Leclerc soon came to agree. “One does not kill ideas with bullets,” he told aides, and he warned superiors that France must avoid a large-scale war. Military action was necessary—troops had to be used to hold cities and lines of communication—but there could be no long-term military solution. Any hope of imposing such a solution would require a vastly larger French fighting force, which Paris was in no position to provide, now or in the foreseeable future. The task of French forces, therefore, would be to reassert French control and thereby give negotiators a base from which to proceed to a
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