The war ended for the 1ère Armée more with a whimper than a bang. While Sixth Army Group had succeeded in eliminating the Colmar Pocket, morale in the 1ère Armée at the end of a tough winter campaign was low, especially as soldiers felt that the French population had disengaged from the war. Operation Cheerful saw the French army invading Germany as part of the Sixth Army Group, directed by de Gaulle to seize objectives to force the Allies to designate a zone d’occupation française. The liberation and occupation of Germany had witnessed a recurrence of violence inflicted on the civilian population by French soldiers as in Italy, earning for the French the nickname “Russians of the West.” De Gaulle’s post-Liberation celebration of victory sought to diminish the role of the Allies and the 1ère Armée, while celebrating that of the resistance and Leclerc’s 2e DB. None of this served either to repair French civil–military relations, badly damaged by the war, or to acknowledge the role played by the empire in France’s liberation, all of which stored up future tensions. Incorrigible to the last, de Lattre settled into an extravagant lifestyle at his headquarters in Lindau, which flouted the conditions of post-war austerity, and caused de Gaulle to recall him to France. Committed to the retention of empire as a symbol of French grandeur, de Gaulle insisted that France reclaim its Indochinese “balcony on the Pacific.” However, the fact that the French colonial infrastructure had been obliterated by the Japanese, allowing Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, with Chinese complicity, to fill Vietnam’s political vacuum would have made it difficult in the best of circumstances for a debilitated France to reassert its sovereignty in Southeast Asia. France’s return to its far-away colony was hobbled by an absence of a viable policy for Indochina, a situation worsened by political instability in Paris following de Gaulle’s surprise January 1946 resignation, a dysfunctional command tandem in Saigon that yoked two headstrong commanders in d’Argenlieu and Leclerc, each with different priorities, and political concessions made by France’s negotiators led by Salan under pressure from Leclerc to catch the tides to launch Operation Bentré – the reoccupation of Vietnam north of the 16th parallel.

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of nationalism associated with decolonization throughout Asia and Africa. Indochina inspired nationalist movements around the world as communist-led movements there scored major victories against French colonialism and American intervention. The phenomenon was complex not only because Indochinese nationalisms were entangled with communism, but also because of their apparently ancient roots.

This chapter aims to explore the origins and nature of nationalisms in Indochina. It examines the processes that gave birth to national consciousness among the people in the Indochinese peninsula. Indochina, a modern name for this region born out of French imperial conquests, consisted of diverse communities of different religions, cultures, and histories. These communities had existed and interacted with each other for centuries prior to their contact with European powers.

Through four regimes between 1815 and 1870, the French would regularly invent new rationales and purposes for empire. A domestic crisis of legitimization led to the invasion of Algeria in 1830. So began a French settler colony in which barely half the settlers even came from France. The revolutionaries of 1848 annexed the colonies, making them national territory. While chattel slavery was legally abolished throughout the empire, annexation meant different things in different places. Colonial incoherence continued. Missionaries fostered and legitimized imperial expansion, though the imperial state never found them completely reliable. Military entrepreneurs in Senegal and Indochina had their own agendas, and did Emperor Napoleon III, who envisaged an “Arab Kingdom” in Algeria. He also sought to expand the empire indirectly, through a disastrous scheme to place a Habsburg on a Mexican throne. The prison colony provided another brutal avenue of colonial expansion. French imperial capitalism generally prospered, though the French were so outmaneuvered by the British after building the Suez Canal that they overshadowed the French role altogether. By 1870, the whole of the French empire still somehow seemed less than the sum of its parts.

This chapter shifts the view from the metropole to overseas France. It shows how French officials focused on restoring their empire in the immediate postwar era. The empire was crucial to France’s quest to regain its status as a Great Power; it was also a salve for domestic unrest. The empire provided raw materials and markets crucial to recovery; it also gave a struggling French government a luster of strength. Agitation in North Africa and Indochina threatened to undermine this enterprise. As in the metropole, French officials abroad sought to outmaneuver and delegitimize rivals who threatened their authority through their contacts with U.S. intelligence. They began to tie nationalist agitation in North Africa and Indochina to local communist action and PCF activity inside France. In North Africa, they also traced an apparent evolution in local communist rhetoric from criticism of nationalist activity, to collusion aiming for electoral gains, to support for independence by the end of 1945. And in Indochina, French officials employed the same methods used to discredit de Gaulle’s government in 1944 and 1945. In the months after the war, it also became a crucial component of the basic formula they used to influence American policy.

This chapter details the cracks in the consensus that began to emerge as tension boiled over in France with the expulsion of the PCF from the governing coalition and the communist-directed strikes that paralyzed the nation at the end of the year. Italian, Spanish and French intelligence, US embassy officials in Paris, U.S. military intelligence, and Central Intelligence Group current intelligence reports kept up the drumbeat, warning of growing anti-Americanism, communist power grabs and the PCF’s role in a larger, global communist conspiracy. Their analysis formed the core of the intelligence sent to President Truman and his senior advisors. However darkly uniform the analysis of the preceding year had been, some French officials, experts in the Office of Intelligence and Research (OIR) and a few mid-level analysts in the CIA expressed growing concern about the type and quality of intelligence. OIR analysts who complained that some CIA officials failed to account for French agency raised one of the most serious shortcomings of American analysis. Beyond their entreaties for American aid, French sources also played a role in the development of U.S. interference in France and its pro-colonial turn.

This chapter is concerned with tracing the history of the drafting of the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). In seeking to understand how and why ENMOD came about, the chapter locates its emergence in the extant superpower rivalry between the USSR and USA around the time of the war in Indochina. Its provisions, it is argued, reflect the complex roles of those powers within the Cold War – as scientific innovators, military superpowers, ideological adversaries and hesitant bilateralists – and survives as a quintessential juridical exemplar of Cold War thought and practice.

In contrast to the British, the French advances in Indochina were initially not concerned with the suppression of piracy, even though piratical activity was prevalent in Vietnamese waters from the mid-nineteenth century. The Vietnamese authorities, meanwhile, lacked the naval capacity, both to keep its rivers and coastal regions free from pirates and to fend of the French incursions. Piracy in the Gulf of Tonkin increased from the 1860s, as Chinese pirates congregated to Vietnam after the efforts to suppress piracy in the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca were stepped up. The main activity of the pirates was the abduction of Vietnamese, particularly women and children, who were trafficked to China, but also men who were trafficked as involuntary coolies. In the 1870s, the French Navy dispatched several antipiracy expeditions to the Gulf of Tonkin, and succeeded largely to suppress the piracy. The label piracy, however, continued to be used to denote any group of bandits or opponents of French colonial expansion in Vietnam. Doing so served to justify the colonisation of Indochina while resonating with a cultural demand for exotic adventure and horror stories in France.