Based on official military documents, the article approaches the adoption of French military doctrines by the Brazilian military in the second half of the 1950s. More exactly, the article deals with the doctrine known as guerre révolutionnaire, whose aim was to defeat the Marxist-Leninist movement, in the context of the Algerian War. Brought to South America initially by the Argentine military, the French ideas have landed in Brazil in 1959, thanks to a lecture read at Escola Superior de Guerra. In the following years, they were adopted as official doctrine by the Brazilian Armed Forces Chiefs of Staff (EMFA). They were also used as ideological ammunition in the juncture preceding the military coup d'état of March 1964 and its influence was felt in the years after the coup. Contrary to what is accepted by the mainstream literature, French writers, not American ones, were the main source of Brazilian military ideas in the sixties.
Armed Forces; Cold War; Military government; Theory of war; The 1964 coup d'état
