The Road to War

France and Vietnam 1944-1947

Martin Shipway

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780857456823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

How did France become embroiled in Vietnam, in the first of long wars of decolonization? And why did the French colonial administration, in late 1946, having negotiated with Ho Chi Minh for a year, adopt a warlike stance towards Ho's régime which ran counter to the liberal colonial doctrine of liberated France? Based on French archival sources, almost all of them previously unavailable to the English-speaking reader, the author assesses the policy that emerged from the 1944 Brazzaville conference; and the doomed attempt to apply that policy in Indo-China.

PART I

THE EXTERNAL AND DOMESTIC PARAMETERS OF COLONIAL POLICY MAKING

1

THE BRAZZAVILLE CONFERENCE AND ITS ORIGINS, 1940–1944

Policy Formulation and Myth Making on the Congo

Historians of French decolonisation have now largely dispensed with the Gaullian myth surrounding the Brazzaville Conference and the benign, supposedly decolonising vision of the ‘Man of Brazzaville’, de Gaulle himself. Moreover, the conference’s insufficiencies as an exercise in liberal agenda-setting have now largely been accepted.¹ The real French African Conference which met at Brazzaville for nine days in January-February 1944, sponsored by de Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation (Comité Français de Libération Nationale, or CFLN) at Algiers, left a highly misleading legacy. An understanding of the origins of the conference, as well as of its highly ambiguous outcome, is therefore unavoidable in any discussion of the policy to which it gave rise.

This chapter thus explores the wartime origins of the post-war ‘Brazzaville policy’, but it is also concerned with the myth which grew up alongside this policy, and was for the most part indissociable from it. Drawing an analogy with the reformist planning of the metropolitan Resistance, the chapter identifies three reasons for the ambiguity which very rapidly attached to the Gaullists’ new imperial thinking. First, although the Brazzaville Conference was the forum for a debate on this new imperial thinking, which was intended as the basis for a policy to be implemented across the French Union following the Liberation, this forum was restricted, largely for practical reasons, to officials of the colonial administration in French Black Africa. Its competence to deliberate on matters of overall policy was thus necessarily limited. Secondly, and despite the caution and muddle which largely characterised the Conference recommendations, Brazzaville was important because it became bound up with the emerging myth of de Gaulle, the emancipator of France and her Empire. Hence, thirdly, the very success of Brazzaville as a propaganda event, even while it was being written off by officials as a partial failure, was to create an immediate source of confusion regarding the thrust and purpose of post-war French colonial policy. For, like many myths, the Brazzaville myth was open to varying interpretations, and thus served as a catch-all term of reference readily appropriated by different actors pursuing often wildly conflicting goals. The origins of the myth, however, lay in the uniquely humiliating French experience of 1940, and in the impact on France’s vast imperial territories of metropolitan defeat, occupation, and political schism; the chapter therefore starts with an examination of the record of the wartime French Empire.

The French Empire at War, 1940–1943

French imperial territory was mostly far removed from the various theatres of war either in Europe or in Asia. The impact of the Second World War was nonetheless keenly felt across the Empire, both because French colonies and dependencies experienced the ripple effects of international developments and of the Gaullist war effort, and more directly because they served as the stage, or at least the backdrop, for many of the dramas played out between Frenchmen as a result of the defeat of 1940. These dramas involved, not least, the switch of allegiance to de Gaulle effected at some point between 1940 and 1944, whether voluntarily, by military force, or by the force of events, by every French colonial administration excepting that of Indochina. Thus, the impetus for colonial and imperial reform from 1944 onwards came not only from a reflex of ‘gratitude’ for the part played by the Empire in effecting a French ‘renaissance’, but also as a response to the seismic shocks which had seriously shaken and weakened an already over-extended and ramshackle imperial structure.

For the duration of the Phoney War, the conflict was seen as one restricted almost exclusively to Europe, in which the colonies, as in the First World War, would have only a supporting role. With the fall of France, however, two very different conceptions of the Empire’s role came into play. According to the first of these, reflected in the armistice, the Empire was to act as a makeweight for France’s weakness in the grand design of Hitler’s New Europe. Thus, notwithstanding the harshness of the armistices, designed as they were to remove France as an actor on the continent, they made only minor incursions into the French Empire. Neither the navy, shortly to be decimated by the Royal Navy at Mers-el-Kebir, nor the colonial armed forces, were surrendered or demobilised, though they were neutralised. By contrast, de Gaulle’s analogy with past French strategy was a more radical one. As the newly appointed Under-Secretary of State for War in the Reynaud government, he sought, ultimately in vain, to persuade the Premier to continue the struggle from colonial exile. The proposed strategy was thus one of a grandiose ‘African Marne’, a vast rallying of French forces as on the Marne in 1914, before an eventual counter-attack. It is an open question how effective such a strategy would have been. Certainly from the perspective of 1943–44, with France totally occupied, de Gaulle’s vision seemed justified. But no contingency plans existed for such a strategy. To have abandoned France to total occupation, and to the rigours of an ill-conceived guerilla war, would have been to put at risk any semblance of legitimacy.² Although he was privileged as a rebel to pursue a course from which the government felt compelled to swerve, de Gaulle’s foresight was nonetheless remarkable. The basis for his rebellion was his refusal to believe that the conflict was limited to Europe. As he declared from the first, in the ‘Appel’ of 18 June 1940:

For France is not alone. She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast Empire behind her. She can form a bloc with the British Empire which commands the seas and remains at war. She may, like England, make use of the limitless resources of the United States. This war is not bound by the Battle of France. It is a World War.³

This conception of the war was in turn reflected by his attitude to the colonies. Both Pétain and de Gaulle believed in the indissoluble link binding France and her Empire. But de Gaulle concluded from this, not that the Empire should acquiesce in France’s defeat, but that it should go on fighting while substantial portions of French territory remained undefeated.

