visitor's itinerary

decline and end of the french empire in the far east

After the French were defeated in 1940, Indochina, which had sided with Vichy, started to collaborate with Japan which guaranteed sovereignty to its administration in exchange for installing military bases. But Japan took control of the peninsula on 9 March 1945. A few months later, in Vietnam, after it was announced that Japan had surrendered and the Emperor Bao Dai had abdicated, the Vietminh took power and, on 2 September, proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic Vietnam (DRV).
For the disarmament of the Japanese, the British were put in charge of Indochina in the south and the Chinese in the North. France sent an expeditionary force to restore its sovereignty while, up to 1946, carrying on negotiations with Ho Chi Minh, which failed and led to a colonial war. The coming of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 disrupted the equilibrium of parties involved. The Vietminh in fact received substantial material aid which helped it to take the initiative and force the French army, after the defeat of Cao-Bang in October 1950, to abandon the regions bordering China and to fall back around the Tonkin delta. Integrated into the rationale of block confrontation, the conflict took on an international aspect. The Fourth Republic obtained substantial military aid from the United States and set up, against the DRV, the associated States of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, while developing their national armies. Faced with the expeditionary force, the Vietnamese People’s Army was supported by a population partially behind its cause and, from there on, with the means to carry out large-scale operations.
In France, where public opinion was divided between indifference and hostility to continuing the war, the rulers sought an «honourable» way out of the conflict. Paradoxically, it was the defeat of Dien-Bien-Phu, on 7 May 1954, which resolved the situation, at the time when the international conference on the subjects of Korea and Indochina opened in Geneva. On 21 July 1954, Pierre Mendès France signed an agreement there which established a ceasefire and brought an end to the war by another north-south partition of the country. The end of the French presence in Indochina was announced.