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War of Influence

Raphaël Chauvancy: The ‘Social-fabric Wars’ threaten to dislocate French society

A senior officer in the Troupes de marine (French Marine Troops), Raphaël Chauvancy is a lecturer at the École de Guerre Économique (School of Economic Warfare). An expert in modern conflicts and a specialist in strategic influence, he published in February “Winning Without Violence: A Handbook of Influence and Information Warfare” (VA Editions). There he details the influence strategies used by hostile states to “manipulate perceptions” and “reshape realities” in a world undergoing profound change. An interview.

Exclusive Interview | General Guy Buchsenschmidt: “I’m afraid of a Ukrainian Verdun”

With a career spanning more than 40 years, which has taken him to various theatres of war in Europe and Africa, Belgian General Guy Buchsenschmidt has extensive military and geostrategic expertise. In this interview, he explains why he fears a new ‘Verdun’ in the war in Ukraine that has been raging for over two years.

Interview | Luis Martinez: “Will the next jihadist caliphate be African?”

Luis Martinez is an eminent politician specialising in the Maghreb and the Middle East. He has been Director of Research at Sciences Po-CERI since 2005. A visiting professor at Columbia University in New York (2000-2001) and then in Montreal (2007-2008), he was an observer for the European Union in sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of several books, including “L'Afrique du Nord après les révoltes arabes” (Les Presses de Science Po, 2019) and “L'Afrique, le prochain califat? La spectaculaires expansion...

Tribute | Jacques Julliard: “The French left no longer needs to be killed, it does it itself!”

Illustrious intellectual and humanist figure, great historian of the French left, dean of columnists and editorialists of the Parisian press, which he enriched with his sharp analyses and enlightened opinions for more than half a century, Jacques Julliard died on September 8, at the age of 90. “A great republican, humanist and socialist voice has just died out. Jacques Julliard cherished the Nation without ever losing his European commitments. He gave in nothing on universal values and secularism without ever...

Secularism | François Kraus: French people consider the religious nature of the Abaya to be undeniable”

One year on from the survey he conducted for our monthly Screen Watch (Observatory of teachers faced with the expression of religious beliefs in schools, October 2022), in which the issues surrounding the wearing of the Abaya and the Qamis in schools were probed for the first time, François Kraus, director of Ifop's Politics / News division, conducted a large-scale survey (representative national sample of 2,145 people aged 18 and over) for our Charlie Hebdo colleagues, following the ban on...

Interview | Éric Guéret, director of ‘‘Premières Urgences’’: Is there a political will to destroy the French public hospital?

For six months, director Éric Guéret filmed the daily life of young medical interns in the emergency department of the Delafontaine hospital in Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. The result is a touching and ambitious documentary, Premières Urgences (released in cinemas on 16 November). As patients pile up in the corridors, the five interns (Amin, Evan, Hélène, Lucie and Mélissa) do their best, with courage and self-sacrifice, despite a glaring lack of resources.

Interview | Carine Azzopardi “For many young people, secularism is perceived as a war against religion”!

On 11 September 2001, journalist Carine Azzopardi was covering the attacks in New York, where she happened to be. On 13 November 2015, her partner and father of their children, music journalist Guillaume Barreau-Decherf, 43, was murdered at the Bataclan. In her book “Ces petits renoncements qui tuent” (Plon), Carine Azzopardi gives the - anonymous - testimony of a French teacher, confronted on a daily basis with the vindictive Islamism of some of his pupils. He refuses to give up...