The first of two Franco-Vietnamese conferences held between 17 April and 11 May 1946 to follow up on the Accords of 6 March 1946. In late March 1946, Ho Chi Minh, as president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), and Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, French high commissioner for Indochina, met in the bay of Ha Long to hammer out how and where subsequent negotiations would take place. The Vietnamese president wanted to by-pass the high commissioner in order to negotiate directly with the French government and in France. Thierry d’Argenlieu, on the other hand, wanted to ensure the meeting occurred in Indochina and not in France. In the end, Ho Chi Minh accepted the high commissioner’s proposal that a “preparatory conference” be held in the colonial hill station of Dalat, preparing the way for a larger conference to occur in France in late May during which the “preliminary accord” signed on 6 March would be completed and finalized.
Both sides agreed that three main issues remained on the negotiating table: 1. Vietnam’s diplomatic relations with third countries; 2. the future status of the Indochinese Federation and Vietnam’s place within it; and 3. French cultural and economic interests in Vietnam. The divisive point boiled down to two very different visions of the Indochinese Federation and the DRV’s place within it. Thierry d’Argenlieu saw the Indochinese Federation as a collection of “free states” (États libres). While each would enjoy considerable autonomy within the federal structure, they would not be independent; they would exist rather as part of a wider Indochinese colonial state, subordinate to the high commissioner, and part of the French Union under metropolitan leadership. The DRV, on the other side, sought to increase the autonomy of Vietnam within the Federation, and by a “Vietnamese free state” Ho Chi Minh meant the unification of Tonkin/Bac bo, Annam/Trung Bo and Cochinchina/Nam Bo into one territorial entity, that of the DRV. More than anything else, the Vietnamese insistence on the reunification of Cochinchina/Nam Bo with the rest of Vietnam (the DRV) and Thierry d’Argenlieu’s determination to keep Cochinchina as a separate “free state” (in the Indochinese Federation) produced two very different conceptions of political space and sovereignty. For the Vietnamese, it was a national question, one that triggered heated debates comparing Vietnam’s “Cochinchina” to France’s “Alsace-Lorraine”. Even in the cultural domain, the Vietnamese refused to return to the French higher learning establishments such as the École Française d’Extrême-Orient, though the Pasteur Institute and a number of hospitals were turned over.
In the end, little progress was achieved during the first Dalat Conference. No agreement was reached on the referendum called for in the 6 March Accords. As British historian Martin Shipway has observed, Thierry d’Argenlieu placed his hopes in the Dalat conference, while the DRV leadership placed all its bets for reaching a negotiated settlement on the upcoming Fontainebleau Conference in July in France. See also 23 SEPTEMBER 1945; CHARLES DE GAULLE; DALAT CONFERENCE (SECOND MEETING).