Meet the Frenchman who has shaped the world’s response to coronavirus

Projecting the fight against Covid as a war on a virus – like the war on terror – tells us more about the politician than about the strategy. But in the struggle to halt and extinguish the disease, it is war that has provided us with tools to manage the present crisis. Take ambulances, field hospitals and triage, for instance. All are the products of war, one war in particular and one man in all: Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, the French surgeon who in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars pioneered battlefield medicine and its associated logistics.

President Macron wisely abandoned his martial tone and bid to emulate France’s great war leader Georges Clemenceau in his most recent TV broadcast to the French nation. To have continued the analogy with the First World War would have exposed him to the very criticism heaped on Clemenceau’s predecessors, roundly denounced for poor strategy, lack of munitions (masks, PPE, testing) and inability to connect with French soldiers and citizens.