Making Sense of the French War

Narrative histories focusing on the French-Vietnamese Wars of the 1940s and 1950s are too concerned with placing the fight in a larger picture of post-war colonial rearguard efforts in the shadow of the emerging Cold War or see it as a stage in the natural revolutionary progression of the socialist state.

New studies cast doubt on the veracity of state-centered perspectives and delve into literary and cultural interpretations of events. Using the Soviet/Chinese endorement of Ho Chi Minh as a stepping stone, American historians tend to conclude Truman's commitment stemmed from economic, domestic, or geopolitical imperatives that rendered his support for the South inevitiable. Rethinking 1950 does not diminish its importance, but adds complexities and ambiguities to the portrayal otherwise obscured by a narrow focus on political events.

Contingency marks U.S./British/French/Communist policies toward Vietnam:

Archival issues in Vietnam

Tensions and doubleness often characterized responses to the war.

"The tensions between official efforts to construct a hegemonic for the French war and the myriad of private and competing responses to it."

"Shared faith in the rational manipulation of human societies and the natural world."

Beneath the veil of official orthodoxies lies a heterodox if submerged vision of the war with the potential to view the multiplicity of meanings through which Vietnamese, Europeans, and American actors sought to make sense of the postcolonial moment in Vietnam"

"Recognizing the stuggles of state and nonstate actors to give meaning to the French war and post colonial moment in Vietnam helps us transcend more familiar Cold War and imperial narratives. The result is an admittedly messier picture, though one probably truer to the period itself, and one that captures the uncertainty, hesitations, and contestations among and between states and peoples."