Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

For Mus, it was no longer possible by war’s end to hold easy assumptions concerning the French Empire and its legitimacy. How, he wondered, could one justify a colonial system that placed some men above others, particularly when those others resisted it? More specifically, how could one support a French effort to reclaim control over Indochina—by force if necessary—in view of the nationalist fervor sweeping the land? The questions gnawed at Mus’s sensibility. Though he was not yet prepared to advocate an immediate and unilateral French withdrawal from Indochina, he began to imagine a new, postcolonial order, in which all men would have to be seen as equals, in which the Vietnamese demand for independence would be met.