Absolutely not.

I'd like to make that clear right now: there was no chance for France to win by force of arms only for the simple fact that you don't win counterinsurgency conflicts by purely military means. That's why Algeria was lost, for example. Instead of adopting a better approach to counterinsurgency, the French continued to treat the war from beginning to end as a conventional colonial war. Had the French chosen to adopt a different strategy, perhaps the war might have gone the other way. Yet, as you and I know, the French instead chose to stick to a very conventional strategy which in the end would cost them the war. The notion that the outcome of Dien Bien Phu in any put France in an advantageous position is ridiculous: The battle took place during the Geneva conference (but before the conference began to focus on Indochina) and the outcome of the battle would play heavily in the mind of the negotiators. A Viet Minh victory would, and did, play an important role in the negotiations.

At this time, I would actually like to take a look at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and in particularly the concept of bases aéro-terrestres.

The intial idea for these air-land bases were to overcome the poor Vietnamese infrastructure and to take advantage of the capabilities of one of the most important units in the French army: The paratroopers. By landing them behind enemy lines, setting up an airstrip with a hedgehog defence and then use this base for intelligence collecting, patrolling and of course as bait. As you mentioned, the idea was to lure out the insurgents and force them to fight on conditions that suited the French. The French had overwhelming fire power and if the Viet Minh would foolishly attack, they would suffer tremendously.

This they did. The first time this concept was used with proper success was the battle of Na San in 1952 in which Viet Minh forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap suffered a defeat. The success of the concept seemed worth to attempt at a larger scale and that leads us to the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

The reasons for the victory at Dien Bien Phu is more than simply the French inability to clear possible artillery positions on the height surrounding them. In fact, Kevin M. Boylan in No "Technical Knockout": Giap's Artillery at Dien Bien Phu argues that Viet Minh artillery played a much smaller role than previous historians has argued and that, in Boylan's words, "its victory therefore owed more to superior engineering, innovative tactics, and other factors."

One of those factors were the French themselves. The French underestimated the Viet Minh tremendously. The idea that the Viet Minh, a seemingly rag-tag guerrilla army would somehow come and beat the French at their own game was an absurd concept. Yet they did. One of the main reasons to this was the fact that the Viet Minh was no longer a guerrilla army but had instead developed into a conventional army (as per the Maoist theory of guerrilla warfare).

The defeat at Dien Bien Phu didn't only hurt them militarily, but their prestige was tarnished and they would come to be humiliated even further; at the battle of Mang Yang Pass a month after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, The Groupement Mobile 100 was ambushed twice, leading to the destruction of the GM and nearly all of its equipment. It's a great example to show how French overreliance on mechanized columns and Vietnamese roads led to it suffering tremendous losses, despite the experience of the French soldiers themselves. The groupe mobile's core was made up by the Bataillon français de l'ONU, veterans of the Korean War where they had fought under the US 2nd Infantry Division. It is worth mentioning however that this groupe mobile was admittedly a mixture of seasoned and inexperienced troops. To illustrate my point further in how a mechanized column like the GM 100 could suffer, the Korean War battalion suffered more losses in these engagements than they suffered during the Korean War.