As General Poirier has said, it is the times of breakdown that stimulate renewal in the field of reflection, and military thinking does not escape this general rule. France had already experienced periods of intellectual renaissance: in the eighteenth century, and especially after the Seven Years War; after 1870, at the time of Foch (where a recent seminar sponsored by the St-Cyr Foundation has allowed us to rediscover the deeds and intellectual heritage). Times of breakdown, and also those following a defeat, the other constant in the equation: the role of 1940 in the postwar intellectual rebirth, by its diversity, merits close study.

It may be thought surprising to talk of a postwar ‘rebirth of French military thinking’, particularly for the period 1945-65, which is the subject of this study. The period has been effectively covered by a sort of veil. It is partly a retrospective veil that was thrown over the period by the intellectual freeze of the ‘deterrence’ period, a freeze affecting debate and discussion—Raymond Aron regretted this in an article published in 1975 in the Revue défense nationale⁽¹⁾—rather than the actual thinking. There were three reasons for this freeze: nuclear orthodoxy, the consequences of the Algerian war and the putsch for freedom of expression, and changes in defence policy decision-making under the Fifth Republic, compared with the Fourth. Further, it was the effect of Aron’s violent attacks on French military thinkers in general (he took issue with Foch with an intellectual injustice underlined in Benoît Durieux’s recent thesis), and on Pierre Gallois and André Beaufre in particular, with whom he held intellectual differences that turned to bitterness, even to personal animosity: he shattered Pierre Gallois in Le Grand Débat published in 1963 (‘world champion dogmatist’, ‘theorist for an impoverished country’, etc.) and André Beaufre in a killer annexe to Penser la Guerre, Clausewitz in 1976, over Beaufre’s book on revolutionary warfare.

Finally, the Empire cast its shadow, together with the spectacular surge of American strategic thinking. The United States suddenly became the new metropolis of military reflection, for at least three reasons: the alliance contracted during the war, on national defence questions between academia and the State (the government hired 8,000 academics after 1942), an alliance which gave us the famous ‘defence intellectuals’, the ‘eggheads’ of the Kennedy epoch; the American technical lead in nuclear weapons, which still gives it a head start in strategic reflection; the existence of laboratories specialising in applied strategic studies, with access to classified documents; the famous think tanks like the Rand Corporation.