“We don’t surrender”

Homage to Gérard Chaliand (1934–2025) by Hugo-Alexandre Queijo

Hugo-Alexandre Queijo did not know Gérard Chaliand the decolonial militant, the adventurer, or the professor. He only, briefly, knew the poet. To pay tribute to him following his passing in August 2025, he evokes a few memories of meetings and readings, his love of the flesh of words and his political intelligence.

Défis Humanitaires thanks the journal ESPRIT for authorizing it to reproduce this article which it published in October.

I met Gérard Chaliand in February 2018, by chance. I was still a student. While my classmates and I were looking for a personality to invite for our master’s colloquium, I had suggested his name after a cancellation. I was only just discovering his work, yet his writing, with its tight aphorisms, pleased me. Gérard responded favorably to our invitation. I therefore discovered him a few weeks later, with his cap over his eyes and his leather jacket. He was already 84 years old. He was pulling behind him a suitcase apparently as old as he was, which contained several copies of his latest book1. That day, I took a dedication of his book as a pretext for a meeting in Paris. He gave me an appointment at the Tea Caddy, a stone’s throw from Notre-Dame. From there, we roamed the capital for a good two hours before, back in the 13th arrondissement where he lived, he invited me to share a glass of white wine in a bistro. A few months later, like others before me, I landed in Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. There I discovered his apartment in Naz City, dinners with Sipan and Wirya2 and the French researcher Arthur Quesnay, with whom we shared his sofa. It was then my first contact with adventure.

Gérard and I did not part thereafter. I saw him every week, often several times, until September 2022. During the first months, he exchanged his company for modest secretarial work. I remember my professor Olivier Zajec’s recommendation not to become Gérard Chaliand’s personal assistant. He quickly changed his mind, adding that there were nevertheless “far worse career beginnings.” I think he was right. This secretarial work being shared by other young people, it occupied me hardly more than a few minutes. I was soon completely relieved of it. Four years later, these meetings became less frequent, subject to my brief stays in the capital. They only became more precious. In the course of these last ones, I met the members of what some liked to call Gérard Chaliand’s “fan club.” Some became very close friends. We had in common being young, tempted by travel and, for many, having found in Gérard a new way of being in the world. I did not know the decolonial militant, the adventurer, or the professor. Others have already captured the essential of that. General Guy Hubin thus indicates that if one were to possess only one book, it should be the World Anthology of Strategy (Robert Laffont, 2001)3. Hervé Coutau-Bégarie hailed the “incomparable connoisseur of guerrillas4.” Nor did I know the defender of the Armenian and Kurdish minorities. I only, briefly, knew the poet. Here again, it is hard to do better than the preface to Feu nomade, his main collection of poems, written by his friend Claude Burgelin5. During a walk in Square Saint-Médard, Gérard had invited me to choose a book among those, spread on the ground, by a street vendor. Attracted by its cover and by the author, I had chosen Jean Lartéguy’s The Strolling Players of the Margeride. Later I found in it the images, rhythms, contradictions and grammar to tell, to those who did not know him, a part of what he was.

