Fighting for a Different Heart and Mind: African Soldiers, Psychological Warfare, and Competing Internationalisms in the First Indochina War, 1946-1954
Andrew H. Bellisari, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Purdue University
Moderator: Uyen Nguyen,Assistant Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
To join, register for free here: https://forms.gle/VNaSha2A4KLsxQ5c6.
Abstract: Between 1946 and 1954, more than 180,000 servicemen from France’s colonies in North and Sub-Saharan Africa deployed to French Indochina to defeat Hồ Chí Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). They represented the Fourth Republic’s ability not only to command the loyalty of its colonial subjects amid anticolonial revolution, but also to defend the larger project of the French Union and the future of reformed imperial federalism it promised. Yet, African soldiers also represented an ever-present anxiety for French officers who feared that colonial troops, swayed by the very war they were fighting, would desert, defect, or join anticolonial movements in their homelands upon demobilization. Similarly, Vietnamese Communists perceived North and Sub-Saharan Africans serving in French uniform as both a threat to their own rhetoric of anticolonial solidarity and an opportunity to spread propaganda and kindle an empire-wide revolution. To that end, both DRV cadres and French officers developed elaborate psychological warfare programs—địch vận and action psychologique—that sought to shape, secure, or redirect the loyalties of Africans serving in Indochina. This talk examines these competing campaigns to argue that French and DRV authorities harbored strikingly similar anxieties about the place of African soldiers within the broader projects of solidarity they championed. In doing so, it reconsiders the First Indochina War not simply as a war of independence or a proxy conflict of the Cold War, but as a contest between competing visions of postwar internationalism and leadership of the colonized world: renewed imperial federation under the French Union on the one hand, and global anti-colonial solidarity spearheaded by Vietnamese Communism on the other.