Most Vietnamese only know France through textbooks (mostly) and news, so for the average, educated Vietnamese, when you mention France, they mainly think of these 7 things:
1. France is a romantic country, and French is the language of love, but the French stubbornly believe that French is the most beautiful language, and are reluctant to learn other languages.
2. France is a developed country in Europe, capable of producing advanced weapons, including Rafale fighter jets, Triumph-class nuclear submarines, etc., and famous brands such as Renault cars.
3. The French hate Americans (stereotype), they don’t want to follow the pace of the United States, and they are always against the Americans.
4. You can’t tell the difference between French and other Europeans by appearance alone
5. France once colonized Vietnam. They divided Vietnam into 3 parts ruled by different agents: Annan, Tonkin and Cochinchina. The resulting regional discrimination is still a highly controversial topic in Vietnam today, and the government has spent a lot of effort trying to bridge it.
6. Vietnam has also inherited a lot from French colonialism, such as French culture, which can now be seen in food, architecture, lifestyle – a generally positive attitude among Vietnamese.
7. Vietnamese history and literature textbooks tell the nation that from the second half of the 19th century to the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, France conquered and ruled Vietnam for nearly a century. During nearly 100 years of rule, the French regime has treated the Vietnamese extremely badly, including high taxes, and strict regulations, all to exploit the Vietnamese to the extreme. The brutal rule forced the Vietnamese to rebel to gain today’s independence. Therefore, in the hearts of Vietnamese, bitter feelings and resentment against France are everywhere.
There is a famous poem about French exploitation in Vietnam: “Cao su id khóv. Khi i trai tráng khi v bng beo” (rough translation: it’s easy to go to work in a rubber plantation, but don’t think about going home! It’s a sturdy one when you go there! Man, came back like a walking dead)
Portuguese missionaries recorded the spoken Vietnamese language in Latin characters in AD 17. Later, when the French colonized this place, because they wanted to erase the influence of the previous suzerainty in Vietnam and replace it with French values, they promoted the indigenized Latin script of Vietnam. So what Vietnamese are now using is the Vietnamese modern script, which is a Latin character with many diacritics.
But today’s Vietnamese do not hate the French in their hearts. Although history is known to most people, it is rarely mentioned in everyday life. Vietnamese instead think they can learn a lot from the French. Indeed, some old buildings designed by the French during their reign are now among the most beautiful in Vietnam.
This strange mentality is actually due to the comparison between the French colonists and the previous suzerain, the Vietnamese believe that the French are the lesser of two evils. In fact, the presence of the French helped Vietnam free itself from the domination and influence of its northern suzerain, and was therefore “almost welcome”.
Vietnamese nationalism led many Vietnamese to think of France as a liberator, and France was never deeply hated in Vietnam’s collective national psyche. The Vietnamese could erase the squares and rewrite the Latin alphabet, thus breaking away from the sphere of influence of the suzerain, much to the comfort of many progressive-minded Vietnamese nationalists at the time.