Images and memories

One of the first things that struck you about him was his apartment. In this small space, ancient civilizations and books were everywhere present. Carpets, chests, statuettes and various trinkets, as well as paintings, completed the ensemble. Plants and flowers were the finishing touch, frequently restocked as they were offered to him or as he picked them himself in the parks of Paris. In this space, the banality as well as the turmoil of the outside world seemed abolished. Many times I left with my backpack filled with books. One of the first was Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. At Gérard’s, the Paris described by the Austrian author, the city “that dilates the heart” and where “all possibilities were open,” seemed miraculously preserved. He was for me, and for many others, a true refuge. As we ran the world, the return sometimes proved disappointing. Fear, tension and sleepless nights made us nervous and impatient. At Gérard’s, we could give free rein to our doubts and our melancholy. There they were pushed back, dissolved in the thickness of the place. Paris, which was and remains, for most of us, our home port, became welcoming again. During those long evenings, his company and conversation were an immense comfort. We often began by dining, drinking and laughing. Then we shared tea or a liqueur, as he took his place in the only armchair. He slowly packed his pipe, let it warm in the hollow of his palm, before beginning, slowly, to smoke. His glasses perched on the tip of his nose, he then unfurled a discreet liturgy of reading. Turning the pages with care, he remade history. Listening to him, it seemed obvious that events, apparently isolated, took their place in a higher perspective. The world was ordered. As the hours passed, he moved from schooling the mind to schooling the feelings. Over the course of the words, the thin border between memories, hopes and sensations faded. In those moments, Gérard embodied a curious blend of wisdom and madness. The intoxication and the smell of tobacco produced a joyful confusion, followed by a gentle trance. It was there, in this intimacy of silence, that we were closest. How, on leaving him, not to believe that the sky existed only for us? In recent years, old age and the relationship to death took on an increasingly important place for him. He evoked for me, and still evokes, one of the characters in Joseph Kessel’s The Horsemen: Toursène, the greatest of the Tchopendoz, now too old to run the buzkashi6. He was hard on himself and on his own, often clumsy and sometimes needing to be reassured about himself. I knew how much Afghanistan had mattered to him. Among other things, he had kept from it that sometimes unhealthy obsession with “knowing how to die.” The close losses of Kim and Juliette, the mothers of his two children, had weakened him7. His once clear eyes, now veiled, sometimes seemed lost. I believe, however, that the ordeal made him more tolerant. As age marked his body and face more harshly, he showed all the more tenderness and warmth. Of all liberties, the liberty to choose the hour and place of one’s death was perhaps the only one he ultimately did not exercise. What remained was the pride of continuing to write and to pass on, to the end. He wanted to warn me, during our last meetings: “I won’t be around for very long, you know.” I then took photos that keep, I believe, the imprint of an elegant and discreet farewell.

The love of the flesh of words

At our first meeting, I was still, in literary matters, largely of consummate ignorance. He was as appalled as delighted by it, and set himself the mission of remedying this lack. His first choice was the dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians, narrated by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War: “Justice enters into men’s reasoning only if forces are equal on both sides; otherwise, the strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must8.” It was, in his view, the absolute political lesson. Then came, pell-mell, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle and Seneca, then Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Victor Hugo and so many others that it is impossible for me to cite them all. He regularly mixed in various political treatises and anthologies of geography or history. Then it was Confucius, Machiavelli or even Frantz Fanon. I left his place, each week, with at least a dozen books. His emails almost always ended with “bring a big backpack.” Proof of the mass he had accumulated, it never seemed to me that the number of books visible at his home ever, in fact, diminished. Since then, I have not yet read half of them.

Beyond history and politics, the books that enthused him most were those that related an adventure. One of his favorite expressions is taken from Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis: “To live, do you know what that means? To loosen your belt and look for a fight9.” I saw him, standing in his living room, a saber in his hand, read me extracts from Denis Davydov’s The Partisan War, the hussar-poet: “Napoleon’s Guard passes among our Cossacks like a ship armed with a hundred guns among fishing boats10.” It was also For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad—in short, everything that showed the human being capable of living, knowing that he will have to die. He preferred Jünger to Genevoix, because the intensification of inner experience in war corresponded to his temperament. For him, it passed above all through encounter. Friendship and love also fell under adventure. It was also historical, questioning human nature as well as epochs, as in Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina (1945). In The Strolling Players of the Margeride, the main character, Jean Soleyrolles, refuses to flee in the face of danger because: “It would be a betrayal of an entire literature11.” Gérard would have approved.

