54 "Through a policy of co-option, the former mandarin class became the administrative tool of the new regime. Only a very small number of traditionalist scholars resisted the tempting offers made by the new ruler. Very soon they became relics of the past."
…
"The legitimacy of the traditional élite received a deadly blow when Bao-Dai, raised and educated in France, was brought home to become the new emperor of the puppet regime."
…
"Most of the French-educated youths were more than happy to replace their Confucian elders in the colonial administration. They became members of a privileged class, economically and culturally segregated from the mass of peasants."

56 "by the late 1930s the colonial administration, with its policy of brutal harassment and co-option, managed to undermine the legitimacy of the emerging élite that lived on urban islands in the middle of an ocean of rural miseries. The peasant mass remained in its solitude of backwardness behind the bamboo hedges of its villages, while the new élite lived in the cities and enjoyed the grandeur of the French culture. As in the case of China, with its Sinification policy twenty centuries ago, France’s mission civilisatrice prepared Vietnam for the war of liberation and social revolution.
The colonial system proved quite precarious. Peasants were ruthlessly exploited by absentee landlords whose relationships with their tenants were now motivated by the free-enterprise principle of maximum profit rather than the previous system of traditional paternalism. Rice was to be extracted from the countryside at the maximum yield for exportation in order to finance conspicuous consumption in the cities."

57 "The battle of Dienbienphu (1954) terminated French colonialism in Vietnam. Vietnam was divided again. The French colonial heritage was moved to the South in 1954 and transferred to the American-supported regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. The second Indochinese war had been lost before it started."