On Twitter, citizen Jean Maurin has his own way of communicating: he expresses himself only by “retweets”, these relays of messages posted by others on the Twitter network. In 2018, the only year his account was active, it was easy to discern what he liked and what he disliked. In the first category, Russia and Vladimir Putin. On dozens of occasions, citizen Jean Maurin relayed content from Russia Today, Sputnik, the Russian Embassy in France, and the Russian Foreign Ministry. On April 9, he relayed content from the Russian representation to the UN contesting any involvement in the poisoning of defector Sergei Skripal. “Propaganda”, states the message. On April 13, for example, he broadcast a message from Sergei Lavrov, the head of diplomacy, who refuted the existence, however certified by France the day before, of a chemical attack with chlorine committed by the Syrian authorities in Douma, and defends the thesis of a “production” of other “special services” of a state involved in a “Russophobic campaign”. On several occasions, Jean Maurin also “retweeted” admiring messages from Vladimir Putin, presented as a great patriot or a “defender of his people”.
In the second category, that of objects of repulsion, there is American power or NATO. “Putin sets the record straight: it is NATO that is getting closer to Russia and not the other way around”, he relayed on August 24, 2018. And then Emmanuel Macron, presented as “the instrument of the financial system that got him elected by a democratic coup”. On April 13, Jean Maurin even broadcast a montage showing the president’s head on a chick’s body, held in the hand of a mocking Vladimir Poutine. “So little Emmanuel, it seems that you want to go to war in Syria?”, is it written in the comments. Clarification: Jean Maurin is not an ordinary citizen. When he published most of these messages, he was a general in the army and commander-in-chief of the Foreign Legion, a post he left in July 2018. He then joined the security department of Renault. .. in Russia, a country where he stayed from 2004 to 2005 as auditor of the military academy of the general staff of the armed forces of the Federation, then from 2009 to 2012 as defense attaché at the embassy of France.
Like Jean Maurin, a certain number of French soldiers appear fascinated by Vladimir Poutine, or more generally by the Russian model. “Soldiers who appreciate Putin’s vertical power exist, confirms Senator Alain Richard, Minister of Defense from 1997 to 2002. They belong to a family of thought that I would describe as populist-authoritarian.” On March 13, 2014, a conference on “Ukraine after Maidan” took place at the Institute for Higher National Defense Studies. The invited academics insist on the seriousness of the Russian invasion in the Donbass. Auditors from the War School, that is to say soldiers in training, intervene… to contest the presentation. “At least Putin is a real leader, who decides and acts”, proclaims a soldier, according to researcher Olivier Schmitt, who recounts the scene in his book Why Putin is our ally ? (Hikari).
Make Putin look like a successor to De Gaulle
The Soviet historian Françoise Thom also sees in it a consequence of the skill of the soft-power Russian: “The Russians know very well how to play on the national vanity of the French, this old anti-American background. To seduce, they defend sovereignty, independence.” An often “anti-NATO” argument put forward by Kremlin relays in France, such as Alexandre Orlov, ambassador to Paris between 2008 and 2017. In October 2016, the diplomat delivered a remarkable text to the Charles-de-Gaulle Foundation, in which he praised “the need for unification of the European continent (…) from the Atlantic to the Urals” in the face of “the enlargement of NATO”, a thought supposedly stemming from the “principles” of General de Gaulle. A general recognizes the effectiveness of this narrative: “The stroke of genius of the Russians is to have succeeded in passing Putin for the successor of De Gaulle. It was very popular within the armies.”
A former DGSE agent takes this tropism much further back. He noticed a “pro-Russian and pro-Serbian tradition deeply rooted among the former students of Saint-Cyr”, stemming from “the Franco-Russian alliance of 1892, still venerated” and “often combined with a hostility of principle for the United States”. General Jean-Bernard Pinatel is one of those who want a new “reverse alliance” and the exit from NATO. As early as 2011, this army veteran published Russia, vital alliance, a book with a preface by Sergei Karaganov, a close adviser to Vladimir Putin. Pinatel is now vice-president of Geopragma, a think tank which supports these positions and which also includes Caroline Galactéros, the current diplomatic adviser to Eric Zemmour. The Geopolitics Review Method, in which several generals collaborate, defends the same theses. Its director, François Maurice, a former air force officer, concerned about the “encirclement of Russia” by NATO, tells us that he is not a “poutinolâtre”, but a Gaullist: “Our line is is more in the footsteps of General de Gaulle, who aspired to a rapprochement of Europeans from Brest to Vladivostok, than in those of any other head of state”.
As such, these strategic preferences are part of a perfectly respectable debate of ideas, which Alain Richard qualifies as “anecdotal”, as these positions would be marginal: “The soldiers who rise to the stars know very well that without the Americans and their help, many of our overseas operations would not exist.” In the same way, General Dominique Trinquand evokes “ideas little shared among the generals”, who know the benefit to be derived from joining NATO’s integrated command. No high-ranking officer formally justifies the invasion of Ukraine.
“The Reverse Alliance”
If the news seems to have put a stop to the defenders of the “reverse alliance” for the time being, a certain empathy for the Russian narrative may have occasionally existed within certain sections of the army. In Betrayals at the DGSE (Stock), journalists Franck Renaud and Antoine Izambard transcribe the striking words of a former executive of the Military Intelligence Directorate: “During the Crimean crisis, in 2014, several notes written by the service were clearly pro-Moscow. ” During this same period, Olivier Védrine, then editor-in-chief of the Russian version of the National Defense Review (RDN), for which the State provides three civil servants, suffered a disturbing misadventure. Because he had spoken in favor of the Ukrainian movement EuroMaïdan, the leadership of the RDN, held by the military, clearly reproached him for taking undesirable positions. He preferred to resign.
Some officers have crossed the red line. In 2017, a colonel from Jean-Yves Le Drian’s military cabinet reportedly provided information to a member of the GRU, the Russian army’s intelligence service, operating under diplomatic cover. He would not have been sanctioned, his initiatives not appearing as treason. An army lieutenant-colonel working at NATO was arrested in Naples on August 21, 2020. This graduate of Slavic studies, Russian-speaking who served in particular in Kazakhstan, is suspected of having transmitted confidential documents at the GRU. A drift facilitated by his Russian acquaintances? One of his former instructors is cautious: “He never said anything pro-Russian. On the other hand, he was frustrated, with the feeling of not being recognized at his fair value.” Spies know it: there is not only ideology in life, there is also the ego.