An Honourable Exit

From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Order of the Day and The War of the Poor comes a searing account of a conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism. A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2023 'Excoriating and profound . . . A remarkable work' - Scotsman 'Absolutely spectacular' - France Info 19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found. In this gripping and shocking novel, Éric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France’s prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty, Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology – greed. As well as bringing scenes from the battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain. Short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind closed doors to witness how history is really made.

About the Author :
Éric Vuillard is a writer and filmmaker born in Lyon in 1968 who has written nine award-winning books, including Conquistadors (winner of the 2010 Prix Ignatius J. Reilly), and La bataille d’Occident and Congo (both of which received the 2012 Prix Franz-Hessel and the 2013 Prix Valery-Larbaud). He won the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, for L’ordre du jour (The Order of the Day), and he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for The War of the Poor.

Review :
Excoriating and profound . . . A remarkable work . . . I cannot think of an Anglophone author who writes with such polemical, poetical indignation Powerful . . . An entracingly nightmarish analysis of the First Indochina War Clever and scathing Vuillard writes into grey areas of history A work of ferocious reckoning . . . chilling . . . shine[s] a hard light on figures who might otherwise disappear into the jumbled backdrop of the past Absolutely spectacular Pages clenched like fists ready to strike. It is the eternal war of the powerful against the weak that Vuillard stages in each of his books Sparkling . . . By his pen, historical figures become beings of flesh and blood; we hear them breathe, we see them sweat The challenge for Vuillard is to tear the rancid nostalgia for 'the good old days' of the colonies, for the chic, elegant, confident and honourable colonial France, to pieces Brilliant . . . An Honourable Exit not only illuminates the machinations behind the Vietnam debacle for the French, but shows just how damaging an anachronistic hunger for domination can be.