He later recalled how he misunderstood the French war effort as a restoration of legitimate French authority after the Japanese occupation, imagining a kind of fraternal occupation based on close contact with the local inhabitants. Yet he could not escape the thought that he was not a liberator but an occupier, that the Vietnamese nationalist forces resembled nothing so much as the maquis he had led only months before. [...]
De Bollardière would not yet abandon the old military ideal of a colonialism of service and fraternity. He understood “pacification” very differently from its institutionalization in violent French counterinsurgency, including the systematic use of torture. His command was staked on developing relations between the European settler community and indigenous Algerians, taking the protection of both equally seriously, refusing to view every Muslim as a suspect, and initiating work projects to secure employment and an income for the local population. This involved the cooperation and development of mutual trust between French troops and the local inhabitants. [...]
De Bollardière’s evolving views were also shaped by his work in the field of public housing, largely for immigrants from North Africa but also Portugal, Yugoslavia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Likewise, he threw himself into the provision of adult education, which he described as a particularly enriching experience. As a catalyst to continual self-reflection and questioning existing conceptions and values, he was convinced it had great potential to humanize society. He was also drawn to the regionalist movement in his native Brittany. His developing grasp of social and economic structures manifested itself in an interpretation comparable to an analysis of uneven development, seeing the decline of Breton culture and its relative economic underdevelopment as twin symptoms of a centralizing French state.
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