The French military establishment is an unlikely inspiration for struggles for peace and justice. Between 1962 and 2011 there were an estimated 125 French military operations abroad, many in the service of Françafrique, a postcolonial reworking of French imperialism in Africa. France is still one of the biggest exporters of weapons to repressive regimes, and its army enjoys an institutional clout rare in any democratic societies.

Perhaps because of this gloomy picture, it is little known that one of France’s leading voices for anti-militarism and social activism hails from the highest echelons of the French army. General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière left the French army in 1957 in protest against its extensive use of torture in its colonial war in Algeria. When he referred to this barbarism in the French press, he was jailed for two months.

France’s youngest general at the time and a celebrated hero of the French resistance against Nazism, de Bollardière consciously abandoned an illustrious career. In postcolonial France, many of his officer peers put their experience and credentials at the service of neocolonialism in Africa or lent their expertise in torture to Latin American dictatorships. But de Bollardière became a forceful advocate of nonviolence and a leading scourge of militarism, nuclear weapons, and social injustice before his death in 1986.