No one declared war

Mechanics of Interests

Vuillard's plans for a book on Indochina date back a long way: as early as 2012, the author filled the Libération column "La Semaine d'Éric Vuillard" with a text about the "Fall of Saigon" – which is now the title of the last chapter of his book. Une sortie honorable:

In 2017, five years later, Vuillard stated more concretely in an interview that he was working on the book: "Currently I have a completed book about an insurrectionary episode of the Protestant Reformation and another about the Indochina War, one of the longest wars of the 20th century, in which the most powerful nations attacked a small country for thirty years." ²

In his review of the book, Pradelle emphasizes that Vuillard dares to tackle the taboo subject of “one of France’s greatest military defeats, of the troops trapped in the Điện Biên Phủ depression, of the collapse of a strategy, of the chaos, of the terror of the soldiers […].” ³ According to the reviewer, this national trauma, including its preparation and consequences, forms a narrative center within the book. From this, he concludes regarding the author's specific historical poetics: "Vuillard proposes a panoptic historiography, narratives that revolve around a single axis and constantly shift in order to extract a genuine moral, to construct an all-around rather unsettling retrospective and anachronistic responsibility that makes disparate events equivalent and presents a form of incongruity in the very fabric of our history." ⁴

Vuillard's book is not actually a war narrative, as Camille Laurens emphasizes, for example, in Le Monde"The fact that the war is described more as a behind-the-scenes struggle than as a battlefield, a cold mechanics of interests, only makes it more horrific." ⁵ That a capitalist logic of war is being unfolded here is underscored even more explicitly by Élisabeth Philippe in Nouvel Observateur“Vuillard doesn’t consider himself the Coppola of ‘Apocalypse Now’. He’s not interested in the grand, obscene spectacle of the battles, but rather in the behind-the-scenes look, the negotiations conducted in cozy drawing-rooms. Behind the tragedy, he doesn’t see the skillful fingers of the Fates, but only the invisible hand of the market. The battles are fought to defend the interests of tin or coal mining companies more than the honor of France.” ⁶ But if Philippe Lançon, in his review, cites numerous books on Indonesia that can teach you better than Vuillard's book, one has to ask what the real interest of Vuillard is. Une sortie honorable lies: “If one wants to understand the complexity of French Indochina and its war, one should Lucien Bodard Indochina War or Jean Hougrons cycle Indochina Night read; and if one wants to understand what the Fourth Republic was, one should read François Mauriac's Notepad read." ⁷ So how does it rank? Une sortie honorable one in the fictionalizations of Indochina?

Imaginary Indochina

The examples of Alexis Jenni, Pierre Lemaître, and Michel Houellebecq illustrate this more or less incidentally: the Vietnam War, formerly Indochina colonialism, has remained part of the French imagination. Copin, in his study of Indochina literature, summarized that the shared history of France and Indochina had produced "a substantial literary output" until the end of the colonial period. ⁹, we find something similar in Lombard's collection Dream of Asia. ¹⁰ In 2014, Leslie Barnes presented a study on French Vietnam literature, using the examples of André Malraux, Marguerite Duras and Linda Lê, which formulated fundamental questions about Francophone (post-)colonial literature in an exemplary manner. ¹¹ Ninon Frank continued this work in 2016 with her book on postcolonial Indochina as a literary construct. ¹²Several postcolonial film histories of Indochina from a French perspective complete aspects of these relationships. ¹³ “Exoticism and Alterity” was rightly the subtitle of Copin’s study, and as the war veteran Victorien Salagnon writes in Jennis L'art français de la guerre This fluctuating image of Indochina certainly caters to exoticist needs:

The 1968 generation, alongside Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, chanted Ho Chi Minh as a symbolic figure of anti-imperialist revolutions in an exotic, distant land for their Cultural Revolution, and American protest against the Vietnam War in America became one of the fundamental demands of the emerging peace movement. On the Vietnamese side, the war claimed approximately 3,6 million lives, Vuillard calculates, and in his footnote to the text, he emphasizes the scale of the tragedy: "That's as many as French and Germans died during the First World War." Since Éric Vuillard is concerned with the multifaceted political landscape of the Indochina War, the atrocities of the war's violence are not presented in the same meticulously detailed "museum of death" as, for example, in this survivor's account by Jenni.

