Before America had their calamitous war there, the French had their turn at failing to hold onto Vietnam in what’s known as the First Indochina War, starting in 1946 and ending with them ceding colonial control of the country in 1954. Eric Vuillard’s novel about this war, An Honourable Exit, reveals the ghoulish parade of French politicians and businessmen involved in the debacle and their behind-the-scenes machinations that prolonged the conflict for as long as it did.
This is the first book of Vuillard’s I’ve actually enjoyed a bit. Unlike his similarly critically acclaimed previous novels, The Order of the Day and The War of the Poor, there’s an energy to parts of An Honourable Exit that make it a more engaging read. Still, I feel underwhelmed by his conclusions and strangely uninformed about the conflict overall given the amount of research he’s clearly done.
The opening scene set on a Michelin plantation in 1928 immediately grabs you and goes some way to explaining both why the Vietnamese rebelled (barbaric treatment) and why France were determined to stay put (record profits). Vuillard dots his story with chapters this brilliant throughout. I liked the Parisian public sessions debates for the disdainful portraits Vuillard makes of the figures involved and the way he takes you into that era. I also liked the chapter where General De Lattre makes a fool of himself during his US tour on Meet the Press (his English was… not good).
Vuillard’s righteous vitriol definitely makes the novel more entertaining though I know nothing about the figures he’s talking about so I can only take his word for it that they’re as pathetic and insidious as he writes them as. It’s odd that there’s a lack of detail surrounding the conflict itself - like when and why it started and why the French were losing as consistently as they were. I suppose you could argue that the context isn’t the point - it’s about those involved on the French side only, and even then only those of a certain rank, rather than the conflict itself - but some background information would’ve been better for an historical novel like this.
His conclusions are also unsurprising for anyone aware of the economics of war: turns out French corporations in Indochina were making a fortune and didn’t want to stop. So said corporations were using their bought-and-paid-for politicians to put down the rebellion so business could carry on. The reason for pretty much all modern wars then: the filthy lucre.
The venom Vuillard puts across is also weird: what’s the purpose of criticising the personnel and actions of the Fourth Republic, buried decades in the past, given that everyone involved is long dead? Not that he’s wrong to do so, assuming the details in this book are accurate, but it’s feels a bit pointless to get het up over things that haven’t mattered in so long and have no contemporary relevance (beyond the continuing fact of business creating war, but I doubt this novel’s existence will stop that given the ubiquity of that knowledge for some time now).
The narrative runs out of steam towards the end with Vuillard continuing to underline that the conflict was about moneyed interests all along and that the French higher-ups dehumanised the human loss of life on both sides. One chapter simply turns into a roll-call of names of the wealthy French businessmen at the Indochina Bank.
The parts of the book I found the most interesting were the parts that read more like a novel and less like a polemic and/or experimental mish-mash of fiction and non-fiction. Vuillard can write a strong narrative when he wants to but loses that focus occasionally, either writing repetitive chapters or scenes that add little to the overall story, and his bark is certainly worse than his bite - for all his moral indignation, I don’t think he made any memorable or unique points about modern warfare that isn’t already widely accepted.
An Honourable Exit is the best book I’ve read by this author so, if you’re interested in Eric Vuillard’s work, I’d recommend starting here. I also think it’s worth picking up if you’re after a novel about this conflict - it’s an uneven and oddly uninformative read but it manages to capture the possible atmosphere of the time and bring to life the historical figures involved in the conflict to perhaps give you an idea of why things turned out the way they did. Just because war criminals/profiteers are dead doesn’t mean we can’t still mock them, eh?
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