Ho Chi Minh had informed the Americans, who let me know, of his refusal to meet me. The meteorological conditions (pouring rains) and the events which, in the world, rushed prevented this meeting, and Paris, occupied by so many other urgent and capital problems neglected to answer the message of the Viet Minh, who had, of course, , been transmitted.
I had myself, sensing the imminence of the final offensive in Asia and the necessity of fixing our attitude as to Indochina, made a quick trip to Paris , which unfortunately revealed to me that France was neither materially nor morally ready to make the necessary effort to regain its place in Southeast Asia.
Our intervention units (French expeditionary forces in the Far East) had indeed undergone appropriate and intensive training, but the Allies refused us the ships necessary to transport them to work.
On my return to Kouen-Ming, I had had with Nguycn Tong Tam, leader of the V.N.Q.D.D. (Viet Nam Quoc Dong Dan), one of the two major nationalist parties which already opposed the Viet Minh, an interview which left no illusions about the difficulties we would have to overcome to regain a foothold in Indochina; it was clear that we would have to fight, or accept a radical revision of our positions. However, the interviews I had just had in Paris had revealed to me that we were not prepared for either of these eventualities.
For generous and innovative that it was, the "declaration of March 24, 1945" of the G.P.R.F., which announced a profound change in the imperial conception of France, intervened too late and remained below what the Vietnamese considered acquired following the Japanese coup.
General de Gaulle, however, had conceived a project:to put Prince Vinh-Song back on the throne, who, still a child, had once reigned under the name of Duy-Tan. Exiled in 1916 for having allowed himself to be compromised in a plot against the French authority, the ex-emperor, who remained loyal to France, had, during the Second World War, taken service in the Free French Forces.
His loyalty to France, his liberalism, could make him the monarch
conciliator, capable of happily guiding the future of his homeland and new Franco-Vietnamese relations.
Prince Vinh-Song was to go to Vietnam at the end of 1945, but fate decided otherwise. Wishing first to go and see his family back in Reunion, where he himself had lived for a long time, Vinh-Song was to perish in a plane crash in Central Africa.