De Gaulle’s crusade, however, at least for the first three years, is best understood as an inspired tactical and propaganda campaign, in which the aim was to win French loyalty and French territory, and so to establish his legitimacy as the authentic representative of the French nation. The first phase of this campaign, a concerted effort to rally military commanders and colonial administrators to the new cause, must be counted a failure: none of the imperial ‘proconsuls’ in North Africa or other key territories, some of whom had at first expressed their support for a continuation of the war, was prepared to reject Pétain’s authority. Two Governors-General expressing support for de Gaulle, Catroux in Indochina and de Coppet in Madagascar, were removed from office and immediately ‘rallied’ to de Gaulle.⁴ Indochina, now deprived of British support, drifted inexorably into Japanese suzerainty. After the British bombing of the French Mediterranean fleet at Mers-el-Kebir and the failure of the Anglo-Gaullist expedition to capture Dakar, Operation ‘Menace’, the loyalty of most of the Empire was not in doubt; French North Africa and French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, or AOF) quickly emerged as the bastions of Vichy’s colonial empire. In the Americas the issue was decided by the Havana Convention of July 1940, by which the American Republics pledged to oppose any transfer of sovereignty in the Western hemisphere. Although this was intended as an instrument to block German incursions, it effectively opposed the Free French also.⁵

By the end of 1940, apart from some smaller territories which declared for de Gaulle under British supervision, the Indian settlements, New Caledonia, and Oceania, only the securing of French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Française, or AEF) represented a veritable triumph for ‘Free France’. Advised by Captain de Hauteclocque (better known by his posthumous post-war title and Resistance nom de guerre, Marshal Leclerc), the Governor of the strategically vital territory of Tchad, Félix Eboué, rallied to de Gaulle in August 1940. Following his example, Brazzaville, federal capital of AEF, fell to the Gaullists in a bloodless coup, followed by the rest of AEF and Cameroun, though Gabon was taken only after bitter Franco-French fighting.⁶ Eboué was rewarded with the Governor-Generalship of ‘Free French Africa’. Brazzaville, although it was to become associated with Gaullist reform after the 1944 conference, was until then chiefly important as the effective capital of Free France, a territorial base to which de Gaulle could retire when relations with Churchill became too difficult in London. As he reflected on his arrival in the makeshift capital, ‘I feel how much this land is French’.⁷ Further territorial gains were made by the Gaullists on the back of British or Anglo-American initiatives. Thus the Anglo-Gaullist invasion of Syria in 1941 allowed de Gaulle’s men to assume the Mandate administration, and de Gaulle negotiated a similar transfer of administrative powers following the British invasion of Madagascar in 1942. Most importantly, the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa in late 1942 not only precipitated the German occupation of the so-called ‘Free Zone’ of hitherto unoccupied France, but also set in train the complex sequence of events by which de Gaulle was established as head of the CFLN at Algiers in July 1943, thus uniting the remainder of the Empire, barring Indochina, under his authority. It should be noted, however, that even at this crucial stage, the rival claims of the American-backed General Giraud had not yet been fully resolved, and that some territories, notably AOF, preferred Giraud to the ‘aggressor’ de Gaulle.

Reformism was pushed into the background while the struggle for imperial unity lasted. The degree to which de Gaulle was influenced by the reformist ideas of Eboué, or vice versa, can only be matter for speculation. At most, de Gaulle showed an awareness that Africa would not emerge from the war as she went in, for example in a speech to the Royal African Society in October 1941:

A Greek philospher once said that war is a begetter of children. It is certainly true that its hard light throws into relief many previously unrecognised necessities, and that its inexorable thirst for action forces changes which have been denied or delayed in peacetime. Africa is also at war, and we should have no doubt that this tremendous adventure will have a profound influence on its development.⁸

But even here, his sentiments, geared to his audience, were designed merely to stress the importance of a unified Allied African war effort. Indeed, until de Gaulle’s arrival in Algiers, and even thereafter, the reality of Gaullist imperialism in Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, and even in Algeria appeared to be a very different story, one of repression and indifference to all pressures for reform.⁹

However, two external factors impelling the Gaullists towards colonial reform need to be addressed before the preparations for Brazzaville are considered: the comparison with Vichy’s colonial policy and international pressure for reform, in particular that of American anti-colonialism. Vichy’s attitude to Empire was a renewed form of the old doctrine of ‘repli impérial’, or retreat into Empire. As one typical publication had it, in 1942:

On her own in Europe, France is merely a devalued piece on the chessboard of the old continent. Because her Empire again gives her the chance to apply her power and exert her long-term influence outside her territory, she has regained value at an international level which can be ignored by none. Through the Empire, France has a chance to count amongst the great nations.¹⁰

Clearly this was largely a propaganda stance, though a significant one. Publications on an imperial theme and local imperial committees (Comités d’Empire) were commonplace on both sides of the Armistice line. Between October 1940 and October 1942, 38 percent of news items on the Gaumont-Pathé newsreels were on imperial topics.¹¹ In practical terms the policy of repli impérial was double-edged. Defence of the Empire was a priority from the start, when the regime stuck out in resisting German and Italian demands with regard to the Empire. As noted above, the regime was also largely successful in checking Gaullist infiltration. At the same time, the Empire was seen less as a ch...