The literary image of Indochina is not solely shaped by French men, therefore a mention of a remarkable novel by Linda Lê from this winter's new season is warranted. It was published by Stock in 2022. The personne je ne fus le contemporary another novel in her series decades of narrative engagement with Vietnam, which has completely different strengths than Vuillard's storyHere, Osip Mandelstam and Ho Chi Minh (who was also a poet) met in Moscow in 1923. The resulting interview with Mandelstam is also available in German; Ho Chi Minh (incidentally, he is just one of several) aliases(under which he operated) describes, for example, the profound rupture of the social structure under French colonialism: “When the French came, the respected old families were scattered to the four winds. Bastards, who knew how to curry favor with those in power, seized the abandoned houses and plantations. Now they have become rich—a new bourgeoisie—and can have their children educated in French. If any boy in my homeland attends a Catholic mission school, it means: a poor fellow who is humiliating himself. And they even pay for it! So they go there like imbeciles, and it is exactly the same as if they were joining the police or the militia. Catholic missions own a fifth of all our land. Only the large landowners can compete with them.” ¹⁴ While Mandelstam died in one of Stalin's labor camps in 1938, Ho Chi Minh lived until 1969. The author Linda Lê was born in South Vietnam in 1963, during his lifetime, attended the French high school in Saigon, and emigrated to France with the women in her family in 1977. She dedicates her new book to those "who, at all times, have sought refuge in books, art, and beauty under a totalitarian regime, risking their lives in the process." In one of her earlier books on exile, Linda Lê quoted the Vietnamese poet Pham Van Ky, who had experienced exile in France, and who thus expressed his difficult literary relationship with his distant homeland: "By Westernizing myself, I tried to justify Asia; I try to denigrate it so that I don't have to return there." ¹⁵

Éric Vuillard, however, does not have such an existential background. Nicola Denis once described his poetics as "an attempt at a mature historiography." ¹⁶ This includes, among other things, an explicit examination and use of historical language(s). The title of the latest historical work not only refers to this. story by Éric Vuillard, Une sortie honorable, a political war strategy frequently expressed at the time, but the book about the proxy war of the post-war order in Indochina begins, motivated by a colonialist conversation handbook for tourists, with revealing sentences such as: 'Bring a rickshaw, go fast, go slow, go right, go left, go back, raise the top, lower the top, wait there a while, take me to the bank, to the jeweler, to the café, to the police station, to the car dealership.' This was the basic vocabulary of the French tourist in Indochina. ¹⁷ Language reflection partially interrupts the historical tableau:

More on Vuillard's ideological worldview later, but even here it can be said that he categorizes historical figures in a decidedly judgmental way, ridiculing or praising them empathetically, the latter especially in the case of Pierre Mendès France, who, as French Prime Minister, contributed to the end of the Vietnam War; his language is commented on favorably by Vuillard on several occasions:

Vuillard's writing style is often interpreted as a critical montage of historical events such as revolution and world war, colonialism and peasant uprisings, and his worldview, shaped by a particular stance, often shines through in his now-established form of the historical novel. However, it is also always, on the one hand, a critique of language, and on the other, a precise use of subjective language that selects jargon to create both irritation and judgment.

This applies first and foremost to the title, which describes France's pressure after the death of the commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force in Indochina and East Asia, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, in 1952, to use a linguistic turn in reference to the meager successes:

Vuillard repeats this phrase several times, for example between René Mayer and General Navarre, and in the context of the beginning of the 1953–54 campaign, where the idea arises to wage the decisive battle of Điện Biên Phủ between France and the Việt Minh independence movement; these battles led from March 1954 to the defeat of the French on May 8th and thus to the end of the French colonial empire:

Vuillard, Rancière and the people

The fact that Vuillard's historical-literary engagement is still perceived by the bourgeoisie as a provocation or a distortion of history is demonstrated by the scathing review of his latest book. Une sortie honorable im Figaro By Jean-Christophe Buisson: “In a tedious book, the recipient of the 2017 Prix Goncourt presents a biased and caricatured, post-Marxist view of the Indochina War. Éric Vuillard’s historical novels or récits resemble Candy’s world: there are villains and heroes. The heroes are usually European, right-wing, bourgeois, industrial, aristocratic, rich, or military. And the heroes? The people, for crying out loud! Or rather: the peoples. They are victims of militarism, colonialism, National Socialism, and imperialism. […] In this text, which will delight Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and their friends, the writer conjures up a piece of French history by eliminating all the aspects he dislikes.” ¹⁸

His contribution to a thematic dossier on Jacques Rancière in Europe Eric Vuillard called “La forme d'un savoir” ¹⁹This can be interpreted autopoetically as referring to one's own work. Rancière was, after all, one of the contributors to the volume programmatically focused on populism. Qu'est-ce qu'un peuple? = What is a people? ²⁰ For example, on February 10, 2022, Rancière and Vuillard met, moderated by Sarah Al-Matary, to comment on each other's work under the title "Peuple, histoire, littérature…".

