Books March 27

France – Algeria, India – China: the war of the worlds. Overview of the books of the week

Pierre Vermeren, France-Algeria. The double blindness, Paris, Tallandier, 2026, 21.90 euros

The Maghreb specialist historian, Pierre Vermeren, offers an incisive and intentionally counter-current reading of contemporary Franco-Algerian relations with this book, which fits into a saturated memory context, where conflicting narratives tend to freeze public debate in irreconcilable stances. Vermeren announces his ambition from the outset: to break with what he sees as a “double blindness” between Paris and Algiers. On one side, France is trapped in unacknowledged post-colonial guilt, and on the other side, the Algerian regime instrumentalizes the memory of the war of independence for internal political legitimation purposes. This critical symmetry forms the backbone of the book and gives it its argumentative coherence. Vermeren mobilizes a wide range of sources, including archives, historiographical works, and contemporary analyses, giving his argument a certain density. The reader will also appreciate the clarity of the style: fluid, often elegant, sometimes incisive, making an otherwise complex and emotionally charged subject accessible.

However, this desire to break away from the “dominant theses” in Algeria sometimes results in a pendulum effect. By wanting to deconstruct what he sees as a hegemonic narrative, Vermeren sometimes adopts a position that can be seen as its inverse mirror. The critique of the Algerian official discourse, while often relevant when highlighting its political uses of memory, would benefit from being more nuanced in its social and cultural implications. In particular, the plurality of voices within Algerian society is overshadowed in favor of a state-centric interpretation.

It is perhaps on the issue of migration that this tension is most visible. When the author denounces the “migration laxity” of successive French leaders, he adopts an analysis grid that focuses on national political responsibility but leaves other structuring factors in the shadows: global economic dynamics, colonial legacies, and individual and family strategies specific to migrations. This sometimes one-sided approach can give the impression of a partial, if not biased, diagnosis that simplifies a multi-dimensional reality.

In general, the book is part of a French intellectual tradition critical of memory policies, but it risks replacing a “repentant” reading with another form of interpretative rigidity. The “double blindness” he denounces may not always be transcended, as the balance between the two shores appears, at times, asymmetrical in treatment. These reservations do not diminish the real interest of the book. France – Algeria remains a stimulating contribution to public debate precisely because it disturbs and invites discussion. By rejecting easy consensus, Vermeren forces the reader to question their own assumptions, which is perhaps the mark of significant works.

Tigrane Yégavian

*

Emmanuel Lincot, China-India. The war of the worlds, Cerf, 2026, 22.90 euros

Renowned specialist in the political and cultural history of contemporary China, professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris and research director at IRIS, Emmanuel Lincot completes with this book his Asian trilogy. After The Great Game: Beijing Facing Central Asia and Asia, Land of Conflicts, he describes the face-off between two giants: two continental states, two millennia-old civilizations endowed with considerable political, economic, technological, and military power, whose relationship and clashes will largely shape the future of the world.

These two demographic titans, representing a third of humanity on their own and with combined PPP GDPs reaching a quarter of the global GDP, are not just continental states: they are among the few civilizations that have spanned the ages while projecting their influence far beyond their regional environment. Despite ancient cultural and religious exchanges, their direct contact only dates back to 1950 when the People’s Liberation Army took control of Tibet, a few months after its triumphant entry into Beijing on October 1, 1949. The confrontation intensified via Pakistan, supported by Beijing in Kashmir, before spreading to the entire Himalayan region, culminating in the conflict of October 1962, following which China seized large Indian territories. During the Cold War, the Sino-Pakistani axis opposed the Soviet-Indian axis; although these alignments have lost some of their relevance, they still form the backdrop on which the fluctuations in relations between Delhi and Beijing continue to unfold.

The first “liquid frontier” generating a security dilemma for India is the LoC (Line of Control), highly militarized border with Pakistan in Kashmir, increasingly linked to the Chinese threat since the development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Around 700,000 soldiers and paramilitaries are deployed there, making the LoC one of the most militarized borders in the world. The strengthening of military cooperation between Beijing and Islamabad – illustrated by Operation Sindoor, which led to a brief aerial confrontation between India and Pakistan from May 7 to 10 – is causing growing concern in Delhi. The second “liquid frontier” is the LAC (Line of Actual Control), separating India from China, interspersed by Nepal to the west and Bhutan to the east, summed up by the phrase “no war, no peace.” China’s lack of willingness to resolve this dispute has long frozen relations between the two neighbors.

In these circumstances, what is the future of the Primakov doctrine? At the head of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the early 1990s, Yevgeny Primakov conceptualized the Russia-India-China (RIC) triangular relationship, aimed at countering American influence in Asia. Regardless of his intentions, it is evident that the states of this triangle are structurally unbalanced. While India has drawn closer to Western powers by joining the Quad in 2007 and strengthening its ties with Australia and Japan, she must question the reliability of American commitment in a major confrontation with China. India has long been the top importer of Russian armaments (58% of purchases between 2014 and 2018), has ordered twelve nuclear reactors for twenty years, and has become a significant buyer of Urals oil (37% of supplies) – purchases recently authorized by Donald Trump for a month. As for China, its massive Belt and Road Initiative – including the maritime component known as the “string of pearls” – aims to reduce its dependence on the Malacca Strait, through which 80% of global oil traffic passes, with a clear strategic aim: to keep India tied to its land border to prevent it from developing a high seas navy worthy of the name.

