Colonial Monarchy and Decolonization in the French Empire

Monday March 16, 2026 | 12-1:30pm | Room 1112, Buchanan Tower

Presented by the and the

The Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai has gone down in history as a colonial puppet. He lies today beneath a black, nondescript tomb- stone in a Parisian cemetery. Meanwhile, millions of visitors stream through ornate monuments in Rabat and Phnom Penh to pay homage to the fathers of the Moroccan and Cambodian nations, Mohammed V and Norodom Sihanouk. The French had crowned them all as their colonial monarchs during the colonial period, but only two became the national icons of their post-colonial states. Why did some colonially conceived monarchs survive decolonization while others did not? In this talk, Christopher Goscha will try to provide a few possible answers to that question using a comparative framework of analysis.

Christopher Goscha is a professor of international relations in the history department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has recently published the award-winning The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First Vietnam War (Princeton, 2022). He is currently finishing a global history of the wars for Indochina (1288-1998).

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Host or Publisher The Center for Southeast Asia Research (CSEAR @ UBC)