Henri de Grossouvre’s vocabulary gives him away: hinge, hub, pivot, axis, ferryman. These are words of connection. His mental geography is made not of blocs but of segments joining cities — and a segment, unlike a bloc, can be checked.
France-Germany: from conviction to clear sight
He began with the Franco-German pairing, and he believed in it. In 2003, as the Élysée Treaty approached its fortieth anniversary, he proposed using the moment to build a confederation. In 2005 he named Strasbourg and Alsace as the institutional and symbolic centre of a political relaunch, holding that treaty reform would not be enough: a Franco-German federation is the viable core.
Twenty years on, the tone has changed, and that is what makes the corpus interesting. In Revue Conflits, in March 2024, he describes a contradictory German strategy: public support for Ukraine — Patriot, Leopard — alongside discreetly maintained channels to Moscow. He argues that Berlin outsourced its energy to Russia, its security to the United States and part of its growth to China, and that the Zeitenwende owes more to economic calculation and to Zivilmacht than to geopolitical ambition. This is not a reversal; it is a reading that followed its object.
France-Italy: an argument older than its moment
In November 2021, in an interview with the Club Italie-France, he argued that France and Italy share more common interests in financial matters than either does with Germany and the northern countries, named space and transport as priority fields for cooperation, and stated that Rome remains the spiritual and cultural heart of Europe.
Five years before the Nice op-ed. That chronological detail matters: it establishes that the Paris-Rome axis is not a reaction to the news but a position built over time.
Central Europe, seen from Vienna
From 1998 to 2002 he ran Alcatel’s major accounts for Central Europe and Russia from Vienna. When he wrote about Serbia in 2015 and cast it as a hub between the European Union and Moscow, this was not desk analysis: it was the reading of someone who had worked the region before writing about it.
A bilateral axis has a property that neither blocs nor organisations have: it is falsifiable. One can measure whether the Quirinal Treaty produces effects, whether the Franco-German pairing holds, whether Serbia tips. That is probably why he keeps coming back to it.