Se souvenir de l’Indochine L’écriture des femmes engagées dans l’armée française, entre mémoire de guerre et récit de voyage

From 1945 to 1954, France was at war in Vietnam. Many women who enlisted in the French armed forces after 1940 joined the French Far Eastern Expedition Corps and served well beyond Europe. In 1954, the French-Vietnam war ended in a double loss for French soldiers—a personal as well as a military defeat. With more women serving in and with the military after World War II, women’s memories of military service also included the testimony of veterans of the war in Indochina. Many of these women recalled their personal war experiences, sometimes immediately afterward, sometimes many years after the conflict. These memories of women at war are a previously unexplored set of sources of historical memories of the French-Vietnam war, which up to now have been produced mainly, if not exclusively, by men. This study thus shows how feminine authors in the French military expressed their views, between memories of war and travel accounts.