This is Eric Vuillard's sarcastic take on France's Indochina debacle. It sounds fascinating but it wasn't.

In his typical scornful style, which after three of his books I can finally say I do not appreciate, he criticises the fat politicians of the Fourth Republic for their business entanglement and revolving door politics.

Vuillard's books are often described as Wikipedia entries, but I disagree: there is very little factual about them. It is precisely his strong political opinions that make it very hard to understand what really happened and that ultimately make you distrust Vuillard as narrating history rather than hammering home his views. For example: wars being fought over economic and business interests aren't exactly a new phenomenon, but Vuillard is pretending to be deeply offended by it and goes on ranting for the entire second half of the book.

I would have much preferred either a historical fiction (something like Robert Harris) or a real historical account of this in theory interesting historical episode, rather than this pamphlet where people are being ridiculed for pages because they are short or because they are fat or because they are bald, but where ultimately very little becomes clear.

Ultimately the result is a confused and shouty little book that leaves lots of questions as to the French errors in Indochina.

This is an extremely short book - 80 pages, and extremely specific in what it sets out to do: a retelling of the climactic episodes of the Indochina war between the French and Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the months leading up to the siefe of Dien Bien Phu. It’s not a fictional retelling, as all of the protagonists are the French politicians and military leaders who created such an ignominious failure. It’s not history either, as Vuillard goes into the thoughts and motives of characters in a way no historian would (unless described by the person themselves, and then only with caution). It’s not unlike a reconstruction of a crime: in this case multiple crimes, but chief amongst them industrial colonialism; incompetence and corruption in elected leaders; and military hubris. Vuillard explores how corporate capitalism from the banks, rubber companies and many others led to the desire to persist with colonial oppression by whatever means, and how the army were confident that they could prevail despite having no idea how to combat a mass guerilla army who knew the terrain. All roads ultimately lead to the French military leaders, who despite reading in their war manuals that making an entrenched camp in enemy territory was bound to end in disaster, do exactly that at Dien Bien Phu.

There are clear parallels with Suez that followed two years later - as ultimately a major European power is defeated strategically by a nationalist war of independence - and the USA looks on rather than come to the aid of an ally. In a fascinating side-note Vuillard follows the attempts of the French government to involve the USA, including the alleged offer by Dulles of ‘a few atomic bombs’. Hanging over all of this is the brutal irony that less than 20 years later the Americans would be facing their own catastrophic military failure in Vietnam.

Vuillard’s title is where he leaves the story - musing that it would have been better to admit defeat rather than expend thousand of (mainly Vietnamese and African) troops in useless combat to create an honourable exit. It’s a forensic and compelling read, shining a light on a murky period of French history and on Kindle (I read an ARC) you’ll be at the end almost before you know it.