A child of empire, Paul was then an unquestioning believer in France’s civilizing mission, and through the 1930s, he wrote nothing critical of colonialism in Indochina or the empire—nothing, for example, about the bloody repression of the peasant uprisings in Nghe Tinh province in 1930–31, which occurred while he was in Vietnam as an officer-reservist in the Indochinese colonial army.