However, it was in poetry that he poured out the best of himself. He loved “the flesh of words12.” His writing was at once gentle and cruel. He quoted Nietzsche, asserting that one “must carry within oneself a little chaos to give birth to a dancing star13.” Inner life thus became an act of presence in the world as much as a quest for truth: “There are moments when your soul opens, unexpectedly. You become sensitive. Things apparently inexplicable suddenly appear simple, evident.” He read in a low voice, as if he might break the magic of the moment. He read Omar Khayyam to me, and I keep from the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet’s collection, It Snows in the Night14, an extraordinary memory. His voice trembled when he evoked Horace, declaring that we must “in a brief space, exhaust a long hope.” Who, having known war, can remain unmoved at the memory of Priam kissing Achilles’ hands and both weeping for the death of Hector and Patroclus? In the afterword to Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder thus evokes Achilles’ shield, adorned with a spiral motif, illustrating sea and land, harvest and dance, peace and war, embodying writing that preserves “different worlds of different people, even after death15.” The knowledge of the skin From this literary thread and his travels, Gérard had built a solid political intelligence. It was notably underpinned by the categorical rejection of totalitarianisms, “those gods who preside over collective deliriums16.” This stance was, for him, as intellectual as it was aesthetic. From his doctoral thesis, Revolutionary Myths of the Third World17, he retained a taste for challenging the taboos of the moment. He openly despised those who, thinking they were defending them, saw outside the Western world only populations destined to remain “literary myths, pretexts for us to take offense18.” We who wanted to serve France, he encouraged us to know her better, with her hypocrisy and her pettiness. He also showed us that the old nation was, and remains, infinitely greater than the spectacle its leaders offer to view. Likewise, he taught us to recognize our own naivety. When seeking adventure, it is as tempting as it is dangerous to be satisfied, without quite understanding it, with the role that chance gives us to play. He also warned us that, in violent and destitute worlds, the appearances of friendship often hide vice and calculation. Nothing is given. He hammered home the absolute primacy of determination: “One must accept choosing what it costs to be a victor and, worse still, what it costs to remain one.” For him, war was an anthropological reality that cannot be transcended (“everything was built by iron, fire and blood19”), far preferable to enslavement. It is one of the fuels of a world where, as Michel Goya reminded us, “nothing replaces victory20.” Beyond physical courage, he extolled moral and intellectual courage without which, too often, one is beaten by oneself. He denounced this fact for France, stating clearly that we are, through “conservatism and corporatism21,” our principal adversary. He thus considered the study of history indispensable. He therefore cited Marc Bloch, with Strange Defeat, as the only one “to have known how to say the situation into which we had allowed ourselves to be locked” in 194022. From it he retained this quote from Aeschylus: “The gods help those who work to their own ruin23.” Clausewitz said nothing else: “Victory is the price of blood. One must adopt the method or not make war. All the reasons of humanity that one would put forward would only expose you to being beaten by a less sentimental adversary24.”

His most precious legacy, and above all the most useful in war, remains what he had called the “knowledge of the skin […] associating what is learned from books and from experience25.” How many times did he repeat to us that “the lightest baggage of the traveler is his culture and, particularly, his historical knowledge”? Only empathy really makes it possible to grasp what is revealed by “those crises that tear a country apart and show it splayed open, without mystery and without modesty26.” Gérard thus helped me understand this method whose core can be summarized simply: start from the individual. It is in interviews, prisoners’ accounts and the sharing of fighters’ experience that it is possible to identify the levers that, in the end, truly allow action. Gérard insisted on not “sticking to social encounters linked to one’s own status.” Likewise, it is thus that one feels “the complex art of being or seeming27.” General Guy Hubin stresses that this necessity “requires special skills […] and involves significant risks. If one does not possess the former and is not prepared to incur the latter, it is better to stay at home28.” This lesson is by no means limited to irregular conflicts.

The last vigil before dawn

Now comes the time to draw from all this a synthesis. Some will emphasize geopolitics, others the adventurer. I will keep, with others, a memory no doubt similar to the description Zweig gave of Sigmund Freud: “One learned and admired at the same time; one felt understood in every word by this man prodigiously free of prejudice, whom no confession frightened, whom no assertion irritated, and for whom the will to educate others to clarity of thought and feeling had long since become an instinctive will guiding his existence29.” From this work dedicated to testimony there also emerges a claim to the human condition, as fragile as it remains, as the supreme dignity. Beyond that, I believe that literature was the only true domain of his life. Among all his passions, Gérard considered, like Marc Bloch, that it is literature that justifies human existence. It alone could, at the price of constant effort, give meaning to a violent and fragmented world. With his interpretation of The Epic of Gilgamesh Gérard expresses what was perhaps his deepest conviction: “We are a mortal species and […] only memory, when it is written down, continues to live30.”

