The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War - Hardcover

Porch, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374158533 ISBN 13: 9780374158538

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1995

Synopsis

A scholarly but highly readable account of France's intelligence networks, from the "black chambers" of the ancien rTgime and Napoleon to the formation of the SDECE (CIA) and the DST (FBI). The events chronicled range from the Dreyfus Affair, to WWI and WWII, to Indochina and Algeria, to the Rainbow Warrior debacle. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

About the Author:

Douglas Porch is a professor of strategy at the Naval War College.

From Booklist:

Readers expecting a chronicle of daring escapades by spies and counterspies will be disappointed. Instead, Porch has detailed the steady growth and evolution of the French intelligence-gathering apparatus. If there are heroes here, they are the often faceless bureaucrats who labor in obscurity, generally known only to their colleagues. Porch traces the roots of the secret services back to the Thirty Years War; he shows how the process of intelligence gathering received structure and pervasiveness under Napoleon. Porch's analysis of the role of the infamous Statistical Section during the Dreyfus Affair is particularly interesting; he feels the section insisted on Dreyfus' guilt less for reasons of anti-Semitism and more for reasons of bureaucratic self-preservation. As Porch moves into the twentieth century, he provides fascinating tidbits on the services' search for "hidden" fascists, communists, and even environmental extremists. Porch is perhaps our nation's foremost scholar of French military history; he is also a highly skilled writer blessed with a sharp sense of irony and the ability to find interesting aspects in the seemingly mundane affairs of state. Jay Freeman

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0374158533
• ISBN 13: 9780374158538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 623