon, no Southern Vietnamese regime could compete with the Vietminh for popular legitimacy or levels of social control.³⁴ Finally, after Mao’s victory in China in October 1949 and the massive increase in Vietminh military potential that followed, the French strategic position sped downhill.³⁵

Those inclined to apathy or anxiety may have closed their eyes to French problems in the Far East, but the war’s dramatic expansion during 1950 did spark French religious opposition and louder intellectual criticism of the conflict, albeit outside the mainstream of domestic political opinion.³⁶ Human rights organisations, church groups and prominent literary figures questioned the wisdom, the methods and the ethics of a war costing more and more lives.³⁷ Relatively few establishment figures were willing as yet to air their pangs of conscience.³⁸ Among the major parties in France, only the PCF maintained an anti-war line. Communist peacenik voices seemed discordant to many. They droned on about the evils of imperialism in coldly ideological terms but said next to nothing about the war’s human suffering. PCF relationships with client parties elsewhere in the French Empire were fractious, contingent and never equal.³⁹ One could even argue that Communist anti­colonialism was counter-productive, precluding other peace-inclined moderates from speaking out for fear of being smeared as fellow-travellers.⁴⁰

The Socialists squirmed on the horn of this particular dilemma. The Party had never devised a workable Indochina policy. Its parliamentarians paid lip service to the need for a negotiated solution but ran scared of its obvious implication: talks with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).⁴¹ They disliked mounting defence spending but voted credits for the war even so. Jules Moch, former resister, industrial policy specialist and arch anti­Communist, personified the Socialists’ agony. As Minister of Defence in 1950—1951 he knew the war was slipping from France’s grasp, not least because of chronic troop shorta­ges in the expeditionary force. But as the government’s leading Cold War strategist, he maintained that the requirements of European defence had to come first.⁴²

The MRP was, as ever, more hardline. The Fourth Republic’s perennial party of government, its ministers—Jean Letourneau, Maurice Schumann and Georges Bidault prominent among them—were closest to the day-to-day running of the war. The MRP’s collective leadership stuck to the mantra of no talks without military victory. But, behind the scenes, other senior Party figures, including Robert Schuman and Pierre Pflimlin, grew increasingly pessimistic.⁴³ As Foreign Minister in early 1949 Schuman avowed that Ho was ‘a creature of the Communists’. But this conviction nourished Schuman’s desperation to find a viable Vietnamese negotiating partner before China fell under the complete control of Mao’s forces.⁴⁴ Once the Chinese—DRV alliance was in place, Schuman began to lose hope. Much the same could be said of the Radical Party’s leading lights, a fact which helps explain Party leader Pierre Mendes France’s outspoken attacks on the war’s pointlessness after the calamity at Cao Bang.⁴⁵ Basking in the warm sunlight of political opposition, de Gaulle’s RPF relished the discomfort of party rivals without offering any clear alternative to fighting on.⁴⁶

Did the apparent French military recovery in 1951 change these perspectives? If so, only briefly: the so-called annee de Lattre was just that—a single year of achievement named after an exceptional commander-in-chief after which French fortunes declined once more. The expeditionary force certainly needed it, but the American military aid for which de Lattre had lobbied so efficaciously and which sustained the last three years of the French war effort was always a source of friction in France’s domestic politics. Socialist splits over Indochina deepened as the war dragged on.⁴⁷ In part, these fractures mirrored rising confessional and intellectual opposition to the conflict.⁴⁸ In part, they reflected the inability of the Fourth Republic’s political elite to make a convincing case for the war’s exorbitant cost. Money, more than lives, lay at the heart of this disillusionment. Businesses and investors began in earnest moving specialist staffs, factory plant and, above all, funds out of Vietnam from late 1952. And in every year from 1946, France had ploughed a yearly average of between 6 to 10 per cent of annual government spending into fighting the war in Indochina, a burden that impinged significantly on the rate of domestic reconstruction.⁴⁹ What, then, was the point in all this expenditure of blood and treasure? Was it really worth it simply to compel Ho Chi Minh’s regime to consider Vietnamese partition?⁵⁰