It is not vain to question the scope of such a legacy. Doubtless universal, I will confine myself here to that which concerns his homeland, France. Few of our fellow citizens are aware that with his departure she loses a part of herself. It was to France, first of all, that he dedicated his memoirs, in a “testimony of gratitude,” for having “equipped him with the cultural tools to bear witness with pertinence31.” Comparing her to the rest of the world, he said he measured “the luck of not having been determined by the demands of those taboos, of that conception of social relations where the individual has no existence32.” He also insisted on the fortune, sometimes forgotten, of living in a country where “to be born a woman does not lead to submission33.” He denounced the anachronism of “colonial guilt,” the dangers of “victimization” as well as the “impostors of revolt34.” If France could only disappoint us, we had to continue to love her. He will thus remain the hyphen of a community that, sharing certain dispositions, found in him a way to think about its freedom. In a society that manufactures isolation, his last gift was to offer us the voluntary choice of fraternity. Of all, it is the most precious. It remains to preserve it. It is now “the hour of the predators35.” Everywhere the gaze rests, the peripheries of our continent constitute one and the same battlefield. France nevertheless seems largely unaware of the dangers that threaten her. She still lets herself be seduced by empty political discourse and indulges in verbose inflation. Peace, they say, is worth a few sacrifices, especially when they cost nothing. Her army, proud, often remains “an old lady who cannot bear to be jostled36.” Everywhere, our enemies mass. Former allies move away. In the East, convinced of our weakness, an imposing machine has set in motion. In the South, the soldiers of jihad have not yet said their last word. Their faces are different, but their goal is the same: to enslave us. It still falls to us, perhaps for a short time, to choose to remain free. It is probable, if that is the case, that we will have to fight. Gérard loved this line by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov: “I go alone on the road, a stony path glitters through the mist.” He has gone. What remains of him is this injunction, which concludes his last poem, soberly called Dispatch: “We do not surrender.”

Hugo-Alexandre Queijo.

1. Gérard Chaliand, Why Do We Lose Wars? A New Western Art, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2016.

2. Gérard evokes at greater length his apartment in Erbil and his relationship with Sipan and Wirya, a couple of friends of Kurdish origin who lived for a long time in Europe, residing a few floors below in the same building, in G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin. Memoirs, Paris, L’Archipel, 2022, p. 229.

3. Guy Hubin, War. A French Vision, preface by Jean-Marie Faugère, Paris, Economica, “Bibliothèque stratégique” series, 2012, p. 257.

4. Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Treatise on Strategy, Paris, Economica, “Bibliothèque stratégique” series, 2013, p. 531. See also Adam Nossiter, “Gérard Chaliand, Intrepid Authority on Geopolitics, Dies at 91,” The New York Times, August 27, 2025; “Gérard Chaliand (1934–2025): an Irregular of Geopolitics” [online], Le Grand Continent, August 20, 2025; Frédéric Encel, “Farewell to Gérard Chaliand, a ‘free-shooter of geopolitics’,” L’Express, August 26, 2025.

5. G. Chaliand, Feu nomade and Other Poems, preface by Claude Burgelin, postface by André Velter, Paris, Gallimard, “Poésie” series, 2016.

6. Among the horse-peoples of Central Asia, buzkashi is an ancestral, rough and prestigious equestrian game where men on horseback snatch the carcass of a goat from each other to carry it to the goal. Those who excel at it are called Tchopendoz, fearsome and respected riders, for it takes strength, skill and bravery to survive this savage melee. See Joseph Kessel, The Horsemen [1967], Paris, Gallimard, “Folio,” 1982.

