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The decorated French writer Éric Vuillard is attempting something audacious: to rewrite the way history gets written. This has won him prizes and plaudits and an international readership. But not everyone is thrilled.
Vuillard’s latest book, An Honorable Exit, is what he calls a récit, a slippery French word that can mean many things, including a story, a narrative, or an account in which, crucially, the reader is always aware of the presence of the narrator. Vuillard’s readers are always aware of his presence as he goes about dissecting an under-explored chapter of French history—the country’s exploitation of its Southeast Asian colony (which comprised present-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) and the shocking defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh in the First Indochina War, which began in 1946 and ended with the annihilation of the last French military outpost at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That humiliating defeat, as Vuillard points out, came when America was underwriting most of the cost of the French disaster, and it opened the door for the Americans not merely to repeat history but to write a new chapter with even more copious quantities of treasure, lies, and blood.
As in his previous books, Vuillard uses every tool at his disposal: archival research, a travel guide, news reports, genealogies, histories and flights of imagination that flirt with fiction. This book’s translator, Mark Polizzotti (who has also translated books by Patrick Modiano and Marguerite Duras), has aptly described Vuillard’s technique as “impressionistic.” “He’s out to create an effect,” Polizzotti said of Vuillard in an interview with The New York Times, adding: “He wants to have an emotional impact, even more than to fill you in on facts. So he uses facts, but he’s going to choose them in order to tell a story.”
Here, for instance, is Vuillard’s description of Edouard Herriot, “the old bison,” president of the General Assembly, sitting down to lunch after a disagreeable debate in that morning’s assembly session about the worsening Indochina War:
They start by ordering a glass of Kessler, then pause a moment to admire its lemon-yellow hue with palish-green tints, in the wan light that struggles to filter through the meager windows of the dining room. President Herriot, who had been exasperated by that prudhommesque session, brings the glass to his nostrils and tries desperately to appreciate the preserved scents, the accents of citrus, quince, plum—no go: his bad mood is stronger than treats, exasperation wins out over the pleasures of the table, and he slugs down his 20-franc drink as if it were cheap rotgut.
This feels more like a novel—by Proust? Balzac?—than a conventional history. Even more impressionistic, and pointed, is Vuillard’s evisceration of the powerful Dulles brothers, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles in the Eisenhower administration, the team who engineered “tailor-made” coups in Iran and Guatemala, oversaw America’s entry into Vietnam, and ordered the horrific murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo. In an astonishing sequence, Vuillard imagines what Lumumba is thinking just before he dies: “if we really want to be horrified, we’d have to creep into the office where Eisenhower and Dulles are talking and hide under the carpet, so as to hear what’s said behind closed doors […as] they skillfully orchestrated the Cold War mechanism that led the world to the brink of Chaos.”
Entering the thoughts of a doomed man, slipping behind closed doors, hiding under the carpet, eavesdropping on the plotting of a pair of monsters—this goes beyond impressionistic, even beyond novelistic, all the way to the brink of the fantastic. And yet, it has the ring of truth.
No war has ever been fought over worthless real estate, and for the French, as Vuillard makes clear, the value of Vietnam was strictly economic. While wearing the flimsy mask of a mission civilisatrice—bringing Catholicism and Western ways to a nearly feudal agrarian backwater—the French spent decades busily and brutally extracting riches from the country, including coal, pewter, gold, rice and, most efficiently, most cruelly, latex from the vast plantations of rubber trees planted by Michelin and other corporations. Workers on those plantations were virtual slaves, and when their attempts to escape their servitude failed, hundreds hanged themselves from the branches of Michelin’s rubber trees. Those who succeeded in escaping were welcomed into the growing army of the Viet Minh, where they became motivated fighters against their former oppressors. Vuillard stresses that France’s military operations were all about protecting France’s economic interests. Here’s his cool appraisal of the General Assembly’s hypocritical hand-wringing after a disastrous 1950 battle near the pewter mine at Cao Bang:
So it was not for a simple outpost lost in some jungle that the army was fighting, nor for a few French colonials gone astray; and out of respect for exactitude, we should rebaptize The Battle of Cao Bang, over which the parliament was tearing itself apart, as: The Battle for the Pewter Mining Company of Cao Bang, which would confer on it its true importance.