By 1953 all of the governing parties identified with starting, expanding or sustaining the war—the MRP, the Socialists, the Radicals and the Union Democratique et Socialiste de la Resistance (UDSR)—were internally divided over it. Public opposition to the conflict was also harder to ignore. Journalists took the lead. Some wrote for a reinvigorated Catholic press, tending to focus on the conflict’s ethical dimensions. Others criticised the war’s shadowy politics in the Fourth Republic’s flagship newspaper Le Monde, founded in 1946. And longer, in-depth critiques appeared in another newly established title, the weekly L'Express. Throughout the national press a steady stream of editorials decried past administrative failures and questioned the wisdom of continued military engagement.⁵¹ Watching France’s fight strategy unravel, in late 1953 Eisenhower’s Republican adminis­tration worked behind the scenes to ensure that a new coalition government under Joseph Laniel conceded independence to the governments in Phnom Penh, Luang Prabang and Saigon.⁵² The Associated States idea, a cornerstone of the original French Union scheme, was dead.

A wasted decade of imperial resistance to advancing decolonisation had reached its Far Eastern apogee, leaving its political architects—the centrist parties of the Fourth Republic—in disarray. Down but not out, the republican imperialism espoused by Radicals, Christian Democrats and Socialists was almost immediately rekindled by the outbreak of rebellion in Algeria in November 1954, only months after the crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu. It would take another, even larger colonial war before the dysfunction of post-war coalition politics was definitively proven by the Fourth Republic’s inglorious collapse in May 1958.

Conclusion

It is commonly asserted that savage security force repression was tangible proof of the moral bankruptcy of colonialism. Such an exacting judgement would seem to be confirmed by levels of coercion and conflict that were exceptional even by colonial standards. First unleashed in response to the 1945 Setif uprising in eastern Algeria and later pursued with equal ferocity in Madagascar, Cameroon and, of course, in the Algerian War of Indepen­dence, French colonial state violence was certainly systematic and looks, at first glance, to have been systemic as well. Look no further than the conniving of the so-called Saigon clique who sabotaged talks with Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam government during 1946 the quicker to get to the business of retaking Hanoi by force to discover the underlying desperation of colonial administrations anxious to reimpose iron control. Yet bureaucracies, civil or military, are complex organisations, neither monolithic in outlook nor united in practice. For every serving official or senior officer prepared to risk all in Vietnam, there were others persuaded from a remarkably early stage—less than eighteen months into an eight-year conflict—that the war was unwinnable. But what about ten years later: surely the empire’s politico-military elite emerged from defeat by the Vietminh demoralised, antagonised and alienated, not only from France’s political classes but from France itself? This picture—of furious professionals devoted to imperial ideals set against a French public increasingly exasperated (even bored) by all things colonial—will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the army’s extra-judicial killings in Algeria, with the reactionary terrorism of the Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS) or with Gillo Ponte­corvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. Seen in this light, the death of the Fourth Republic in the May crisis of 1958 was a mercy killing—a Gaullist intervention to save France from itself, from the hopeless factionalism of its party leaders and the reactionary excesses of colonial warriors whose ethical compass was spinning out of control.

Whichever the case, it seems impossible to deny that the Fourth Republic was brought down by its own contradictions. This, was a regime trapped by elaborate constitutional architecture testy, multi-partyism, and the unfulfilled promises of colonial reform that resulted. Perhaps party elites and arid constitutional processes matter after all.

Notes

1 This chapter draws on ideas discussed more fully in my book Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford, 2014).

2 Significant additions to this literature are: Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), Culture imperiale 1931-1961. Les colonies au coeur de la Republique (Paris, 2004); and Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel (eds), Culture post-coloniale 1961-2006 (Paris, 2005), especially Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard, ‘Memoire coloniale: resistances a l’emergence d’un debat’, pp. 22-41, and Fran^oise Verges, ‘Malaise dans la Republique: memoires troublees, territoires oublies’, pp. 69­82. See also Claude Liauzu, ‘Les historiens saisis par les guerres de memoires coloniales’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, Vol. 54, No. 2 annex (2005), pp. 99-109; Robert Aldrich, ‘Colonial Past, Post-Colonial Present. History Wars French-Style’, History Australia, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2006), pp. 14.1-14.9.

