genesis of a bookstore success | EUROtoday

Pgreater than 30,000 copies offered, a number of reprints, a mountain of unanimously praising articles and invites to talk all over the place, The Great Bookstore, C within the air, It’s as much as youon the France Inter morning present or on the microphone of Caroline Broué within the present With a naked voice… “I believe that there is above all a curiosity, today that the war is upon us, for the chief of staff that I was”, modestly makes an attempt General François Lecointre to elucidate the unbelievable success of his incandescent little work, Between wars. His first guide.

The man has truly been writing for a really very long time. Long letters to his spouse and kids, when exterior operations stored him removed from his household. Sometimes tales, humorous tales to point out his 4 daughters the strangeness and fixed dilemmas of his existence as a soldier. Articles within the Army Human Sciences Review Inflectionswhich he himself based in 2005.

ALSO READ General Lecointre receives the prize TodayWhen younger, he had additionally imagined, for his regiment’s evaluation, a brief story that includes a pedantic, ridiculous officer, desperately searching for the that means of the French dedication in Somalia (1992), a pithy and virtually insolent textual content which had aroused the astonishment of his colonel – the textual content is reproduced in Between wars. “I felt, at the time, that writing had effects,” he says in the present day, laughing.

Doubt, obedience and concern

While he was nonetheless Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, it was his long-time pal François Sureau who pushed him to discover this different aspect of himself and to dare to jot down, actually. Through her, he met the writer Karina Hocine, at Gallimard, a home that Lecointre already is aware of for having directed, in 2018, a collective work, The Soldier, XX^e-XXI^e century (Folio). “I immediately perceived the singularity of the character,” remembers the editor. “He was mild years away from the picture we normally have of a common, there was, in him, a author. »

Pushed by the duo, Lecointre commonly locks himself in his home in Béarn and tries to present form to the story that inhabits him. But when, in June 2021, he left his submit as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, proposals from different publishers flooded in. “A former chief of employees is bankable », laughs Lecointre.

ALSO READ General François Lecointre: we should rearm minds Everyone clearly has in thoughts the success of the primary, very political, work of General Pierre de Villiers after his resignation in 2017. But Lecointre is dedicated, for Gallimard, to writing one thing fully totally different, to expressing doubt, obedience, the concern, the confrontation with dying that navy life requires, harshnesses important to the protection of our democracies however which our civil societies, in keeping with him, comfortably evacuate from their panorama.

Media protection that sucks it in

He will get again to work. Enjoys the train, however finds it demanding: “I did not need to do principle, the textual content needed to be private, however with out being conceited. So I stored tinkering with it, and I used to be virtually embarrassed to ship such a brief manuscript. »

The guide seems in April 2024 and it seduces and surprises. Lecointre, now Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor, discovers the lengthy marathon of promotion, a media protection that sucks him in and forces him to do what he’s normally loath to do: to indulge, typically in a really private.

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Kangaroo of the day

Answer

“At Caroline Broué’s microphone, I said a lot more than I expected to say. My daughters also assured me that they had learned, in this show, a lot of things about me that they did not yet know,” he’s shocked.

In the boards and debates the place he’s now always invited, he scrupulously constrains himself to not touch upon both the navy state of affairs or the selections of his successor, General Thierry Burkhard. His guide is something however a political rant, something however an admonition from an offended high-ranking officer. “An author is born,” thinks Karina Hocine. With François Sureau, she already pushed him to start writing a second work.