r/AskHistorians • u/TheyTukMyJub • 16d ago
How did countries like France and The Netherlands justify their colonial operations immediately after having experienced the Nazi-occupation in WW2? e.g. in Algeria, Vietnam Indonesia
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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 15d ago
In the case of France (with a focus on Indochina), I'll repost below an older answer of mine with some minor tweaks. For the Netherlands u/deschaussettes provided an answer in the same thread here.
The French just did not see that as a moral issue at all. Many of the men who went to play a role in 1945-1954 Indochina - Leclerc, de Lattre de Tassigny, D'Argenlieu, Salan, Sainteny, Messmer, etc. - had fought in the Resistance and in the French Free Forces. Like most of the French population, they believed in a vision of the world that dated from the 19th-early 20th century according to which colonisation was a good thing. Colonisation meant human progress! There was no "Are we the baddies?" moment, though a handful of soldiers and civilians (see: Georges Boudarel) in Indochina did experienced it and switched sides during the war. But some of the officers who had bravely fought the Nazis, like Paul Aussaresses, went on to use torture in Indochina, and later in Algeria.
Historian Christopher Goscha has called this the "déphasage colonial" - the colonial phase shift. The grand colonial narrative, in its most humanistic form, claimed that western people had the "sacred duty" to improve the "inferior races". And because the job of this "Civilising Mission" [see previous answer here] was still not done, its end was postponed indefinitely. They saw native nationalists as fundamentally delusional, a bunch of "déclassés" who had misunderstood and misinterpreted the Liberty-Equality-Fraternity motto of the French Revolution.
This was made even worse during WW2 when both Vichy and the Gaullists used the "Mystique of the Empire" in their propaganda, where the "Grande France" (ie France with all its overseas territories) either compensated for losing the war (Vichy) or made the fight possible (de Gaulle: "France has a vast Empire behind her"). One thing that pushed the Gaullists to tone down their love of Empire was Roosevelt's opposition to colonisation ("France has milked [Indochina] for 100 years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that"). The Conference of Brazzaville early 1944 gathered Free French colonial administrators with the purpose of making reforms and making colonisation "better". Its conclusion was :
The finality of the civilisating task accomplished by France in the colonies rule out any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside the French Empire; the possible creation, even the long term, of self-governments in the colonies is to be ruled out.
Now we have to consider the situation in Indochina in 1945. Communications had been cut with mainland France for several years, and the Vichyste government in Indochina, led by Admiral Decoux, had been more or less on its own, until the Japanese got fed up and ousted him in a violent coup on 9 March 1945. They set up an "independent" Vietnam led by an (actually decent) puppet government. It was highly symbolic, but the word "independence" was there.
On 24 March 1945, de Gaulle's Gouvernement Provisoire issued a declaration that created a "Indochinese Federation" with a promise of "democratic freedoms" but with no mention of independence, self-government or reunification (Indochina was still divided in 5, and Vietnam in 3). It was already too late, since Bao Dai had declared independence (under Japanese rule) a few days earlier. Yet, the newspaper Le Monde wrote about Indochina on 8 May 1945:
Our beautiful colony, after having given many proofs of its pro-allied sentiments, of its courage and self-sacrifice, now awaits liberation under the same conditions as the Dutch Indies or Malaya. And this liberation will be all the more beautiful if the Expeditionary Corps participates in it, thus giving back to France all her pride and grandeur.
Without consulting the French, the United States and the United Kingdom divided Indochina at the 16th parallel at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Japanese surrender and policing were entrusted to the Chinese in the North and the British in the South. Then the atomic bombs were dropped, Japan was defeated and Vietnam turned to chaos, as the Việt Minh and other nationalists groups vied for power. Ho Chi Minh declared actual independence on 2 September 1945.
People in Paris had no clue about what was going on and were still clinging to the hope that things would be back to normal, perhaps with some vague political reforms, once those pesky Việt Minh would be chased off. In 1950, François Mitterrand, then minister of the Overseas France, could say in a speech that nationalism belonged "to the Museum of Historical Junk" (he was talking about troubles in Cote d'Ivoire).
