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The professionalisation of the army and its involvement a long way from France, at a time when France no longer had any known enemies, has revealed the distinctive feature of the soldier’s profession: a distinctive relationship with death: not so much the death to which the soldier is exposed as the death he may be led to deliver. This singular capacity, which is in actual fact extravagant because it runs counter to our values of civilisation, was genuinely generic, especially with regard to ethics. Written almost 20 years ago, the text reproduced here presents the thoughts of the commander of the Besançon military district/7th db, General Jean-René Bachelet, in December 1997. At the time, we were already at the heart of this issue’s topic and, even if the enemy has reappeared, this reflection has lost nothing of its topicality.