In her magisterial 1972 history, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Frances Fitzgerald expanded on Vuillard’s portrait of French economic interests in the country, adding zinc and tin and sugar to the list of coveted raw materials, and the creation of a network of infrastructure to extract and export the bounty:
[T]he French administration built roads, canals, railroads, and market cities linking the Vietnamese interior with the shipping routes. These public works benefited the French almost exclusively at the time, but the French officials financed them largely by an increase in taxes on the Vietnamese peasantry… They also established a government monopoly on salt, alcohol, and opium, and raised the prices on these goods to six times what they had been before the occupation.
Such measures failed to “civilize” the country, but they succeeded in spawning a national liberation movement that was led by a cadre of French-educated men whose fervor and ingenuity the French could not match. The peasants who flocked to their cause cared little about communism, democracy, or even the smoky idea of a free Vietnam. They just wanted to return to their villages and be left alone. As Fitzgerald put it, “Many Vietnamese were ‘nationalists’ in the sense that they looked forward to the disappearance of French rule.” After 1954, those nationalists looked forward to the disappearance of American rule. Their dream finally came true in 1975, when the last helicopter wobbled off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.
Vuillard doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that his quest for murky truths sometimes forces him to speculate. The text is sprinkled with phrases such as “I’m not sure” and “I don’t know” and “I imagine” and “no doubt” and “maybe.” These gropings reveal the nature of his project—to arrive at the truth by connecting strands of overlooked, seemingly unrelated facts rather than by simply piling facts on top of facts. And arriving at the truth confers on him the freedom to form opinions. Strong opinions.
A Literary Brawl
Which brings us to the people who are not thrilled by Vuillard’s enterprise. His previous book, The Order of the Day, won France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize. That book focused on two events during the rise of Nazi Germany: a 1933 meeting at which newly elected Adolf Hitler shakes down a gathering of rich bankers and industrialists for money to fund his dream; and Germany’s occupation of Austria in 1938. In this book, as in An Honorable Exit, Vuilllard occasionally slips into the minds of his subjects, the way novelists do. For instance, there’s an episode when the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg is summoned to Hitler’s alpine chalet, where he’ll get bullied into agreeing to put Austrian Nazis in charge of the country. As his car climbs toward the chalet, Schuschnigg’s anxiety climbs with it. Once again, Vuillard gives us the chancellor’s thoughts: “The border lay just ahead, and Schuschnigg was suddenly seized by apprehension. He felt as if the truth was just beyond his grasp.”
This bleeding of fictional techniques into a historical narrative did not sit well with Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia who specializes in modern European history. “When Vuillard also tells us what participants in these events were thinking, he resorts inevitably to fiction…,” Paxton wrote in his review of The Order of the Day in the December 6, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books. “Unfortunately we can’t tell which parts of the text are his creations, which rely on period archives, and which come from memoirs written in afterthought. He has chosen his details not for their explicative value but for their revelation of human folly.” Paxton acknowledges that Vuillard has indeed “done some homework and his narratives are generally accurate, but he likes to heighten the impression of absurdity[….] Vuillard’s delight in irony seems to have outweighed exactitude.”
Or has it actually heightened exactitude? I go back to Vuillard’s suggestion that rebaptizing the Battle of Cao Bang as “The Battle for the Pewter Mining Company of Cao Bang” would confer on it its “true importance.” This reveals both his delight in irony and his relentless quest for exactitude. The two are not always mutually exclusive; they can be symbiotic.