7. G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin, op. cit., p. 54. Kim Lefèvre, born October 12, 1935, in Mayotte and died August 6, 2021, in Marseille, was a French-Vietnamese writer, actress and translator. Born to a Vietnamese mother and a French father, she grew up in Indochina and emigrated to France in 1960 to study literature at the Sorbonne, then began a literary career marked by two major autobiographical accounts and two works of fiction. She was, among other things, interviewed by Bernard Pivot on the program Apostrophes, April 7, 1989. Juliette Minces, born July 18, 1937, in Paris and died June 24, 2021, in Fontenay-le-Comte, was a French political sociologist and writer. Having grown up in a Polish Jewish family that had taken refuge in France, she was interned at Gurs during the Second World War. She was also an activist for Algerian independence, engaged in the anti-colonial struggle and, more broadly, a pioneer in denouncing communitarianism in the face of a laicity she considered essential to women’s emancipation, among other work.

8. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Jean Voilquin [1936], Book V, ch. 89. The History of the Peloponnesian War is the account of the conflict opposing the Greek cities of Sparta, at the head of the Peloponnesian League, and Athens, at the head of the Delian League, at the end of the 5th century BC, which ended with the collapse of the latter. The Melian Dialogue takes place in the fifteenth year of the war, during the 416–415 confrontation between the Athenians and the people of Melos, a small island located in the south of the Aegean Sea, east of Sparta.

9. Nikos Kazantzakis, Alexis Zorba [1946], trans. Yvonne Gauthier, Paris, Pocket, 2002, p. 109.

10. Denis Davydov, The Partisan War. 1812: The Russian Campaign [1821], trans. Henri de Polignac, preface by Gérard Chaliand, Paris, CNRS Éditions, “Biblis” series, 2016.

11. Jean Lartéguy, The Strolling Players of the Margeride, in If You Come Back to Margeride, Paris, Omnibus, 1997, p. 366.

12. G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin, op. cit., p. 100.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1885], trans. Maurice de Gandillac, Paris, Gallimard, “Folio essais,” 1985.

14. Nâzım Hikmet, It Snows in the Night and Other Poems, translation by Münevver Andaç and Güzin Dino, preface by Claude Roy, postface by G. Dino, followed by an evocation by Abidine, Paris, Gallimard, “Poésie,” 1999.

15. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin [2010], trans. Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Paris, Gallimard, “Folio Histoire,” 2025, p. 680. Snyder evokes more particularly, in this passage, the use of the symbol by the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, who pays tribute to the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.

16. J. Lartéguy, If You Come Back to Margeride, op. cit., p. 424.

17. G. Chaliand, Revolutionary Myths of the Third World. Guerrilla and Socialism, Paris, Seuil, “L’histoire immédiate,” 1976.

18. J. Lartéguy, If You Come Back to Margeride, op. cit., p. 423.

19. G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin, op. cit., p. 295.

20. Michel Goya, “On November 11, Nothing Replaces Victory” [online], La Voie de l’Épée, October 24, 2018.

21. G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin, op. cit., p. 284.

22. Ibid., p. 286.

23. Ibid., p. 290.

24. Marshal Foch, On War [1903–1904], ed. Martin Motte, preface by General Benoît Durieux, Paris, Tallandier / Ministry of the Armed Forces, 2023, p. 108.

25. G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin, op. cit., p. 9.

26. J. Lartéguy, If You Come Back to Margeride, op. cit., p. 336.

27. G. Chaliand, The Knowledge of the Skin, op. cit., p. 292.

28. Guy Hubin, Tactical Perspectives, prefaced by Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, Paris, Economica, “Bibliothèque stratégique,” 2009, p. 170.

29. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. Memoirs of an European [1944], trans. Serge Niemetz, Paris, Belfond, 1996, p. 491.

30. The Epic of Gilgamesh, ed. G. Chaliand, Paris, Pocket, “Agora,” 2021.