Indochine : La guerre oubliée 1946 - 1954

On March 6, 1946, France recognized Vietnam as a free state, but within the French Union. For Ho Chi Minh, it was too late. After a few skirmishes, the war officially began on December 19, 1946. A horrific war, with its widespread guerrilla warfare and fighting in rice paddies and jungles, the Indochina War was a revolutionary conflict of extreme violence. Generally, French citizens were indifferent to the Indochina War, a distant land. After the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, public opinion changed. The Cold War altered the dynamics of the Indochina War. On one side, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and China financed the Viet Minh. The United States paid up to 80% of the war costs to the French, fearing the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the Korean War began in 1950. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the turning point of the war. Unbeknownst to the French army, the Vietnamese managed to construct a road system that allowed them, on May 7, 1954, to capture the supposedly impregnable air-land base of Dien Bien Phu after two months of fighting. In June 1954, Pierre Mendès France, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic, began secretly negotiating a peace agreement at the Geneva Conference. On the night of July 20-21, an agreement was finalized. The French were to withdraw from Vietnam, and the 17th parallel became the border. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, was located in the north, and the Republic of Vietnam, led by Bao Dai, in the south. The Americans did not accept this communist presence in part of Vietnam. This marked the beginning of the Vietnam War. In 1993, French President François Mitterrand admitted that the Indochina War had been a mistake. In May 2005, President Jacques Chirac declared June 8th a national day of remembrance for those who died in that war. More information: https://souvenir74.fr/actualites/8-ju...