French Indochina

French Indochina was the federation of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian territories governed from Hanoi between 1887 and 1954. France had begun with Saigon in 1859 and expanded piecemeal. The structure was deliberately uneven: Cochinchina in the south was a directly ruled colony, while Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia and Laos were protectorates with their monarchies left standing but powerless. The economy was built around rubber plantations, coal, rice for export, and state monopolies on opium, salt and alcohol that at times supplied a third of the colonial budget. Peasant indebtedness and landlessness rose sharply. Resistance was continuous and was met with a penal system that turned the prison at Con Dao into a school for revolutionaries. The Communist Party founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1930 grew out of this. Japan occupied the territory from 1940 while leaving the Vichy administration in place, then swept it aside in March 1945. The famine in Tonkin that year killed perhaps a million people. Ho declared independence in September 1945, quoting the American Declaration. France returned by force, and the First Indochina War ran for eight years. It ended at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, where a French garrison was besieged in a valley by an army that had carried its artillery over the mountains by bicycle and hand. The Geneva Accords that July partitioned Vietnam and granted independence to Laos and Cambodia. The American war followed in the partition's wake. France committed nearly half a million troops to the war and lost around seventy-five thousand dead. The United States was paying about eighty per cent of the French war costs by 1954. Dien Bien Phu was chosen by the French precisely because they expected the Viet Minh could not bring artillery to it.

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