It is estimated that 200,000 mixed-race children were born in Indochina during the colonial period, spanning from the first French military expedition in Cochinchina in 1858 to the Geneva Accords in July 1954.
In these territories, where the majority of European settlers were men, an overwhelming majority of these children were fathered by French men.
This phenomenon, regarded by colonial authorities as a mere “parenthesis” or a “theoretical experiment,” was experienced by the mixed-race children and their mothers as a true tragedy, sometimes even a calamity, highlights RFI.