Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Unlike the Dutch, the French had not been in the region very long; and even though America paid for the first Vietnam War (something of which very few Frenchmen were aware at the time), it was French soldiers who fought and died there. French politicians of the Right in particular castigated Mendès-France and his predecessors for their failure to prosecute the war more effectively, but no-one had anything better to propose and almost all were secretly pleased to put Vietnam behind them. Only the French Army—or more precisely the professional officer corps—harbored continuing grievances. Some younger officers, notably those who had first served in the Resistance or with the Free French and acquired there the habit of independent political judgment, began to nourish inchoate but dangerous resentments.