Word: larteguy
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...Larteguy regards the Army as uniquely combination of power and ideology, and it alone can therefore undertake the task of national reconstruction. As noted, this argument is in a great French tradition...
...important to note that the soldiers in The Centurions are members of the professional Army, the paratroops (or les paras, as the French call them). This partially accounts for the antipathy to them which Larteguy laments, for the French do not feel bound to such "mercenaries." The soldiers themselves, however, consider themselves literally "new blood" in an Army whose traditional leaders, drawn from the social elite, had all but run to the ground. Far from deserving the contempt of the French, they feel that the citizenry should appreciate how ideally suited they are to undertaking the work of reconstruction...
...Larteguy's argument, revolutionary though it is meant to sound, is a familiar one. If anything, that is its strength: The Centurions is a call for a radical defense of the old values. The Communists have remembered what we have forgotten; if we rededicate ourselves to the ideals of strength, independence, self-reliance, we can destroy them and thereby save ourselves. Indeed, we will have saved ourselves by the rededication itself...
...Larteguy is probably right on military grounds. The day of Napoleonic Grande Armee has passed; the French experiences discussed in The Centurions prove it, and the United States is learning the same thing today in Viet...
...contention that a revolutionized Army is the key to a new Revolutionary France is wide of the mark. Sartre's contrary theory of involution--that the desperation and violence of the Army is corrupting whatever survives of a healthy France--is, I think, more accurate. Perhaps Larteguy is just when he blames domestic decadence for the impotence of the Army in the colonies; but he does not convince me that it can and must therefore save France...