“Throughout four dramatic years,” Decoux would write later of the Youth and Sports program, “all these young people, who were not our blood, and most often did not speak our language, gave the 25 million Indochinese a moving example of fidelity and obedience to our devastated fatherland.”35 The remark gives insight into Decoux’s attitude regarding his own position and the people of Indochina. Patterning his administration on Marshal Pétain’s authoritarian Vichy regime, which liquidated France’s democratic institutions and persecuted Communists, Freemasons, and Jews, he expected obedience and
...more
