The French occupation of Indo-China was relatively brief, finishing in a bitter war and the defeat of Dien Bien Phu [see Colonization, Decolonization]. Both the colonial period and the withdrawal left their mark on France in a number of ways; the war did much to worsen relations between the army and the government, and prepared the way for some of the conflicts connected with the Algerian War.
A number of important French literary works reflect aspects of the Indo-Chinese experience, notably Malraux's La Voie royale and Duras's L' Amant (Duras was born in Indo-China and spent her childhood there; her work might therefore be seen as belonging to ‘Indo-Chinese literature in French’). The colonial authorities sought to encourage the teaching and use of French in Indo-China as in the rest of the empire. Indo-Chinese intellectuals spent time in France before, during, and after World War II; the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, lived there for several years and wrote political tracts in French. Raphaël Barquissau's L'Asie française et ses écrivains (1949), an anthology published a few years before the final French withdrawal in 1954, shows a certain development of French-language writing, both by colonists and by indigenous authors. There was indeed a modest flourishing of Vietnamese fiction in French, one of the leading figures being Pham Van Ky (b. 1916), who settled in France in 1938 and published many novels with Indo-Chinese or oriental subjects, including Perdre la demeure (1961, Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française). In general, however, the French presence in Indo-China was too short-lived and the native cultural traditions too strong to allow the growth of a significant national literature in French.
[Peter France]
