It is the war. We are in the 50s and French Indochina turns against the metropolis. A vast territory –where Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao are today– that has not been excessively visited by fiction, although there are examples to remember, such as a film with Catherine Deneuve in the early 90s or, recently, the novel El ancho world of Pierre Lemaitre.
Now comes An Honorable Exit (Tusquets/Edicions 62), a book by Éric Vuillard (Lyon, 1968), which focuses on real events that allow one to get a full idea of horror. "France and the US suffered 400,000 deaths in the area," he explained, in a meeting with this newspaper in Barcelona. But, on the Vietnamese side, the war caused nearly four million deaths. Ten times more. An abysmal inequality, which raises a terrible question: is the life of a Vietnamese worth ten times less than that of a Frenchman? That's how it was."
It all started when Vuillard looked through a 1923 travel guide to Indochina. raise the cape', 'take me to the bank'... He drew a geography of servitude, only missing exclamation points at the end of each sentence. At the same time, he was reading Chekhov's The Island of Sakhalin, and he, who came from an authoritarian country, was deeply annoyed by being carried by other men in rickshaws, he realized that it is not normal. That contrast interested me.”
There are shocking scenes, some in the French Assembly, where big politicians from prominent families – to the right and to the left – take warmongering positions in elegant salons whose atmosphere contrasts with the blood and dirt of the places where the consequences of their decisions reach. For example, in a Michelin plantation in the area: “I have not invented anything, everything stems from a cold 1928 report from the labor inspector, who notes that there are three Vietnamese chained. He stops, asks the person in charge of the plantation about it, and he tells him that they are deserters but that they only have them for one night and are held by one foot. Workers who leave the plantation are called deserters, which their contracts prevent them from doing. So, since everything is in order, the inspector returns to his car and drives off. That deprivation of liberty, explained in bureaucratic language, looks less horrible than narrated in literary language. Literature has a function: to abolish the distance with reality”. Specifically, “what struck me the most was a sentence. At the moment when they open the door, and a Vietnamese man is seen tied up, almost dying, with only a cloth to cover his genitals, and who has been thoroughly whipped, the official approaches the man restlessly and exclaims: ' As long as he hasn't mutilated himself!' It is not my invention, it is a phrase that I took literally from the report.
And it is that, in his opinion, “colonialism is a phenomenon that never explains the real reasons for its existence, it is based on concealment. He proclaims that it is colonized to evangelize, to civilize, but in reality it is to exploit natural resources ”.
He believes that “Hollywood, with its Vietnam movies, even the ones considered critical, emphasizes the suffering of the boys in the US army. That is covering up the facts, the real economic and political problems. We are shown the metaphysical suffering of the soldiers sent to that hell. But war appears as a social phenomenon closed in on itself, an eternal, inevitable and cruel evil.
For this reason, Vuillard changes the name of the battles, after investigating the real reason behind each one of them. Thus, he realized that “a corporation always appears involved. Thus, he renamed the Battle of Cao Bang the Battle of Cao Bang's Mines d'Étain Joint Stock Company, or the Battle of Mao Khe he called the Battle of the Société Française des Charbonnages du Tonkin. This helps to understand the heat of the fighting”.
Another scene that is hard to digest is the offer by the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, on April 21, 1954, to the French Minister Georges Bidault of two atomic bombs to put an end to the problem. “I am convinced that he meant it. Bidault was scared, of course."
In war people die. For some, it is just strategy and politics from the offices. It happened in the Indochina war, and it is happening now with Ukraine. Will a Vuillard from the future arrive one day to snoop around the papers and records and reveal some clues? “Of course,” he replies, “since the beginning of the war in Ukraine there have been great Western leaders on the boards of large Russian companies. François Fillon, former French Prime Minister; Matteo Renzi, former Italian Prime Minister; Gerard Schröder, former German chancellor; the former Finnish prime minister, three former Austrian chancellors... In Indochina, all the tracks led to number 96 Boulevard Haussmann, headquarters of the Bank of Indochina, which financed the companies that operated there. And, today, in one way or another, they all work for Gazprom”.
