There are two ways of doing geopolitics. The first is to comment on what happens. The second is to draw what might hold. Henri de Grossouvre has practised the second for twenty years, and it shows in the vocabulary of his titles: path, vanguard, instruments, architecture. These are words of construction, not of observation.
A question asked in 2002 and never dropped
The essay that opens his body of work, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, predicts nothing: it proposes. Explicitly within a Europe of nations — not supranational federalism — it argues for a strategic partnership between a restored Franco-German core and Russia, across four named fields: energy, security, space, and the mastery of advanced technology. General Pierre Marie Gallois, the man who persuaded de Gaulle to give France a nuclear deterrent, wrote the preface.
History then gave the title a resonance the author had not planned. Less than a year after publication, the joint opposition of Paris, Berlin and Moscow to the Iraq war turned those three names into a worldwide headline. The book was reissued in French, translated into Italian in 2004 — expanded by three chapters written for the occasion — and into Serbian in 2014.
An audience beyond France
As early as 2004 he published in English in World Affairs, an Indian academic journal, an article titled “Paris, Berlin, Moscow: Prospects for Eurasian cooperation”. The reach of that text is measured less by its immediate circulation than by its uptake: eighteen years later it still appears in the bibliography of a Journal of Eurasian Studies article on the concept of “Greater Eurasia”. Few non-academic essayists can say the same.
Testing the European system
In 2017, in the Revue Politique et Parlementaire, he did something few do honestly: reviewed the criticisms levelled at European construction from both sides of the spectrum — Varoufakis, Iglesias and Sapir on one flank, Orbán and Klaus on the other — without reducing them to a single school of thought. What he drew from it was not an indictment but a proposal: a framework of continental cooperation, with rail infrastructure as its first concrete binding agent.
The following year, with Richard Kitaeff, he returned to the same ground for a simple reason: the Franco-German pairing alone, they wrote, does not generate enough continental weight.
What the recent period has changed
It would be dishonest to present this line as untouched. The conditions for a rapprochement with Russia, as set out in 2002 and in 2018, are not those of today. What the corpus does document consistently is a method: start from material interests — energy, transport, industry, technology — rather than from declarations, and look for where the lines that hold actually run.