3 Classic accounts of the Parti Colonial are C.M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “Colonial Party”: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885-1914’, Historical Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1971), pp. 99-128; L. Abrams and DJ. Miller, ‘Who Were the French Colonialists? A Reassessment of the Parti colonial, 1890-1914’, Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1976), pp. 685­725. The best recent account of business engagement with empire is Hubert Bonin, Catherine Hodeir and Jean-Francois Klein (eds), L'esprit economique imperial (1830-1970): groupes de pression et reseaux du patronat colonial en France et dans l'empire (Paris, 2008).

4 Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895­1930 (Stanford, 1997); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial.Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2007); Dino Costantini, Mission civilisatrice: le role de l'histoire coloniale dans la construction de l'identite politiquefranqaise (Paris, 2008).

5 An exception here is the exploration of the ‘late colonial state’ phenomenon, as discussed by John Darwin, ‘What was the Late Colonial State?’, Itinerario, Vol. 23, Nos. 3-4 (1999), pp. 73-82.

6 Exemplary works of this type are Frederick Cooper, ‘The Senegalese General Strike of 1946 and the Labor Question in Post-War French Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1990), pp. 165-215; Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958 (Portsmouth, NH, 2005); Elizabeth Schmidt, ‘Top Down or Bottom Up? Nationalist Mobilization Reconsidered, with Special Reference to Guinea (French West Africa)’, American Historical Review, Vol. 110 (Oct., 2005), pp. 975-1,014.

7 Zara Steiner, ‘On Writing International History: Chaps, Maps, and Much More', International Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3 (1997), p. 538.

8 Claude Liauzu, Histoire de lAnti-Colonialisme en France. Du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 2007), especially chaps. 3, 4 and 6.

9 For the connections between liberation, reconstruction and France's new party politics, see Serge Berstein, Frederic Cepède, Gilles Morin and Antoine Prost (eds), Le Parti Socialiste entre resistance et republique (Paris, 2000); Andrew Knapp (ed.), The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation, 1944-1947 (Basingstoke, 2007); Fondation Charles de Gaulle, Actes du colloque, De Gaulle et le Rassemblement du Peuple Frangais (1947-1955) (Paris, 1998).

10 Seung-Ryeol Kim, ‘France's Agony between Vocation Europeenne et Mondiale. The Union Fran^aise as an Obstacle in the French Policy of Supranational European Integration', Journal of European Integration History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002), pp. 61-84.

11 This was the essential criticism levelled by de Gaulle's elite supporters in the Gaullist opposition movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Fran^ais. See David Valence, ‘Un RPF pour quelles elites?', in Serge Berstein, Pierre Birnbaum and Jean-Pierre Rioux (eds), De Gaulle et les elites (Paris,

2008), pp. 47-61.

12 Martin Thomas, ‘Colonial Violence in Algeria and the Distorted Logic of State Retribution: The Setif uprising of 1945', Journal of Military History, Vol. 75, No. 1 (2011), pp. 125-157.

13 James I. Lewis, ‘French Politics and the Algerian Statute of 1947', Maghreb Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1992), pp. 147-172. For echoes of this silencing with regard to the treatment of Algerians in post-war France, see Emmanuel Blanchard, ‘Le mauvais genre des Algeriens: des hommes sans femme face au virilisme policier dans le Paris d'après-guerre', Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Societes, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2008), pp. 209-222.

14 Key examples include Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1944-54 (Cambridge, 1991); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley,

1993) ; William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (Chapel Hill, 1998); Gerard Bossuat, Les aides americaines economiques et militaires à la France, 1938-1960. Une nouvelle image des rapports de puissance (Paris, 2001); Claire Sanderson, L'impossible alliance? France, Grande-Bretagne et defense de l'Europe, 1945-1958 (Paris, 2003); Michael Creswell, A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Brian Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York, 2008). A commendable, recent exception to the rule is Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, 2007).

15 Archives Nationales, F/1a/3298, Algiers Governor Yves Chataigneau, ‘Rapport relatif aux evenements du departement de Constantine', 21 June 1945; Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945. Une subversion fianqaise dans lAlgerie coloniale (Paris, 2009), pp. 109-134, 207-209.

16 Andrew Shennan, Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, 1940-46 (Oxford, 1989), chap. 7.

17 Regarding the new republican elite and colonial expectations of it, see Olivier Wieviorka, ‘Replacement or Renewal? The French Political Elite at the Liberation', and Martin Shipway, ‘Whose Liberation? Confronting the Problem of the French Empire, 1944-47', both in Knapp, Uncertain Foundation, pp. 75-86, 139-159.