Paxton goes on to describe Vuillard’s prose as “muscular, concrete, richly inventive, ironic, sardonic, opinionated,” and he calls him an “expert at black humor.” He adds: “Vuillard claims that the writer’s task is to ‘lift the hideous rags of History’ and reveal the deals and bluffs and scams beneath,” and to that end, Vuillard has developed “a personal style of historical narrative.” This is intended as a put-down, but I read it as high praise.
I’m reminded of the translator Polizzotti’s words about Vuillard, that he “uses facts, but he’s going to choose them in order to tell a story.” Isn’t that what all writers do? Aren’t they making a choice every time they commit a word or a comma to paper? And aren’t those choices always a reflection of the writer’s “personal style”? After working more than a few years as a reporter and publishing two nonfiction books, I can attest that none of that writing, though based on facts, adhered to the cherished American myth of “objectivity”—for the simple reason that those articles and books were written by me, and thus they reflected my biases, preferences, and prejudices, my likes and dislikes, my politics and my education and my life experiences. (Vuillard takes a passing shot at “the fake transparency of journalism.”) It’s a fantasy to believe that any writer can be truly objective, just as it’s misguided to believe that journalism, history and all other forms of nonfiction can, or should, be mere accumulations of facts. Practitioners of the New Journalism realized this 60 years ago when they started grafting novelistic techniques onto their reporting, to sometimes stunning effect. They may have stretched the facts, but at their best they peeled away the deals and bluffs and scams until they arrived at truths that could startle, enrage and delight.
Paxton ends his review of An Honorable Exit with a curious jibe, noting that since its inception in 1903 the Goncourt Prize has usually been awarded to works of fiction, and that the only giant to have won the prize is Marcel Proust. He cites a handful of winners—André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, Michel Houllebecq—who rise above “a procession of largely forgotten names.” He closes by suggesting that Vuillard is destined to join that procession.
Two months after Paxton’s bruising review appeared, Vuillard shot back with an angry letter to the editor. It opened with some light sparring. “Professor Paxton scolded me first and foremost for being ‘opinionated,’ and it’s around this admonition that his article subtly pivots,” Vuillard wrote. “That reproach supposes the existence of a distant, neutral way of writing [… that] draws a distinction between history and literature.” Now Vuillard lands a body blow:
Basically, it’s a very common attitude in academia to consider as inappropriate all intrusions into one’s domain of expertise… The position that he adopts so casually toward literature, the idea that it ought to behave itself and keep to the art of the novel, is not merely retrograde—it also entails a concept of knowledge.
It also, he adds, smacks of “a naïve territoriality.” Now Vuillard delivers the knockout punch:
In [Paxton’s] estimation, knowledge cannot be built in anything other than ‘an analytical way.’ From this point of view, Professor Paxton imagines that writing is nothing more than a matter of ornamentation, and composition, a simple question of balance. He is certainly free to apply these dreary categories to his own books.
Regardless whose corner you’re in, I find it oddly heartening to be reminded that the literary world was once able to generate such an impassioned brawl. Yes, there was a time not so long ago when books and the ideas behind them still mattered, back before books became just more product that huge corporations need to move in quantity.
Domino Theories
For the Americans, the value of Vietnam was strictly strategic. They didn’t care about the country’s pewter mines or rubber trees; they cared only about preventing the country from “falling” under Communist control, which, according to the cockamamie “domino theory” put forth by President Dwight Eisenhower and adopted by his successors, would lead to the inevitable “fall” of the rest of Southeast Asia, from Cambodia and Laos and Thailand to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, then Australia and New Zealand and eventually, no doubt, Hawaii, Guam and New Jersey. The thought of “losing” Vietnam gave Eisenhower the cold sweats. “The possible consequences of the loss,” he said, “are just incalculable to the free world.”
