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Coercion and Co-optation of Indochinese Worker-Soldiers in World War I: Mort pour la France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Geoffrey Gunn
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Summary

Alongside even larger numbers of contingents drawn from France's colonial empire, including a large pool of workers sourced from China, successive contingents of “Indochinese” -Vietnamese in addition to Cambodians - were also pressed into both military and labor battalions in World War I battlefields. Besides explaining the battlefield experiences of the Indochinese battalions in the European war – a little studied area – this article seeks to expose the contradictions raised by France's patriotic appeal for “volunteers,” versus the domestic anti-colonial movement. On another level, the article examines the juncture between the worker-soldiers in France and the burgeoning socialist and communist underground in Paris, and back home in Vietnam, as best exemplified by the activities and writings of Ho Chi Minh in the run-up to his now-famous oration at the Versailles Conference.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , e4
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2016

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Footnotes

Geoffrey Gunn is emeritus professor, Nagasaki University, Japan, and adjunct professor, University of Macau, China. His recent books include Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014; and Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong: Anti-Colonial Networks, Extradition and the Rule of Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

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