18 Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Petain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, 2001), pp. 9-30.

19 Michael Neiberg, The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (London, 2012), chaps. 3-7.

20 D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven, 1973); Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘La survivance d'un mythe: la puissance par l'empire colonial (1944-1947)', Revue Frammise dHistoire d'Outre-Mer, Vol. 77 (1985), pp. 388-397.

21 Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: un etat ne de la guerre (Paris, 2011), pp. 98-99; Frederick Cooper, ‘“Our Strike”: Equality, Anticolonial Politics, and the 1947-48 Railway Strike in French West Africa', Journal of African History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (1996), pp. 81-118; Jacques Tronchon, ‘La nuit la plus longue... du 29 au 30 mars 1947', in F. Arzalier and J. Suret-Canale (eds), Madagascar 1947: la tragedie oubliee (Paris, 1999), pp. 118-126.

22 Marshall, French Colonial Myth, pp. 312-314; Jon Cowans, ‘French Public Opinion and the Founding of the Fourth Republic', French Historical Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1991), pp. 62-95.

23 Steiner, ‘On Writing International History', p. 536.

24 James I. Lewis, ‘The MRP and the Genesis of the French Union, 1944-1948', French History, Vol.

12, No. 2 (1998), pp. 276-314.

25 Raymond Betts, France and Decolonization, 1900-1960 (London, 1991), p. 128.

26 Leo Zeilig, ‘Frantz Fanon: une vie revolutionnaire', Contretemps, Vol. 10 (June, 2011).

27 Frederick Cooper, ‘The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa', in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 406-435.

28 For the political background, see Frederic Turpin, ‘Le Mouvement Republicain Populaire et l'avenir de l'Algerie (1947-1962)', Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique, Vol. 113 (1999), pp. 171-179; Liliana Mosca, ‘À l'origine de la repression de 1947 à Madagascar: raisons nationales ou logique inter­nationale?', Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’istituto italiano per l’Aficae l’Oriente, Vol. 62, No. 2 (2007), pp. 257-278; Stein Tonnesson, Vietnam 1946:How the War Began (Berkeley, 2010).

29 Pierre Letamendia, Le Mouvement Republicain Populaire. Histoire d’un grand parti franyais (Paris, 1995), pp. 98-101.

30 Bruce D. Graham, ‘Le choix atlantique ou troisième force internationale?' in Serge Berstein (ed.), Paul Ramadier: La Republique et le socialisme (Paris, 1990), p. 160; Bruno Bethouart, ‘Le MRP, un nouveau partenaire', in Berstein et al., Le Parti Socialiste, pp. 257-258.

31 Marc Michel, ‘L'empire colonial dans les debats parlementaires', in Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza (eds), L’Annee 1947 (Paris, 2000), pp. 198-199.

32 Tonnesson, Vietnam 1946, pp. 142-145, 243-244.

33 Francois Guillemot, ‘Be men!': Fighting and Dying for the State of Vietnam (1951-54)', War & Society, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2012), pp. 186-196. The improving effectiveness of the National Army was also eclipsed by the strategic capability of DRV forces trained and equipped by Communist China, see Qiang Zhai, ‘Transplanting the Chinese Model: Chinese Military Advisers and the First Vietnam War, 1950-1954', Journal of Military History, Vol. 57, No. 4 (1993), pp. 689-715.

34 Bertrand de Hartingh, Entre le peuple et la nation. La Republique Democratique du Viet Nam de 1953 à 1957 (Paris, 2003); Christopher E. Goscha, ‘A “Total War” of Decolonization? Social Mobiliza­tion and State-Building in Communist Vietnam (1949-54)', War & Society, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2012), pp. 136-162.

35 For discussion of a landmark French defeat at Cao Bang in late 1950, and for analysis of popular mobilisation in Communist-ruled areas, see Frederic Turpin, ‘Cao Bang, autumne 1950: autopsie d'un desastre', Revue Historique des Armees, Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 25-34; Goscha, ‘A “Total War” of Decolonization?' pp. 136-162.

36 David Drake, ‘Les Temps Modernes and the French War in Indochina', Journal of European Studies, Vol. 28, No. 109-110 (1998), pp. 25-41.

