The modern army may have the kind of firepower its predecessors could only dream about, but there is one battle the fighting forces of previous centuries would win hands down: the battle of the book.

In France, where intellectuals enjoy high social esteem and where soldiers dislike the stereotype of gun-toting automatons, the army is looking for thinkers to rank alongside the likes of Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian officer considered the founder of contemporary military analysis.

The country’s generals, worried that French thinking on warfare came to a halt around the time of Agincourt, have embarked on a campaign to restore the reputation of their troops by encouraging them to get into print. The search began this weekend when General Pierre Garrigou Grandchamp, Cofat’s commanding officer, put on the first French army book fair in an effort to get soldiers to ditch the internet in favour of the pen.

Those in uniform who have a secret sensitive side are free to write poetry or novels, but the main aim is to encourage works on la stratégie militaire, adding the pen to France’s sword, hence the title of the two-day event in Tours, central France — La Plume et l’Epée — which brought together military and civilian specialist authors.

Honour is at stake — but so is the defence of the West, according to the army’s training command (Cofat), which is running the campaign to find new ideas that might triumph in today’s “asymmetric” warfare against insurgents in battlefields such as Afghanistan.

Prizes, including €4,000 (£3,600) and a vaguely abstract statue of a quill and a sword, were offered for the best book written by a member of the French armed forces since 2003. The best civilian work received €3,000 and a statue.Les militaires don’t write as much as they used to and they are not part of the nation’s intellectual scene any more,” Colonel Plantec, a spokesman for General Garrigou Grandchamp, told The Times.

This was partly because thinking on strategy and tactics had been frozen during the Cold War and had “got moving again” only after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Lieutenant-Colonel Michel Goya, whose work, La Chair et l’Acier (Flesh and Steel), was shortlisted, said that Gallic military philosophy dated from Agincourt and other battles during the Hundred Years’ War, when English “resistance and tenacity” triumphed over French “ardour”.

The two other shortlisted military works were Relire les Principes de la Guerre en Montagne (Rereading the Principles of Mountain Warfare) by Lieutenant-Colonel Cyrille Becker, and Clauswitz en France (Clauswitz in France) by Colonel Benoît Durieux, which won the prize. The civilian winner was François Robichon for his work Edouard Détaille, Un Siècle de Gloire Militaire (Edouard Detaille, a Century of Military Glory).

Wisdom and warfare

"Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity"

— Carl von Clausewitz, On War

‘To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting"

— Sun Tzu, Art of War

"An admiral has to be put to death now and then to encourage the others"

— Voltaire, Candide

"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it’s the size of the fight in the dog"

— Dwight Eisenhower, 1958, to the Republican National Committee

"But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favour was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents"

— Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Source: Times database, military-quotes.com

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