As he was writing his book “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Toqueville surmised that all people yearn to be free and for equality. People will demand equality, even if it means enslaved equality. If we must remain slaves, then all must become slaves. Such was the attitude of the Vietnamese people leading up to the First Indochina War.
Those who rose up and sought independence had never known a life not ruled over by the French and their collaborators. Life for those who would resist was harsh and unforgiving. The French had done little to improve the lives of the Vietnamese people, and indeed treated the country as a resource that was meant to be sucked dry to benefit France. The French colonial experience in Vietnam was as exploitive as any of the other European colonial adventures in places such as Africa and China. It is not hard to imagine the reasons why the Vietnamese people yearned to be free from their colonial masters.
The most obvious and overarching reason why the Vietnamese grew weary of French rule was the simple fact that the French did little to improve the lives of ordinary people. The colonial system was brutal and exploitive. All of the markets in Vietnam were geared towards benefiting the French investors and colonizers who had taken up stake in the country. The Vietnamese people were treated as inferior and child-like, unfit for any life beyond one of manual labor.
Any dissent from among the people was brutally put down and squashed by the French authorities. Another reason abounded from the many cultural differences between the two societies. Whereas the Vietnamese had slowly cultivated a group ownership system of land or resources that revolved around the village structure, the French were of the capitalist school of single ownership. As they extended their political influence over the country, they imposed such economic ideas on the populace, often abruptly and as a detriment to the established village system, which was pushed aside in favor of the French ideas.
Many peasants were pushed off their ancestral lands as French landlords bought up the ground for their own uses. These refugees largely became tenant farmers or laborers. This caused a major upheaval in the economics of Vietnamese life, which was already being strained by the increasing pressure placed in it by French production expectations.
People didn’t know how to react when faced with the replacement of the ownership system they had grown comfortable with by a foreign system that was in many ways a polar opposite. The village system suffered greatly because of this, further depriving the people of needed resources, both social and material.
Of course, the French government did not mind this at all. As far as they were concerned, Vietnam and its child like labor force was an Asian cash cow. Ever in competition with its European rivals, especially Britain, France was able to hold up Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos, as a major and highly profitable colony in Southeast Asia.
Investment from France poured in, mostly in the southern portion of the country around Saigon. Vietnam became a major producer of rubber and industrial metals. The French had no reason to try and improve the lives of the Vietnamese or to change anything at all. It was a formula that was making them money hand over fist.
Also, any precedent that would be set by Vietnam becoming independent was feared by France as well as the other major European colonial players. If one country could gain independence through resistance, then many of the other colonized countries around the world could do the same thing. This was an attitude held mostly by those in Europe. Their neighbors across the pond, the United States, had not engaged in the same manner of colonization, and thus felt differently about the potential fate of Vietnam.
From a rhetorical standpoint, the US was not opposed to Vietnamese independence, especially right after World War II. The American public had little sympathy for France, mainly due to the Vichy French government having been an open collaborator of the Nazis during the war. It also espoused American ideals like self-determination. Franklin Roosevelt, while he didn’t openly support or campaign for Vietnamese independence, did not oppose the idea. American military operatives had helped run a resistance movement against the Japanese during the war, and many figures in the military, including General Douglas McArthur, the commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific during the war, openly supported independence.
But that attitude largely changed in the American political sphere following Roosevelt’s death and replacement by Harry Truman. Truman had no such support for independence as Roosevelt had had, and he was much more concerned about avoiding upsetting the US’s relationship with Britain and France, who were both vehemently against any thought of Vietnamese self-government or independence. So, when Ho Chi Minh, a rebel leader during the war, and his organization the Viet Minh declared independence from France in September, 1945, the US did little in the face of massive British and French military action meant to crush the movement and restore France’s position at the top of the hierarchy in Southeast Asia.
When viewed in the overall context of European colonization, France’s experience and attitude in Vietnam are quite typical. It isn’t surprising that many of the time honored local traditions and customs were trampled on and replaced by systems that the French thought of as superior. But that also means it works just as well as it did in places such as Central Africa and the Middle East. It wouldn’t have been a complete loss for France has they awarded their Vietnamese colonies their independence. In fact, it could be argued that it wouldn’t have been a loss at all, at least economically.
The United States model of colonialism has shown that it is possible to create profitable markets for the home country from an economic standpoint without a large amount of political involvement or interference. In fact, the next decade would show how disastrous heavy US political involvement in a country could potentially be. In short, France could have still made large returns on its investment in Vietnam without holding control over that country’s political sphere. You don’t have to be in charge of a country to make money there. US business investments have seen profitable returns without major political involvement in places such as Central and South America, so the model has been proven to work.
From a political standpoint, it also would have benefited France to give Vietnam their independence. It can’t have been a surprise to see a resistance movement, and a Communist leaning one at that, grow out of the social atmosphere that France, through heavy handedness and apathy, created in Vietnam. Had the country been made free, even in some token sense, it would have gone a long way towards avoiding the eventual conflict that would envelope the country and cost France one of its most profitable colonies.
Even the loss of face to other European powers shouldn’t have been a major concern to the French. Any forward thinking political theorist should have been able to see that the end to colonialism as it had existed for the previous two centuries was coming to an end. France and Britain feared the precedent that Vietnamese independence would see for other colonies. But that should have been a small concern for them both. Instead, the powers that be tried to desperately cling to their colonial treasures, often at the expense of the native populations.
France should have awarded Vietnam independence. Not only was it the morally right thing to do, it was the politically and economically savvy thing to do. Bloodshed would have been avoided by the lack of a need for a rebellion, French investment probably would have remained, and it would have remained in a system that, while self government would have changed to some degree, still largely favored the French businesses that had set up shop there. Finally, any loss of face for the French would have been a small price to pay for what they should have considered as getting off easy after the terrible time the French had had running the country. Ironically enough, their inability to succeed in Vietnam only foreshadowed the American experience a few years later.
Herring, George C. America’s Longest War, Fourth Edition. 2002. McGraw Hill Higher Education.
Zac Johnson - My name is Zac Johnson. I'm a 22 year old senior at Arizona State University in Tempe, majoring in political science. I'll graduate in ...
Join the Conversation