Although united within BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), where facade unity prevails, the two giants are engaged in a permanent competition: seeking alliances, circumvention maneuvers, and the conquest of influence. Beijing seeks to encircle Delhi by cultivating privileged relationships with most of its neighbors – Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar. This confrontation primarily unfolds in Central Asia, long a Russian backyard, which has redirected its trade towards China, its largest trading partner. Uzbekistan, a demographic giant in the region, is the key: it established the first Confucius Institute abroad in 2004. None of the Central Asian states – nor any Middle Eastern country – has sanctioned Beijing for its abuses against the Uighurs. In the Middle East, where China sources over half of its hydrocarbon and strategic material supplies (uranium, helium, etc.), it has been striving for a decade to establish itself as an indispensable actor, as shown by the fragile reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia facilitated in April 2023. This growing competition between Washington and Beijing benefits India, whose human presence in the region is much greater: in the United Arab Emirates alone, out of nine million inhabitants, 3.5 million are Indian. Faced with the Belt and Road Initiative, Delhi has countered with a series of alternative corridors, including the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), capable of reducing costs by 30% and transport times by 40% between European ports and the countries involved. Additionally, Beijing’s efforts to expand its influence in India’s immediate neighborhood – Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal – directly contradict Narendra Modi’s “neighborhood first” strategy.

Beyond the usual speeches on peace, South-South cooperation, multilateralism, and a multipolar world order, these two Asian giants are engaged in an increasingly ruthless competition. Russia, sharing with them a certain authoritarian bent, has played for decades the role of a fragile referee – a role that its gradual weakening could jeopardize, prompting Indians and Chinese to see themselves more openly as rivals. Recent strategic surprises – some involving the region directly – confirm that the Indo-Pacific region is emerging as the main stage for a hybrid war of attrition between the two powers. This rivalry, in turn, fuels a nationalist sentiment based on the fusion of the state, the people, and the army under authoritarian leaders in both countries – a model that seems to be spreading, despite some reluctance.

Eugène Berg

Maurice Chappaz, Verdure de la nuit et autres poèmes, Poésie/Gallimard, 8.40 euros.

A geography of the soul

He is one of the poets whose work alone constitutes a political act – not through slogans, but by the way it is rooted in a land and returned to the world with an intensity that borders on a manifesto. Maurice Chappaz (1916-2009) is one of those. This Valaisan by birth, long ignored by the major French literary capitals, finally finds the dissemination he deserves through the Poésie/Gallimard collection, after decades. The Romand Swiss Chappaz is, in the truest sense of the term, a territorial poet. The Valais he sings – its receding glaciers, its vineyards clinging to the slopes like sentences, its villages distorted by mass tourism and technical modernity – is not a romantic backdrop or an alpine postcard. It is a disputed, threatened space, filled with tensions between the old peasant world and the civilization of asphalt and concrete. Therefore, reading Chappaz is understanding a struggle – that of a man who refuses to let his land become abstract, neutralized, reduced to an economic functionality.

Verdure de la nuit brings together poems spanning several decades of creation, allowing the reader to follow the evolution of a language that continues to deepen. The early texts are already imbued with that particular light of the upper Rhône, that raw, cold clarity that descends from the mountain passes. But as the pages progress, something hardens, darkens, as if the poet is acknowledging the slow dispossession taking place before his eyes. Farmers disappear, alpine meadows close, traditions erode. Chappaz, never falling into sterile nostalgia, transforms this mourning into verbal energy, into restrained anger that gives his verses their unique tension. Chappaz’s language is organic, carnal, sometimes rough like granite. It draws from dialects, place names, agricultural work gestures, to create what could be called a lexical resistance: naming is preserving; speaking the Valaisan name of things is refusing their dissolution into a faceless universality. In this, Chappaz joins, without ever theorizing about it, contemporary reflections on rootedness, cultural sovereignty, and the dignity of mountain peoples in the face of centralizing and globalizing logics.

Husband of novelist Corinna Bille, friend of Gustave Roud and René-Guy Cadou, Chappaz belongs to that constellation of regional poets – a term that must be understood in its noblest sense – who understood that the universal is only gained by delving deeply into the particular. There is something of Peguy in this relationship to the native land as a theological as well as geographical place. There is also a form of political ecology avant la lettre: this poet did not defend nature as an abstraction, but as a concrete soil, as a transmitted heritage and a promise made to future generations. This collection invites us to understand that poetry is also a geopolitics of the everyday. Each poem is a held border, a piece of the world torn from oblivion. In a century where local identities regain strength and voice against the homogenizing erasures, Maurice Chappaz’s voice resonates with striking relevance.

Tigrane Yégavian