In the beginning of the 1920s, gifted with a rare skill in polemics, he was with Nguyễn Phan Long, one of the best representatives of the progressive native press in French Indochina.

Son of a French diplomat, Marie Joseph Maurice Dejean de la Bâtie, and a Vietnamese woman, Dang thi Khai, he obtained the acknowledgment of paternity from his father in 1920.

[3] In this article, Dejean took up a somewhat ambiguous attitude: he rejected the argument of those who justified the French presence by the fact that Vietnam was unable to attain its independence even when it envied its neighbors (China and Japan); but at the same time he thought that the Annamite people needed France to implement its modernization.

But my natural inclination rather incites me to lean toward the weak...»[5] Eugène Dejean de la Bâtie participated actively in the struggle led by Monin and Malraux for the grant of democratic rights to natives: freedom of movement, of meeting, of expression, with authorization of a free press in Vietnamese.

According to Le Quang Trinh who calmly but sharply replied to Mr. Malraux, the effect of his speech have been crushing: "the hot tempered gentleman had disappeared followed by his faithful squire [Dejean]".

And Nguyen Phan Long, author of the article goes on saying facetiously: «We didn't know that Mr Le Quang Trinh had such a chastised eloquence and with such a crushing efficacity».

The two men then offered its management to Phan Van Truong, a lawyer of French citizenship, who had been a companion of the future Hô Chi Minh in Paris in the early twenties.

However, in the early 1940s, he was forced to accept that the content of his newspaper L'Écho annamite, be submitted to censorship by the petainist regime of Admiral Decoux, for which he would be blamed at the end of the war.

Yves Le Jariel, L'Ami oublié de Malraux en Indochine, Paul Monin, Les Indes savantes, 2014.