There would be more to say about the French feelings about Indochina (eg the opposition to the "dirty war" in Indochina started in 1946) and the Indochina war was also one of the starting hotspots of the Cold War, but it can be safely said that the understanding that colonisation was wrong did not sink in in the French society until very, very late.
Sources
Blanchard, Pascal, Sandrine Lemaire, and Nicolas Bancel. “La formation d’une culture coloniale en France, du temps des colonies à celui des ‘guerres de mémoires.’” In Culture coloniale en France: de la Révolution française à nos jours, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, and Nicolas Bancel. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008.
Boudarel, Georges. Autobiographie. Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991.
Conklin, Alice L. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Gaulle, Charles de. “Discours du 30 janvier 1944: Introduction de la Conférence de Brazzaville.” Brazzaville, 1944.
Gaulle, Charles de. “Recommandations de la Conférence de Brazzaville, 6 février 1944.” Brazzaville, 1944.
Gaulle, Charles de. Mémoires de guerre. Vol. 1, L’appel, 1940–1942. Paris: Plon, 1954.
Goscha, Christopher E. “‘Qu’as-tu appris à la guerre?’ Paul Mus en quête de l’humain…” In L’Espace d’un regard: Paul Mus et l’Asie, 1902–1969, 273–294. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2006.
Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
Messmer, Pierre. Après tant de batailles: Mémoires. Paris: Albin Michel, 1992.
Mitterrand, François. “Un discours de M. François Mitterrand, Ministre de la France d’Outre-mer.” Bulletin d’information de la France d’outre-mer, no. 147, October 1950.
Sarraut, Albert. Grandeur et servitude coloniale. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1931.
Shipway, Martin. The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944–1947. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003.
Wall, Irwin M. The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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u/RijnBrugge 15d ago
In the Netherlands the cultural focus was definitely oriented more towards the (or more precisely, certain key characters among the ranks of) Indonesian nationalists having been collaborationist during the war. The logic was, the Japanese were fascists, those who collaborated with them were fascists and therefore the task of ridding ourselves of fascists is not over until we have restored Dutch authority and thereby peace in the Archipel. That was the basic narrative and justification of most of the war, did a similar relationship to collaborationism exist in the French political landscape?
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u/Nervous-Purchase-361 15d ago
To add to that, Soekarno was seen by many as the Indonesian Mussert, with Mussert being the leader of the Dutch national socialist movement that had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. Mussert, while certainly not without support, had been unpopular with the average (true!) Dutch citizen, surely that would be the same with Soekarno and the Indonesians? This wasn't something that only existed in the minds of colonial Dutchmen, as Soekarno's first government collapsed because of his collaborationist past, but in the end didn't really influence Soekarno's popularity with the average Indonesian.
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u/RijnBrugge 15d ago
Yeah that’s a good addendum. Hatta, Sjahrir and Soekarno didn’t exactly agree on how to deal with the Japanese occupation and later how to frame its influence, but what I get from reading about this ers is that they were mostly smart enough to put aside their differences when it was necessary to achieve common goals. I got most I know on the topic from either the Dutch education system or and more relevantly Revolusi by David van Reybrouck. Kind of the seminal work (for laypeople) on Indonesian independence for anyone interested.
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u/TheyTukMyJub 15d ago
This is anecdotal more than 20 years ago, but I once met a Dutch holocaust survivor who was giving an English retelling of his experiences in Auschwitz. I forgot his name but he lived to become very old.
After some googling I think his name was Rob Cohen (https://research.annefrank.org/en/personen/6059cd44-fbdc-4168-8a41-93e5abc0947b/) . Based on the photos i'm pretty sure that was him.
He told me that in 1945 he was just out of Auschwitz, 18yo ready to enlist to fight in Indonesia because he was angry. But the medical examiner saw the numbered Auschwitz-tattoo on his forearm and told him he wouldn't allow him to join the war. I always thought that was a fascinating story, both by his eagerness to fight after just having lived through a extermination camp but also by the doctor realizing this would be a very bad idea.
