French colonialism in Vietnam, though short-lived (1859-1954) in com- parison with Chinese rule, distinguished itself by its sheer brutality and contempt for the Vietnamese people and their culture. France’s mission, aside from plundering and profiting from Vietnam’s considerable
natural resources and exploiting the country’s apparently inexhaustible supply of cheap labor, was to save the Vietnamese from their own political leadership from themselves by "civilizing" them. The French made the mistake of seeing the Vietnamese as "big children" with limited mental capacities, and of believing that their Vietnamese enemies were no better than common criminals who lacked patriotism and dedication.
 
Above : Those Vietnam's Patriotic in French prison in 1908

  In a passage from a colonial curricular guide, French administrators’ paternalistic description of their work sounds like a noble calling, em phasizing their desire "to protect the people from themselves and their own shortcomings such as gambling, excessive superstitions of all sorts and their love of chicanery which ruins both their savings and their health" (Altbach and Kelly 1984, 19). Even for those few Vietnamese who had access to the colonial education system, opportunities for promotion and advancement were limited, in keeping with the French principle that "the lowest-ranked representative of France in Indochina must receive a salary superior to that of the highest Indochinese official employed by the colonial administration. In Understanding Vietnam, Neil Jamieson uses the example of a Vietnamese professor who graduates from the University of Hanoi, studies in France, and returns home, only to earn less than the French janitor who cleans the classroom in which he teaches (1995, 97). The main purpose of education was to create a tiny elite of Viet- namese who could assist in the administration of their own country as a French colony. By 1945, in the twilight of French rule, 95 percent of the population was illiterate.