In an interview with the magazine Ballast materials The political philosopher Jacques Rancière differentiated between population and people, a people that Vuillard places in precisely this narrative juxtaposition: the historical mass versus the political construct. Rancière responded in an interview: “The people are not the mass of the population; the people are a construct. They do not exist; they are constructed through speeches and actions. Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Syntagma Square in Athens, the movements of undocumented immigrants—all of this creates a specific people of the anonymous. And this people is the people of democracy: a people that manifests the power of everyone. But whoever speaks of construction also says that there can be multiple constructions of the people.” ²¹)

Vuillard's work is always also a reflection on the constructions of the people, for example when his book July 14 He skeptically quoted the French king's statement: "On the first day the king appears and declares that he is the first friend of his people; one would like to believe it." ²² Later in the scenes, the insurgents are shown as a ‘different’ people: “You have to imagine a crowd that is a city, and a city that is a people.” ²³ Compared to the previous one Congo It reads like the travesty of a king without a people: "Fiévez was a kind of king. We had never seen anything like it before. A king amidst vines, exploiting a people of spirits. The future barely exists, the past is nothing, the present is dead." ²⁴ Numerous are the unleashed masses in Vuillard's books, for example in The War of the Poor"And then an uprising breaks out. The people rise up. Prague goes up in flames. The rebels are hunted down. Students burn papal speeches, students are hacked to pieces with axes. And then everything escalates." ²⁵ For Vuillard, the exoticism surrounding Native American culture, its reduction to tourist spectacle, is just another step in the destruction of a people:

Vuillard presents a more philosophically explicit argument in L'ordre du jour Referring to fascist Germany, the concept of Lebensraum (living space) is based on the idea of ​​the people in German Idealism:

Even the peoples of the Indochina colonies are not equal to the head of government Édouard Herriot; Vuillard has him decree "pompously": "If we were to give the colonial peoples equal rights, we would be the colony of our colonies." ²⁶

Vuillard's latest book ends with the negation of its title. Une sortie honorableAs the book announcement had already formulated the comparatively utopian reversal, similar to David and Goliath: “The Indochina War is one of the longest modern wars. Yet it barely exists in our school textbooks. With a terrifying sense of narrative, the author tells the story of the war.” Ein ehrenhafter Abgang, how in a miraculous reversal of history two of the world's greatest powers lost against a tiny people, the Vietnamese, and takes us right into the heart of the conflicting interests that led to the debacle." ²⁷

The humiliation of defeat was ultimately unavoidable; an honorable outcome for France from the war proved impossible. The title of Vuillard's narrative marks a failure of political pretense in the Machiavelliian sense, as he states in Princes writes:

The narrator grimly savors the undignified retreat scenes of the colonial rulers, which today can be reminiscent of the West's flight from Afghanistan. That such scenes still trigger many French people today may stem from Buisson's scathing review in Figaro This has become noticeable. What a contrast to the cover photo, which shows Jacqueline and Christian de La Croix de Castries on September 11, 1954! Vuillard dedicates an entire short chapter to mocking the representative of an honorable family, whom he always refers to by his full name, including all his given names. Christian is a seducer at garden parties, with a locker full of crumpled handkerchiefs and gambling debts, the epitome of decadence and arrogance, and as such, commander of the French troops at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Spiegel In 1954, he reported how his fellow officers accused Castries; here too, the powdered gentleman rider, for whom cognac deliveries were more important than military supplies, was caricatured, and Vuillard's pamphlet succumbs to this temptation as well. ²⁸ Fluttering ties, loosening sashes, and helplessly wriggling diplomats' bodies embody, in the final image of Vuillard's book, the moment of utterly disgraced power:

