Abstract
The 1930–31 revolutionary outburst in Vietnam convinced the French administration that it needed to revitalize the local monarchy and create a living institution with initiative in decisions and reforms that would satisfy the Vietnamese people's aspirations. The Vietnamese emperor, Bảo Đại, was taken back to the imperial capital of Huế and given the task of conciliating ‘the millennial traditions and disciplines of the past, indispensable to public peace, with the requirements, advances and freedoms inseparable from modern activity’. Yet this attempt to boost the monarchy's prestige was shortlived because the French administration went no further than a few measures aimed at modernizing the mandarinal machinery. The French will to mould the country's social structures into a passive state of tranquillity thus satisfied no-one, and could not help to develop a conservative ideology attractive enough to avert a revolution on the left.