In an assembly he never graced with his presence

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 232.

British advice, based on the experience in Malaya, was also beside the point, since the Viet Minh had a far larger basis of popular support than the CTs had enjoyed. Attempts to make the South Vietnamese wage a hearts-and-minds campaign among their own population were not a success. To have authority meant a right to beat people and steal. Instead of going about ‘with a guitar under the left arm, a sub-machine gun under the right’, as hearts and minds was poeticized, brutality and torture were the norm.

Diem was adamantly opposed to democratic elections, rightly fearing that Ho Chi Minh would win. A CIA assessment concurred, claiming that Ho would receive 80 per cent support in a free election. Diem initiated a ‘Denounce the Communists’ campaign, in which thousands of southern Viet Minh sympathizers, or anyone who opposed him, disappeared into concentration camps. Newspapers which criticized him were closed. His brother Nhu supplied a political creed to bolster Diem’s reactionary desire to be a latter-day emperor, as evidenced by the little shrines which flourished around his photographed image. By October 1955, Diem was sufficiently sure of himself to hold an illegal referendum in the south, in which people could choose between him and Bao Dai. He was chosen, becoming president for five years under the October 1956 constitution. Diem’s political clients packed the new 123-seat National Assembly. Eighteen of its members were told to act as an opposition, while always voting with the government. They included Nhu, who won a seat as an Independent in an assembly he never graced with his presence.

That April, the last French troops withdrew from South Vietnam. The First Indochina War had cost the multiracial French forces 90,000 dead or missing in action. On the other side, the Viet Minh had lost maybe 200,000. Almost without a pause for breath, French veterans of this war found themselves transferred to Algeria, where their FLN opponents included Algerian Army of Africa soldiers who had been captured, and retrained in guerrilla warfare, by the Viet Minh.