ABSTRACT
The history of the French governmental response to the surge of the Vietnamese students is essentially one of French failure. The growth of the "humanitarian conception" did not greatly affect the attitudes towards the empire held by France's colonial professionals–the intellectuals, functionaries, and politicians whose careers were most intertwined with the empire. The French state did not encourage a student exodus, but acted as if it was powerless to prevent it. Indeed the only student policy that the French carried out with any consistency was that of official surveillance, and even this was done by half measure. The Catholic Church was one nongovernmental institution that complemented the government's feeble efforts to enforce a modicum of academic and political discipline over the Vietnamese students. Catholic missionaries had been active in Vietnam for three centuries, and the French conquerers of Vietnam had skillfully used the banner of "freedom of religion" against Vietnamese mandarins who were oppressing Vietnamese Catholics.
