Media : French Launch Verbal War Over Vietnam Visit : Four decades later, the defeat at Dien Bien Phu still stings. Mitterrand’s trip has newspapers fighting the battle all over again.

PARIS — For French President Francois Mitterrand and some of the former soldiers who accompanied him last week to the basin of Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam, it was an emotional journey to the site of one of the worst military defeats in French history.

But for other veterans who fought with French expeditionary forces in the 1946-54 Indochina War, the visit was an insult to the memory of the soldiers who died in the historic battle that marked the beginning of the end of the French colonial experience in Southeast Asia.

French newspapers feasted on the revived debate about the French-Vietnamese war. The right-wing newspaper Le Figaro used the occasion to launch a long series re-examining the tactical errors of the battle, with retired army tacticians coming up with new schemes to win the war.

The popular newspaper France-Soir interviewed retired army nurse Genevieve de Galard, recalled as the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu” for her brave service on the battleground, who described the Mitterrand visit as an “outrage.” De Galard complained, as did many veterans, that Mitterrand visited Vietnam only days before today’s scheduled dedication of a new memorial to France’s Indochina War dead at Frejus, in the south of France.

The intensity of the internal French debate over a battle and a war that ended nearly 40 years ago gives Americans some hint of what is in store for them as relations between Vietnam and the West expand in coming years, reopening wounds of the longer and bloodier American phase of what was essentially the same war.

Unlike the French, however, the American forces never suffered a defeat in a single battle as complete and devastating as Dien Bien Phu.

On May 7, 1954, after a two-month siege by forces of the Viet Minh, the 8,000 French troops still alive in the 12-mile-long Dien Bien Phu valley in northwest Vietnam surrendered to their enemy. More than 3,000 French troops died in the battle in the “basin of hell.” More than 4,000 more died in captivity.

“I came to Dien Bien Phu to recall, to experience everything that a Frenchman can feel before the sacrifice of our soldiers,” Mitterrand told reporters as he toured the battle site with retired armed forces Chief of Staff Maurice Schmidt, who fought there as a young officer.

Later, the 76-year-old French leader, increasingly sentimental as he nears the end of his long career, added, “This war always seemed to me a mistake.”

Back home in France, Mitterrand’s visit and comments stirred the embers of a long, bittersweet romance between the French and Indochina, as the territory of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was called during the years of French rule. Lately, the country has been undergoing a revival of interest in the Indochina era.

“Vietnam,” said a French businessman quoted by the liberal elite newspaper Le Monde, “still holds a certain number of myths and fantasies for the French. The historical ties continue, notably through the presence of a large Indochinese community in France. That explains, in part, the infatuation for Vietnam that has preceded the visit of President Mitterrand.”

Since the announcement of Mitterrand’s intention to visit last year, delegations of French business leaders have traveled to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) anticipating a revival of a trade partnership. French Vietnamese and Asiaphiles in Paris celebrated when the government announced the reopening of the French School of the Far East in Hanoi, a French-language colonial legacy that closed 25 years ago. Last year, several French bilingual schools opened around Ho Chi Minh City.

In 1992, three major movies were released that are set in Vietnam: the immensely successful “The Lover” by Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on the best-selling novel by Marguerite Duras; the critically successful “Indochine” starring Catherine Deneuve, and “Dien Bien Phu,” a movie about the battle by former soldier-turned-film director Pierre Schoendoerffer.

Schoendoerffer, an enlisted man during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, was one of the veterans who accepted invitations from Mitterrand to accompany him to the battle site.

Interviewed in Hanoi by Bruno Fanucchi, a reporter with the newspaper Le Parisien, Schoendoerffer described the return to Vietnam and Dien Bien Phu as a “salute by the president to the soldiers who led the final battle of an end of an era.”

“At Dien Bien Phu,” said Schoendoerffer, “it was not the vanquished who return through the back door. It was the return of France en majeste --at the very highest level. Mitterrand is not someone who came to ask forgiveness but to render homage to all our soldiers in Indochina, fallen and forgotten, victims of a misunderstood and ridiculed combat.”

But retired Gen. Marcel Bigeard, commander of a division of parachutists in the battle, declined Mitterrand’s invitation to revisit the site. Bigeard said he would never return to Vietnam as long as it “remains a Marxist country.” But the decorated soldier, who twice parachuted into the battle, said that when he dies he wants his ashes scattered over the battlefield “to rejoin those already resting there.”

For the French press accompanying Mitterrand, the main attraction in the Vietnamese capital was retired Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the strategist who devised the successful Viet Minh battle plan that defeated the French.

When the former professor and fluent French speaker Giap dined at Mitterrand’s side at the state banquet, Le Parisien ran a front-page color photograph.

Told of the controversy the visit was causing back in France, Giap, pudgy and white-haired in his old age, politely praised the French president.

“I admire the courage of a man who decided to reconcile and turn the page of history. A new page waits to be written.”

A Tale of Two Conflicts

French-Indochina War

* Period of conflict: 1946-1954

* Peak French/allied troop deployment: 470,000 in 1954

* French casualties 47,500 killed, 43,000 wounded

* Viet Minh casualties (est.): 500,000 killed

* Civilian casualties: 800,000 to 2 million

* French cost of war effort: $3 billion

* U.S.-Vietnam War

* Period of conflict: 1954-1973 (U.S. never declared war.)

* Peak U.S. troop deployment: 543,000 in 1969

* U.S. casualties: 58,151 dead, more than 300,000 injured

* South Vietnamese casualties: 220,357 killed, 499,000 wounded

* North Vietnamese/Viet Cong casualties (U.S. est.): 444,000 killed

* Civilian casualties: Hundreds of thousands killed

* U.S. cost of war effort: $165 billion

SOURCES: QUID encyclopedia, Times reports, Facts on File, World Book, World Almanac, Encyclopedia Americana. Various sides and sources in the wars may give different numbers.