And the Vietnam War began...

The failure was already more than foreseeable when the news reached Paris that a "federal" conference had precisely been convened, on August 1, in Dalat, by Admiral Thierry d'Argenlieu for the purpose of determining the position which would occupy in the Indochinese Federation, not only Cambodia and Laos, but also Cochinchina, which we thus seemed to want to definitively remove from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This news led to the immediate suspension of the negotiations, which we managed however, thanks to the intervention of Ho Chi Minh, to resume a few days later. But trust was dead.
On September 10, the Vietnamese delegation, led by Pham Van Dong,
slammed the door definitively and re-embarked, on the 16th, for Tonkin. The great chance of the French Union had passed. However, nt, Ho Chi Minh, he remained in France in a private capacity. He confided to me, not without anxiety, his desire not to leave "empty-handed" and gave me to understand that, in this case, he risked being overwhelmed on his return...
On September 14, Ho Chi Minh signed with Marius Moutet, Minister of Overseas France, a provisional modus vivendi whose main purpose was to avoid acknowledging the total failure of the Fontainebleau talks. He left it to specialized commissions to find solutions to the main points of divergence that emerged during the talks.
On September 19, Ho Chi Minh left France aboard the Dumont-d'Urville . On October 18, in Cam Ranh Bay, he met Admiral d'Argenlieu before returning to Tonkin, where he disembarked on the 20th. Ho Chi Minh acclaimed Franco-Vietnamese friendship, confirmed his decision to "live in the French Union" and intoned the Marseillaise. But the opposition, which took advantage of the absence of Ho Chi Minh to provoke incidents between French and Vietnamese, some of which were very serious, such as that of August 4, in Bac Ninh, denounced as treason the tendency of the president of the R.D,V.N. to get along with France and tries to regain the initiative. The reaction of the Viet-Minh will be brutal. The leaders of the pro-Chinese parties will be radically eliminated and, at the end of October, a new government will be formed, which will include a majority of men entirely devoted to Ho Chi Minh.
This is one of the points on which the Fontainebleau conference had stumbled which, even before the specialized joint commission had been able to carry out its work, caused irreparable damage.
On November 21, a Chinese junk carrying contraband gasoline was seized by our people in the waters of the port of Haiphong. However, the Vietnamese National Assembly had, six days earlier, demanded that the French government respect the “customs sovereignty” of Vietnam. While one of our boats was towing the junk towards the port of Haiphong, Vietnamese Tu Ve, in an attempt to deliver it, opened fire on our sailors. They reacted vigorously, and the incident, banal as it was, quickly degenerated into a real street battle.
Despite the talks which tried to bring the incident back to its proper proportions , on November 22, General Valluy, who, in Saigon, was acting as Admiral d'Argenlieu, considering that the measure was complete, ordered the arms commander of Haiphong to take control of the city to restore order there. The operation, supported by the artillery, was severe; if there were not 20,000 dead, as the Vietnamese claim, there were several thousand.
On the 28th, the French troops had made themselves masters of the region of Haiphong ... but the Franco-Vietnamese war had just begun.
In the meantime, while, having remained in France, I could believe that my mission in Vietnam had been completed, I had been in a hurry to resume the responsibility of the police station
from France to Tonkin, and on December 2, I was back in Hanoi. When, the next day, I went to see Ho Chi Minh, I found him in bed, ill, and he did not hide his concern from me at the seriousness of the situation. He was surrounded by two collaborators and our conversation therefore remained in generalities...