Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War sought to reassert control over French Indochina, which had been occupied by Japan. In 1950, as the communist-backed Việt Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, began to gain the ascendency in the First Indochina War, the Vietnamese nation had two parallel administrations; the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) (recognised by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China) and the State of Vietnam (SoV), an associated state in the French Union (recognised by the non-communist world). In 1954, after the defeat of the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Accords of 1954 split the country
Paris in the 17th century Saint-Marcel, along the River Bievre, which was quickly polluted by the workshops and dye vats along its banks. The largest workshops there, which made the fortunes of the families Gobelin, Canaye and Le Peultre, were dyeing six hundred thousand pieces of cloth a year in the mid-16th century, but, because of growing foreign competition, their output dropped to one hundred thousand pieces at the start of the 17th century, and the whole textile industry was struggling. Henry IV and Louis XIII observed that wealthy Parisians were spending huge sums to import silks, tapestries, glassware leather goods and carpets from Flanders,