Lançon answers his opening question of why one should read this book when other books can provide more information about the complexities of colonialism in Indochina and the Vietnam War: “The interest in Une sortie honorable The significance lies less in the political explosiveness, which is no surprise, than in the form chosen to execute it. Vuillard has once again written a novelistic pamphlet. The characters he brings to life actually lived, and they did what he writes about, but he reinvents them, imbues them with an external and internal illumination designed to convey his anger and convictions. One doesn't have to follow him in this, at least not entirely, to appreciate his free-flowing tone and digressions, his narrative pace, his montage skills, his imaginative use of imagery, all this art of archery, zooming, and imaginatively driven short circuits—in short, his style. ²⁹ The repeated emphasis on the scenes depicted by Vuillard – “Ah, il faut avoir vu” – concludes with a mournful remembrance of the fate of an entire people. Herein lies, according to Rancière, the theoretical relevance of Vuillard's literature. A systematization of his works from the perspective of political philosophy is still lacking.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. Éric Vuillard, "La chute de Saigon! La Semaine d'Éric Vuillard, Libération, 27. April 2012.>>>
2. "Éric Vuillard aura encore bien d'autres occasions de venir saluer les lecteurs de la librairie locale, car il ne manque pas de projets littéraires. " This actuellement un livre terminé qui porte sur un épisode insurrectionnel de la Réforme protestante, et un autre sur la guerre d'Indochine, l'une des guerres les plus longues du XXe siècle, où les nations les plus puissantes se sont jetées pendant trente ans sur un petit pays ", ajoute l'auteur, qui habite à Rennes." “Le Prix Goncourt, Éric Vuillard, écrivain fidèle en amitié”, Ouest-France, December 2, 2017.>>>
3. “Vuillard raconte l'une des plus grandes défaites françaises military, les troupes piégées dans la cuvette de Diên Biên Phu, l'effondrement d'une stratégie, le chaos, l'effroi des soldats […]” Hugo Pradelle, “Vuillard, au-delà de l'histoire”, Waiting for Nadeau, January 19, 2022.>>>
4. “Vuillard proposes a literary panopticon of history, the récits qui tournent autour d'un même axe, se décalant en permanence, pour en extraire une véritable morale, y imaginer une responsabilité rétrospective et anachronique somme toute assezz bouleversante, qui fait s'équivoquer des événements disparates, imaginant une forme d'incongruité dans la matière même de notre histoire." Hugo Pradelle, “Vuillard, au-delà de l'histoire”, Waiting for Nadeau, January 19, 2022.>>>
5. “Reste que la guerre, d'être décrite en coulisse plus que sur le terrain, froide mécanique d'intérêts, n'en est que plus terrifiante.” Camille Laurens, “Pertes et profits: Une sortie honorable, d'Eric Vuillard,” The world of books, January 14, 2022, 8.>>>
6. "Vuillard doesn't have the opportunity to pour Coppola d'" Apocalypse Now ". Ce qui l'interest n'est pas le grand spectacle obscène des batailles, mais les coulisses, les tractations qui se jouent dans les salons feutrés. Derrière la tragédie, il ne voit pas les doigts habiles des Parques, seulement la main invisible du Marché. Les combats sont menés pour défendre les intérêts des sociétés de mines d'étain ou de charbonnage plus que l'honneur de la France." Elisabeth Philippe, “Vuillard en Indochine”, Le Nouvel Observateur, January 6, 2022, 75.>>>
7. “Si l'on veut sentir la complexity de ce que furent l'Indochine française et sa guerre, mieux vaut lire The Indochinese War, by Lucien Bodard, or the cycle of the Indochinese Night de Jean Hougron; and you can see what the Quatrième République is about, but this is what it means Notepad de François Mauriac.” Philippe Lançon, “Une sortie honorable”, the Quatrième République de long en charge”, Libération, January 22, 2022.>>>
8. It's about Dr. Nakkache.>>>
9. Henri Copin L'Indochine in the French literature of the years dating back to 1954: exoticism and altérité, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996. Cf. >>>
10. Rêver l'Asie: exoticism and littérature coloniale aux Indes, en Indochine et en Insulinde, ed. by Denys Lombard, Paris: Ed. de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1993.>>>
11. Leslie Barnes, Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 2014.>>>
12. Ninon Frank On imagining a space: postcolonial Indochina as a literary construct, Berlin: regiospectra, 2016.>>>
13. For example, Cinema Indochina: A (Post-)Colonial Film History of France, ed. by Beater Weghofer, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010; Francis Albert Louis Moury, Flammes sur l'Indochine: les classics du cinéma de la guerre du Viêt Nam, Nice: Ovadia, 2019.>>>
