Contenu du sommaire : Que sont les héros devenus ?

The world of combat is subject to its own rules, which seem to apply very unequally between individuals. Some people appear to be particularly suited, and accomplish exceptional feats. The purpose of this article is to throw light on this phenomenon, by drawing on experience from star French fighter pilots in the Great War.

When citizenship moves from the republican to the democratic model, the concern for equality in conditions outweighs the republican transcendency of the general will. When, however, democracies no longer understand what war is, they produce the danger of no longer being able to defend themselves and no longer being able to fight for peace.

Henri Bergson and Charles Péguy thought of heroism, mysticism and action together. For today's readers, it makes us think that heroism has given way to anti-heroism. The former acts through the virtue of a creative feeling that is communicated as an appeal. The latter, which shuts devotion and sacrifice away in the cupboard of outdated truths, enables incredulity and suspicion to justify inaction.

The Great War probably played a decisive role in changing perceptions of sacrifice. Before 1914, we can see discussion by the military authorities who thought sacrifice in combat to be natural for « professional heroes », which was what soldiers in a regular army were supposed to be. Then, in the letters of people who fought in the Great War, it was possible to see the emergence of another way of discussing sacrifice, one that saw it as being tested to the limit, characterised by suffering and making no sense except when defending your comrades and hoping for a decisively victorious outcome.

Both Picquart and Dreyfus were victims of fanatical, sustained and organised injustices. And yet, can it be said that only Picquart was a hero ? That only Dreyfus was ? That both men were heroes, or that neither was ?

Pierre Schoendoerffer is the only French film director nearly all of whose work has been devoted to war and soldiers. Through four feature films and a documentary, he was always tackling the issues that were dear to him : commitment, honour, redemption and memory. The question of commitment was explored in The 317th Platoon, honour was featured in A Captain's Honor, and redemption was the subject of The Drummer Crab. Memory, seen from many perspectives, is a stylistic feature that Schoendoerffer used in all his films. He teased out a warrior figure displaying both the person's power (effectiveness in combat, and the way he fascinated his men) and his limitations (his excesses, exile and mortal destiny). He left bitterness and the search for redemption to ordinary men. Schoendoerffer is a subtle film director, but his work is also that of an anthropologist and a moralist, in the noble sense of the word.

Did you know that a person given the status of hero during his lifetime goes on to experience misfortune and exclusion ? The four stories traced here were chosen because they draw on people and facts known to the general public. Whatever the person's history and the role they played in choosing their destiny, in the end things turned out badly for each of them. One was a pawn deployed on a chess board for the media, another thrust forward to promote a political system. An exceptional man was pursued by a horde of people who wanted to sully his image, and a warrior saw his status as a sham. Two died, and two are still in hiding.

A character, an action and memory are, all three, needed to construct a hero. The person may be fictional or real ; a winner or defeated : the hero results from discussion that looks at some extraordinary action taken by the person to save a social group. A courageous action is not always the same thing as a heroic action, as it may lack the public awareness needed to obtain recognition from the community. When reworked by imagination, the hero's destiny is to escape the historical account and achieve a sacred status in the community's memory. The person becomes the subject of a cult for whom a historian of representations can try to identify the sharp breaks and the features that continue over centuries. By looking only at Western heroes, and in particular at contemporary French examples, we can see how difficult it is for the hero to gain recognition for his specific virtue rather than the competing models of excellence : gods, saints, people recognised as « great men », and celebrities. Moving on from the aristocratic heritage, the concept of a hero has become democratic to the point of being diluted in a discrete, and even suspicious, form through being contrasted with that of victim. A hero can be seen as embodying the political, ideological and cultural values of the society that constructs such characters.

Does heroism still mean anything ? That could be the question to which the author is trying to give an answer, inspired among other things by his career as an officer in the Marines. Heroism is a multi-faceted phenomenon that is relative and develops. The epic-hero myth of past ages has been displaced by romantic and tragic heroes. The figure of a hero has changed and become more diverse, sometimes contrasted with false conceptions of an adversary free of faults through the magic of a protective status. The modern hero has fallen off his pedestal, but his fall has helped him become more human.