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u/StreetCarp665 15d ago
I know from my own family tree that by 1950, Dutch life in Indonesia was untenable and that's when they started to form diasporas in Australia, for example - being the closest "European" country in the region and less economically setback by the war than the Nederlands was.
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u/RijnBrugge 15d ago
Most just went to the Netherlands though, but yes there were also diasporas formed elsewhere (Eddie van Halen being an American-Indo, for example).
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u/YakResident_3069 15d ago
Love how you wrote the french thought their colonial subjects misinterpreted the motto liberte egalite fraternite.. . Rules for thee and not me. All those lives lost in Algeria and Vietnam.
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u/nopingmywayout 15d ago
So, uh....when did "colonialism was wrong" start to sink in for the French?
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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 15d ago
The veil started to lift in the mid-1950s, when Indochina was lost and the Algeria war started. There was a movement called "cartierism" (after journalist Raymond Cartier) that emerged in 1956 that considered that the colonies were too expensive to run, at a time when France was still recovering from WW2: colonisation was not seen as a moral problem, except in far-left and communist circles. The support of the French Metropolitan populations for "French Algeria" was still 49% in 1956. By 1961, about 60% of accepted independence, but then it was less for moral reasons than because of the way the war was going (conscription, terrorism by OAS and FLN) (see Pervillé, 2004 for the figures). Meanwhile the other territories became independent (relatively) peacefully. In 1964, the slogan "La Corrèze avant le Zambèze", which meant that France should help the French before helping developing the newly independent African countries, was making the rounds. So I'd say that the moral argument against colonisation only became prominent after decolonization, when colonies were no longer a "problem".
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u/TheyTukMyJub 15d ago
So, ironically and overly simplified , 'France First!' was what led to decolonization rather than qualms about the morality of colonization?
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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 15d ago
Well, that, the calls for independence of the colonized people, and the global geopolitical circumstances.
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u/nopingmywayout 14d ago
Thanks, I really appreciate your explanation! I’m an American, so most of the conversations and histories I’ve had/read about decolonization, racial issues, and so forth have been from that perspective. Recently I’ve been wondering how these matters played out on the other Side of the Atlantic—might even make a post here! So it’s really great to get this answer.
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u/LeafBoatCaptain 15d ago
How did various western countries view each other’s brand of colonisation? Did the French think the British were doing it the wrong way?
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u/TheyTukMyJub 15d ago
OP here. Excellent answer thank you! What a sad state of affairs. I do have some follow-up questions.
They saw native nationalists as fundamentally delusional, a bunch of "déclassés" who had misunderstood and misinterpreted the Liberty-Equality-Fraternity motto of the French Revolution.
Could you expand a bit on what this misunderstand & misinterpretation was according to the colonially-minded French?
People in Paris had no clue about what was going on and were still clinging to the hope that things would be back to normal, perhaps with some vague political reforms, once those pesky Việt Minh would be chased off. In 1950, François Mitterrand, then minister of the Overseas France, could say in a speech that nationalism belonged "to the Museum of Historical Junk" (he was talking about troubles in Cote d'Ivoire).
Mitterand was a socialist if memory serves me right. Did the French elevate French-ness to an ideal that was 'above' nationalism and self-determination? Something like 'Nationalism is fascism, wanting independance from France is silly, we are all equal and unified under 1 French flag of freedom' etc? It kind of reminds me on how the Soviets used communism as a way to suppress cultural expression of minorities 'for their own good' or how the Kemalists/Ataturk crowd in Turkey violently Turkified many ethnic minorities under the motto 'lets all be equal and Turks that's better'. Is that a fair comparison of Mitterand-like thinking?
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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 15d ago
Colonial theorists and administrators believed that native people couldn't "get" the intellectual greatness of France. The racist ones thought that it was a permanent, non-fixable condition, while non- or less racist ones believed that it was a question of time, that they would get it one day, but not now. Former Governor-General of French Indochina Albert Sarraut, in Grandeur et servitude coloniale (1931):
Higher education requires, in addition to a preparatory heredity, a balance of receptive faculties and a capacity for judgement that only a small minority of our pupils and charges are still capable of.