I was surprised to learn from Vuillard’s book that the French had their own version of the domino theory. When Pierre Mendès France, then a member of the General Assembly, suggested in 1950 that negotiating with Ho Chi Minh might be the path to an honorable exit from the untenable First Indochina War, the pushback was swift and virulent. A dinosaur named Maurice Viollette rises before the assembly and delivers this rebuke:
If you make the error of initiating negotiations, of abdicating to Ho Chi Minh, tomorrow you will have to abdicate in Madagascar, in Tunisia, in Algeria. And perhaps,” he growled to a mesmerized audience, “there might be those who say that, all things considered, the frontier of the Vosges is all France needs. When you go from abdication to abdication, you are heading for catastrophe and even for dishonor[.…] Any weakness on our part will lead to the collapse of our nation.
There is a sort of sick pleasure in learning that American politicians and generals did not have a monopoly on hubris and idiocy when it came to dealing with Ho Chi Minh and his maddeningly resourceful army of peasants. The Americans may not have cared about Vietnam’s natural resources, but the parallels between the French and the Americans were numerous, and they didn’t stop with their domino theories. Both countries sent their poorest citizens to die in Vietnam. On the French side, as Vuillard points out, “the ones who died were mainly the Arab, Vietnamese, or Black infantrymen.”
Both countries were also led by politicians and military men who were immaculately ignorant about Vietnam. General Henri Navarre, the final commander of the doomed French military mission, is summoned to meet René Mayer, president of the Council of Ministers, before he leaves Paris for Hanoi. After Mayer confesses that the war is a lost cause and the best they can hope for is an honorable exit, Navarre offers a confession of his own: “I don’t know the terrain.” Mayer replies: “So much the better. You’ll see it more clearly.” In other words, ignorance is wisdom. The same went for the wise men assembled by five American presidents to concoct and execute their own lost cause. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under President John F. Kennedy and, disastrously, Lyndon Johnson, made his own remarkable confession 20 years after America’s defeat was sealed. “I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand or appreciate its history, language, culture, or values,” McNamara wrote in his memoir, In Retrospect. The same must be said, to varying degrees, about President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, military adviser Maxwell Taylor, and many others. When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita. Worse, our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance.
On the upside, wars are always good for business, and both wars lushly enriched the sponsoring country’s corporations. In America it was Grumman, Monsanto, Bell Helicopter, Dow Chemical, Chrysler and Colt, to name a few. In France, it was primarily the Banque d l’Indochine, which had a hand on the throttle of virtually every piece of machinery in France’s colonial economy in Indochina. Until it didn’t.
Late in the book, Vuillard takes us inside the room at 96 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris where the board of directors of the Banque de l’Indochine is meeting after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. We learn that this tightly knit—virtually inbred—group of directors had the foresight to divest its various Indochina holdings early in the war, and now that defeat has arrived, the bank is reaping the reward. The directors learn that during the past year, while thousands of Black and Moroccan and Vietnamese soldiers were dying pointlessly at Dien Bien Phu, the bank’s dividend tripled. That jump in the dividend, Vuillard notes, “is rigorously in proportion to the number of dead.” There is no shortage of people to blame for the lies, brutality, jingoism and bad faith of this botched war, but Vuillard makes clear whose hands are the bloodiest: “while it was the military and the politicians who committed these heinous crimes, the gentlemen who had sat quietly around the conference table at 96 Haussmann were guilty of far worse.” So were the men who sat quietly around conference tables in the White House and the Pentagon.
Speaking Truth
Vuillard has said that he spent 12 years researching and writing An Honorable Exit, which works out to about a page a month. The payoff of such slow cooking is prose that is packed with historical detail and brought to a high polish. Every word is carefully chosen, surgically placed, freighted with information. The writing is both dense and lyrical, a rare combination.
When Mendès France broached the unthinkable notion that France could no longer afford the war and should negotiate a political accord with the Viet Minh, Vuillard writes that the reaction among members of the National Assembly was physical—“a shudder ran through the semicircular amphitheater, a kind of silent heave.” Here’s why: “When someone speaks the truth—in other words, gropes in the dark—you can feel it.” And as you read this remarkable little book, you will feel a shudder run through you as Vuillard gropes in the dark and speaks the truth.
