The End of Violence: France and the Single Struggle of Jacques De Bollardière (Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History)

The End of Violence focuses on General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, who transformed from a rising star in the French army into a stalwart of nonviolence.In 1957, de Bollardière abruptly left his command in Algeria out of a refusal to countenance torture, publicly denouncing this paradigmatic war of European decolonization.In doing so, he jettisoned a glittering career forged in the Free French forces and Resistance maquis in the Second World War, and in France's colonial war in Indochina (1945-1954).Hugh McDonnell offers an innovative contribution with previously unexplored source material that reveals worldviews informing early twentieth-century provincial aristocratic family life, novel insights into Second World War dynamics, ethical problems of the Free French movement, and the messy and lethal world of the Ardennes maquis.He provides a complex analysis of revolutionary warfare as the guiding ethos of the French army in its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the retrospective