The period of the French Revolution promised the recognition of heroes : citizens and soldiers, militants who had enlisted in armies in completely unprecedented ways. This « manufacturing of heroes » can thus be followed through various developments and a variety of aims and setbacks, as it came up against would-be heroes espousing rival causes. The process was then simply recovered politically by the powers that be, and then by a single man, Bonaparte. That period nevertheless left an indelible mark, which shaped memories and created further examples.

Mysterious though it may seem, there are cases of heroism without a hero ! For a hero, whether fictional or real, to emerge from a group, there must be people undertaking the process of hero-making. Supported by myths and ideologies, the hero must meet a social and cultural need, and this depends on authorities – whether governmental or private – that can produce accounts of events. Without a record, there is no hero !Currently, the supply from armed forces is poor, while there exists a demand for epic heroes, not least among the young ; and yet there is no lack of raw material in terms of heroic actions achieved by our soldiers. There is also a need for the authorities responsible for the way the military relate to society to take an interest in those actions, record them and supply them to the market for artistic and literary creation. The whole production apparatus for bringing military heroes up to date needs to be redesigned. While the ease with which soldiers can now be seen and heard nationally presents a problem, this enterprise of making armed professionals into heroes is more needed than ever.

Heroic figures from the Saint-Cyr military academy are examined here from both historical and sociological perspectives. This produces a number of observations : that there is a cultural lack in the political and literary fields among today's pupils ; a close interweaving of the mythological, traditional and historic dimensions that are always difficult to disentangle ; an updating of military-leader models and, before any example is identified, construction of the archetypal Saint-Cyr hero.

Since 1945, nearly 30% of the names given to successive years'student officers at the École Spéciale Militaire Interarmes military academy and its two successors, École Spéciale Militaire (Saint-Cyr) and École Militaire Interarmes, have referred to the Indochina war, and in particular to inspiring leaders who were killed. During that war, the contribution of those who fought had to be acknowledged. Starting in the 1980s, this gave way to the desire for the future officers to remember, by creating a mythical image of the conflict and of the soldiering profession it illustrated, through the leaders selected for elevation into heroes.

Since the beginning of 2010, France has lost about 20 of its children in an external theatre of operations. This means there were no fewer than 20 occasions when the military authorities implemented the Hommages plan, paying respect due to a soldier who had died for France, facilitating administrative procedures and, most importantly, welcoming the deceased's relatives ! In the current climate of « victimisation », it is a delicate but necessary matter to explain to a family devastated by their emotional pain that the person they are mourning died a hero.

Military intervention alone cannot resolve an international crisis, revive a State and enable it to survive. It is now essential to combine the action of numerous parties : civil, institutional and private ; national and international, in all the fields of responsibility of the defective State. This new conception of crisis resolution has been called the « global approach ». Being aware of its failings in this respect, France decided in 2009 to provide itself with a new instrument for its inter-departmental policy for civil and military management of external crises. That innovation is a « task force » at the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. This article traces the process that gave rise to the body, and attempts to pin down what is at stake for the military and for the civil service.

The concept of « strategy », which originated on the battlefield and with military art, has been extended from war to all circumstances involving confrontation, but has become weaker in scheduling forms of action while being intensified in revolutionary battles. Putting it into perspective by drawing on the great subdivisions of philosophy (metaphysics, logic, ethics, etc.) has strengthened it and reminded us of its major characteristic : the presence of Another, whether an adversary or an ally. This produces a dilemma. Is any strategy-related culture specific to a particular human group acting in a given field ? Is it legitimate to attempt a general theory of strategy ? Does an anthropo-strategy have to be pluralistic ? Some guidelines are offered here, together with a reminder that in the absence of uncertainty there cannot be a strategy.

Any political and social organisation is based on a philosophical system. Using Henri Hude's latest work, Démocratie durable [Sustainable Democracy], it can be seen to involve freeing oneself intellectually from the politically correct in order to understand the disorders in our society and reflect on the conditions in which the profession of soldier is exercised in a society where the role of the media is extreme.

When citizenship moves from the republican to the democratic model, the concern for equality in conditions outweighs the republican transcendency of the general will. When, however, democracies no longer understand what war is, they produce the danger of no longer being able to defend themselves and no longer being able to fight for peace.