14. Ossip Mandelstam interviews Ho Chi Minh, Merkur 235 (October 1967): 998–1000. See also Osip Mandelstam, About the interlocutor: Collected Essays I 1913-1924, edited by Ralph Dutli, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994.>>>
15. “En m'occidentalisant, je regardais à justifier l'Asie, je regarde à la dénigerer pour n'avoir pas à y retourner”, Linda Lê, Incidentally (exiles), Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2014.>>>
16. Nicola Denis, “La méthode Vuillard oder Der Versuch einer reifigen Geschichtsschreibung”, Merkur 845 (October 2019): 83-89.>>>
17. “« Va chercher un pousse, va vite, va doucement, tourne à droite, tourne à gauche, retourne en arrière, relève la capote, baisse la capote, attends-moi là un moment, conduis-moi à la banque, chez le bijoutier, au café, au commissariat, à la concession. » C’était là le vocabulaire de base du touriste français en Indochine.” Eric Vuillard, Une sortie honorable.>>>
18. "Dans un livre ennuyeux, le récipiendaire du prix Goncourt 2017 déroule une vision biasée et caricaturale, toute postmarxiste, de la guerre d'Indochine. Les romans ou récits d'Éric Vuillard à prétention historique ressemblent au monde de Candy: il ya des méchants et des gentils. Les premiers sont généralement européens, de droite, bourgeois, du colonialisme, du nazisme l'imperialisme […] Dans ce texte qui réjouira Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Mélenchon et leurs amis, l'écrivain évoque un morceau d'histoire de France en en éliminant all aspects qui ne lui plaisent pas." Jean-Christophe Buisson: «Les trous d'histoire de M. Vuillard», Le Figaro, January 7, 2022.>>>
19. Eric Vuillard, “La forme d'un savoir”, Europe 1097-1098 (September – October 2020): 23-25.>>>
20. Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, Jacques Rancière, What is a people? Hamburg: Laika, 2017. Qu'est-ce qu'un peuple? Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2013. Translations from the American and French by Richard Steurer-Boulard.>>>
21. "Le people, ce n'est pas la masse de la population ; le people est une construction. Il n'existe pas, il est bâti par des discours et des acts. Occupy, le Printemps arabe, les Indignes, la place Syntagma à Athènes, les movements des sans-papiers, tout cela fabrique un certain people d'anonymes. Et ce people est celui de la démocratie: a people who manifeste le pouvoir de n'importe qui. Ballast materials, 3 (May 4, 2017)>>>
22. "Le premier jour, le roi paraît, il declare être le premier ami de son peuple; on voudrait le croire." Eric Vuillard, July 14.>>>
23. “Il faut se figurer une foule qui est une ville, une ville qui est un people.” Ibid.>>>
24. "Fiévez fut une sorte de roi. On n'a jamais rien vu de tel. Un roi au milieu des lianes, exploitant un people de fantômes. Le future existe à peine, le passé n'est rien, le present est mort." Eric Vuillard, Congo.>>>
25. "Et c'est l'émeute. Le peuple se soulève. Prague flambe. Les émeutiers sont pourchassés. Les étudiants font cramer les bulles papales, on découpe les étudiants à la hache. Et puis tout s'envenime." Eric Vuillard, The War of the Poor.>>>
26. « Ainsi, lors des débats entourant la naissance de l'Union française, il a pompeusement déclaré: “Si nous donnions l'égalité des droits aux people coloniaux, nous serions la colonie de nos colonies.” » Eric Vuillard, Une sortie honorable.>>>
27. "The Indochinese War is one of the longest battles in the modern era. Pourtant, in our Manuels scolaires, elle existe à peine. Avec un sens redoutable de la narration, Une sortie honorable Raconte comment, par un prodigieux renversement de l'histoire, deux des premières puissances du monde ont perdu contre un petit peuple, les Vietnamiens, et nous plonge au cœur de l'enchevêtrement d'intérêts qui conduira à la débâcle.”>>>
28. “Accused by comrades” Der Spiegel 45, November 2, 1954.>>>
29. “L’intérêt d’Une sortie honorable Est moins in la charge politique, sans surprise, que dans la forme choisie pour la conduire. Vuillard a new écrit un pamphlet romanesque. Les personnages qu'il met en scène ontérieur, et ils ont fait ce qu'il écrit, mais les réinvente, à charge, selon an éclairage extérieur et interior destiné à porter sa colère et ses convictions. Il n'est pas nécessaire d'y croire, du moins pas entièrement, pour apprécier sa liberté de ton et de digressions, sa vitesse de récit, sa science du montage, sa fantaisie dans les associations d'images, tout cet art du tir à l'arc, du zoom et du court-circuit fouetté par l'imagination, bref, son style." Philippe Lançon, “Une sortie honorable”, the Quatrième République de long en charge”, Libération, January 22, 2022.>>>