ABSTRACT
The status of the Associated States was unique in the post-World War II French Union. Indochina was the only territory in the entire French colonial empire that never supported Free France and Charles de Gaulle. There are differing interpretations as to when decolonization materialized. The departure of the French as the key event, 1954 would be the appropriate moment. First, the 1945 Potsdam Conference divided Indochina into two parts along the sixteenth parallel, but without France being represented at the conference. Second, after the Japanese coup and the 1945 August Revolution, French rule was already a thing of the past in Vietnamese public opinion. France underestimated the power of Vietnamese nationalism, and its recolonization appeared to be a military conquest, much like the initial effort to colonize Indochina in the nineteenth century. Associated States had been France's idea for transforming the old empire into a new entity of semi-independent countries.
