‘So What Did You Learn from War?’ Violent Decolonization and Paul Mus's Search for Humanity

This article examines how and why the French Orientalist, Paul Mus, became one of the leading critics of the Indochina War and an advocate of French decolonization. Most studies of Western Orientalism tend to adopt Saidian approaches to demonstrate the degree to which Western scholars operated from within the confines of the wider colonial project and were influenced by it. Mus does not escape from this critique. However, like Jacques Berque in...