In its colonial policy, on the other hand, the Fourth Republic seemed firmly committed to nineteenth-century imperialism, despite the cosmetic reform of renaming the Empire the French Union.On the surrender of Japan to the Allies in 1945, Vietnam, the northern half of the French Indochina colony, came under the control of Ho Chi Minh and his Communist organization Vietminh. Attempts to negotiate were bungled, and there began an eight-year armed struggle which ended with French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and partition of the country at the Geneva Conference in 1954 – at which point the Americans took over in the south, with well-known consequences. In that year the government decided to create an independent nuclear arsenal and got embroiled in the Algerian war of liberation. The situation was complicated from the French viewpoint by the legal fiction that Algeria was a département, an integral part of France, and by the fact that there were a million or so settlers, or pieds noirs, claiming to be French, plus there was oil in the south. But by 1958, half a million troops, most of them conscripts, had been committed to the war, with all the attendant horrors of torture, massacres of civilian populations and so forth. When it began to seem in 1958 that the government would take a more liberal line towards Algeria, the hard-line Rightists among the settlers and in the army staged a putsch and threatened to declare war on France. Général de Gaulle, waiting in the wings to resume his mission to save France, let it be known that in its hour of need and with certain conditions – ie stronger powers for the president – the country might call upon his help. Thus, on June 1, 1958, the National Assembly voted him full powers for six months and the Fourth Republic came to an end.
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