Sending young men to fight and die in a ‘dirty war’ in Indo-China made little sense to most French voters; and letting Hanoi take over was not obviously more ill-advised than supporting the palpably inadequate Bao Dai, whom the French established as the country’s new ‘emperor’ in March 1949. The French officer corps, on the other hand, was certainly keen to pursue the struggle in Vietnam; there, as later in Algeria, France’s martial heritage (or what remained of it) seemed at stake and the French High Command had a point to prove. But the French economy could never have sustained a long drawn
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