General Beaufre. Father of French Strategy

Born in 1902, André Beaufre joined the army as a young man. A lieutenant in the Rif where he was seriously wounded in 1925, he became a captain of Moroccan tirailleurs a decade later, before witnessing the collapse of June 1940. A fellow fugitive with General Giraud in 1942, he took part in the liberation of France. After Indochina, he became a general commanding a division in Algeria and finally took command of the land forces engaged at Suez in 1956.

Celebrated abroad, rediscovered in France over the past thirty years, regarded as one of the greatest military thinkers of the twentieth century, General Beaufre is regularly cited in support of the most prominent analyses of contemporary conflict.

Translated into more than twenty languages, his flagship work — Introduction to Strategy — is a worldwide reference. The author does nothing less than redraw the space of strategy by combining fields of action that had previously been foreign to it.

What he calls "total strategy", which today closely resembles the fashionable "comprehensive approach", offers a response to the reality of a world in a permanent state of neither peace nor war. But more than proposing bold strategic combinations — ranging from nuclear deterrence to partisan warfare by way of conventional conflict — André Beaufre, who died in 1975, turned strategy into a method in motion, a way of approaching problems.

Under his pen, strategy becomes first and foremost a cast of mind before it is an operational manual, a means of anticipating events rather than merely enduring them. A thoroughly researched and remarkably well-sustained work from start to finish.

To be read, studied and reflected upon in these troubled times.