37 Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill, 1977), pp. 55-56; Jean- Pierre Biondi, Les anticolonialistes (1881-1962) (Paris, 1992), pp. 261-265.

38 Goscha, Vietnam, pp. 14-15; Susan Bayly, ‘Conceptualizing Resistance and Revolution in Vietnam: Paul Mus' Understanding of Colonialism in Crisis', Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2009), pp. 192-205.

39 Elizabeth Schmidt, ‘Cold War in Guinea: The Rassemblement Democratique Africain and the Struggle over Communism, 1950-1958', Journal of African History, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2007), pp. 95-121; Alexander Keese, ‘A Culture of Panic: “Communist” Scapegoats and Decolonization in French West Africa and French Polynesia (1945-1957)', French Colonial History, Vol. 9 (2008), pp. 131-145.

40 Alain Ruscio, ‘French Public Opinion and the War in Indochina, 1945-1954', in M. Scriven and P. Wagstaff (eds), War and Society in Twentieth Century France (Oxford, 1992), pp. 117-129; Alain Ruscio, Les Communistes franyais et la guerre d’Indochine, 1944-54 (Paris, 2004).

41 Some Socialists never abandoned the idea of face-to-face negotiations and maintained indirect links with the Vietminh, see Jacques Dalloz, ‘Alain Savary, un socialiste face à la guerre d'Indo­chine', Vingtième Siècle, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1997), pp. 42-54.

42 The National Archives, London, FO 371/101045, FJ1071/1, Annual review for Indochina, 1951.

43 R.E.M. Irving, Christian Democracy in France (London, 1973), pp. 199-200, 205-209.

44 Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, serie Z: Europe, sous-serie: Grande-Bretagne, 1944-1949, Vol. 39, ‘Compte-rendu des conversations entre M. Schuman et M. Bevin', 13 January 1949.

45 Pierre Mendès France, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome 2: Une Politique de [’economie 1943-1954 (Paris, 1985), pp. 297-303.

46 Jean-Pierre Rioux, ‘Varus, Qu’as-tu fait de mes legions?’, in Maurice Vaisse (ed.), L’armee fanqaise dans la guerre d’Indochine (Bruxelles, 2000), pp. 21-31; Frederic Turpin, De Gaulle, les Gaullistes et l’Indochine (Paris, 2005), pp. 571-572.

47 Jacques Dalloz, ‘Alain Savary, un socialiste face à la guerre d’Indochine’, Vingtième Siècle, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1997), pp. 42-54.

48 Daniel Hemery, ‘L’Indochine, les droits humains entre colonisateurs et colonises: la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, Revue Franqai.se d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, Vol. 88, Nos. 330-331 (2001), pp. 223-239.

49 Hugues Tertrais, La piastre et lefusil. Le cout de la guerre d’Indochine 1945-1954 (Paris, 2002), pp. 225-231.

50 Pierre Asselin, ‘Choosing Peace: Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam, 1954-1955’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2007), pp. 95-126.

51 Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 211.

52 George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975 (New York, 1986), p. 26.

Further reading

Conklin, Alice, Sarah Fishman and Robert Zaretsky, France and its Empire since 1870: The Republican Tradition (Oxford, 2010).

Goscha, Christopher E., Vietnam: un etat ne de la guerre (Paris, 2012).

Knapp, Andrew (ed.), The Uncertain Foundation: France at the Liberation, 1944-1947 (Basingstoke, 2007).

Lawrence, Mark Atwood, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, 2007).

Lawrence, Mark Atwood, and Fredrik Logevall (eds), The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

Logevall, Fredrik, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York,

2012).

Rioux, Jean-Pierre, The Fourth Republic, 1944 1958 (Cambridge, 1987).

Shennan, Andrew, Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, 1940-46 (Oxford, 1989).

Shipway, Martin, Decolonization and its Impact (Oxford, 2007).

Tertrais, Hugues, La piastre et le fusil. Le cout de la guerre d’Indochine 1945-1954 (Paris, 2002).

Thomas, Martin, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford, 2014).

Thomas, Martin, Bob Moore and L.J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918 1975 (London, 2008).

Tonnesson, Stein, Vietnam 1946: How the War Began (Berkeley, 2010).

Wall, Irwin M., The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1944-1954 (Cambridge, 1991).