I've got the impression that he got France out of Vietnam almost entirely on the strength of his personality and by using up every last bit of his considerable political capital. Yeah, probably exaggerated.
The more I read about the politics of decolonization (next stop Frantz Fanon), the stranger PMF looks. Is Fourth Republic France just weird? Did anything really change between Vietnam and Algeria, or was there just not the same connection/mixing as in the case of Algeria and continental France?
I've gone to JSTOR and read a few reviews of the big biographies, but so much is in French and I'm just an anglophone dabbler :( The subject of "mendesisme" comes up a bit as well, to the point where a goddamn conference was convened. Of course all I can read is a review of the proceedings.
Please send help!
It's not so much that PMF was a miracle worker, it was that Indochina became too heavy a burden. Unlike Algeria, there was no settler population in Indochine. Algeria however, had a very large settler population. People's relatives lived there, it was geographically closer. As Mitterrand said at the time, 'l'Algérie, c'est la France.' France would not support mobilization for the war in Indochine, a draft that is, but they did so for the Algerian war.