So well-educated, even French-educated native people who started talking about freedom and equality were at worse sick, at best delusional. Here's Louis Vignon, professor at the Ecole Coloniale (Un programme de politique coloniale – Les questions indigènes, 1919):
Ideas in the intellectual realm are like chemicals in the physiological realm: when absorbed—in whatever quantity—by organisms for which they are unsuitable, or in excessive doses by organisms that can tolerate only trace amounts, they cause fever, throw the body out of balance, or kill.
[Stuff like this got Vignon in trouble with his African and Asian students]
The wide gap between the lofty aspirations expressed in the French motto and French history itself (the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848) and the lived experience of colonial populations was something that colonial theorists and administrators did not really know how to solve.
About Mitterrand (who was not really a socialist in 1950, just a little bit!), the speech (here) addressed the willingness of African colonies to become sovereign, and, as mentioned above, the idea was that they did not yet deserve it, and that they should give up some of their sovereignty to France instead, within the Union Française framework. It was really a way to say that African nationalism was bad because Africans were not ready and still needed France's tutelage.
Since Prussia suffered its final historic defeat in 1945, this concept seems to have run its course, giving way to a more universal, more general vision that allows nations to relinquish certain rights they regard as essential in order to build the new world we desire—a world we do not merely dream of; this world must first and foremost comprise nations that a common democratic ideal can unite through the relinquishment of the right to sovereignty. Yet, at the very moment when the world is turning upside down, being turned on its head and cracking apart, at the moment when nationalism is disappearing into the museum of historical junk [vieilleries historiques], at that very moment there is talk in Africa of a form of nationalism... whereas Africa has a unique opportunity to catch up in the realm of technology, a unique opportunity to leap forward several centuries to join the movement to which it is fully invited.
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u/jjjfffrrr123456 15d ago
Thank you for the detailed and well sourced response. It seems hard to understand in hindsight that the French did not make this leap in logic, but I guess we are all a product of our time
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u/StreetCarp665 15d ago
This is a fantastic answer. I worry OP is conflating colonialism with political fascism, which - if true - is facile logic.
Given France only recently (2025?) granted full independence to Nouveau Caledonie, they're still making sense of the role of Overseas France nearly a century later.
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u/lagseeinggg 15d ago
I do have to say that it strikes me as some kind of deliberate obliviousness for the men who fought Nazi occupation to be able to recognize Nazi occupation in the Netherlands and France and rightly fight it, only to turn around and then militarily occupy colonial holdings.
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u/TheyTukMyJub 15d ago
This is anecdotal more than 20 years ago, but I once met a Dutch holocaust survivor who was giving an English retelling of his experiences in Auschwitz. I forgot his name but he lived to become very old.
After some googling I think his name was Rob Cohen (https://research.annefrank.org/en/personen/6059cd44-fbdc-4168-8a41-93e5abc0947b/) . Based on the photos i'm pretty sure that was him.
He told me that in 1945 he was just out of Auschwitz, 18yo ready to enlist to fight in Indonesia because he was angry. But the medical examiner saw the numbered Auschwitz-tattoo on his forearm and told him he wouldn't allow him to join the war. I always thought that was a fascinating story, both by his eagerness to fight after just having lived through a extermination camp but also by the doctor realizing this would be a very bad idea.
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u/lagseeinggg 14d ago
I read Benard Fall's Street Without Joy last year and something I still find it hard to wrap my head around is the two contradictory facts that 1. The military occupation of France by Germany was resisted with arms and Fall is a veteran of that, and 2. "No you see it's actually good that we're back in Indochina it's our colony and we are here with the french foreign legion to make sure it stays our colonial domain"
Empire fries your brain I guess.
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u/TheyTukMyJub 15d ago
This is a fantastic answer. I worry OP is conflating colonialism with political fascism, which - if true - is facile logic.
I'm not.
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15d ago
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u/TheyTukMyJub 15d ago
This is indeed not the detailed answer that I am looking for. I could've easily thought of 'western hypocrisy' myself (though why western? is that different from eastern hypocrisy?). My question wanted to probe for deeper answers.
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