An essay published in 2002. An association founded in 2003. And a continental argument running through twenty years of publications. This file separates the three, because confusing them is the first mistake made by those who come new to this work.
Three things bear this name. Distinguishing them is not pedantry: it is what allows each to be judged for what it is.
The book
Paris, Berlin, Moscow: The Path to Independence and Peace was published by L’Âge d’Homme on 1 April 2002. One hundred and sixty-eight pages, with a preface by General Pierre Marie Gallois — the man who persuaded de Gaulle to give France a nuclear deterrent and who theorised French deterrence.
Explicitly within a Europe of nations, the essay argues for a strategic partnership between a restored Franco-German core and Russia, around four named stakes: energy, security, space, and the mastery of advanced technology.
Less than a year later, the joint opposition of France, Germany and Russia to the Iraq war turned those three names into a worldwide headline. The book quickly went out of print, was reissued in French, translated into Italian with Fazi Editore in 2004 — expanded by three chapters written for the occasion — and into Serbian in 2014.
The network
The association was founded in 2003, a year after the book. It is not a political movement. Its mission, as set out in the 2017 press release, is to bring together across party lines those who hold that the countries of western, central and eastern Europe share a common view of the world and common interests with Russia. It gathers public and private decision-makers, figures from the diplomatic world, academics and industrialists.
In August 2017 it became the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Geopolitical Network. Richard Kitaeff, mayor of Gordes and lecturer at Sciences Po, was elected president; Henri de Grossouvre became honorary president. Le Figaro reported the change of leadership in its “Décideurs” column in October 2017, and noted that Jacques Attali, founder of the EBRD, is its patron for France.
The argument
This is the third object, and the most durable. It reduces neither to the book nor to the association.
It was taken up in English as early as 2004 in the Indian academic journal World Affairs, under the title “Paris, Berlin, Moscow: Prospects for Eurasian cooperation”. That article is still cited in 2022 in the bibliography of a Journal of Eurasian Studies study on the concept of “Greater Eurasia”. Eighteen years of latency: that is the most honest measure of a text’s reach.
It was extended in 2017 in the Revue Politique et Parlementaire, where rail infrastructure is named as the first concrete binding agent of continental cooperation. It was taken up again in 2018 with Richard Kitaeff, on a simple observation: the Franco-German pairing alone does not generate enough continental weight.
What the context has changed
This must be said plainly. The conditions in which this argument was set out in 2002, and again in 2018, are not those of today. This file does not pretend otherwise, and it does not retroactively update texts that belong to their moment.
What remains legible, however, is the method: start from material interests — energy, transport, industry, technology — rather than from declarations, and look for the lines that hold. It is that method, more than this particular axis, that reappears applied to Paris-Rome twenty-four years later.
A confusion to avoid
Henri de Grossouvre has no connection with François de Grossouvre (1918-1994), an adviser to François Mitterrand. They are two different people, whom search engines constantly conflate. No element of François de Grossouvre’s biography appears on this site.