ABSTRACT
Colonial unrest and German rearmament preoccupied a succession of French governments throughout 1953 and 1954. By June 1954, Laniel, Bidault, and Pleven could no longer juggle US demands for the EDC with an acceptable outcome in Indochina. To exacerbate the crisis in Vietnam, violence broke out across the North African colonies. Failing to project any semblance of a controlled policy during Dien Bien Phu’s final weeks and at the Geneva Conference, the major French force behind German rearmament appeared to many observers as ready to collapse. The complexion of any new French government thus assumed supreme importance for the Eisenhower Administration and Churchill government, whose policies toward Europe and Southeast Asia now rested on the will of six hundred deputies in the National Assembly. Since 1945, Washington and London had cajoled, begged, and tried to entice the Fourth Republic into following a common allied approach to European problems. As French politicians and technocrats worked hard to reconstruct French power and Western European relations, British and US policymakers had helped to promote French prestige—the idea of French world power—as an important element in containment. This hope for the French Union to play a major role in world affairs stimulated US and British enthusiasm for the French effort in Indochina in the late 1940s and immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea.
