Jean Lartéguy

Jean Lartéguy, born Jean Pierre Lucien Osty in 1920 in the département of Lozère in France, is a French novelist and journalist whose career spans the last half of the 20th century. He is particularly known, both in France and in the English-speaking world, for three novels that he wrote in the late 1950s and early 1960s about French paratroopers fighting first in the final days of the colonial war of Indochina, then in the Algerian war. As David Rieff writes:

his novels [chronicle] and [celebrate] the French paratroopers' fight against Vietnamese and Algerian revolutionaries, first for empire and then for a metropole stretching from Normandy to the Sahara.... These books, which were very skillfully written, had titles such as The Mercenaries, The Centurions, and The Praetorians, all evocative of the comparison that was central to Larteguy's vision: the French troops as latter-day Roman centurions holding the line against the barbarians, exactly as their Roman ancestors had done along Hadrian's Wall. Larteguy's books extolled the self-sacrifice of commando soldiers who were unappreciated or even reviled at home, but were nonetheless the bulwark between la patrie and anarchy.

Biography

The nephew of Émile Osty, a canon noted for a particularly fine translation of the Bible into French, Lartéguy obtained a degree in history at Toulouse, then became the secretary of the historian Joseph Calmette. Volunteering for the French military in October, 1939, just after the start of World War II, he fled the subsequent Germany occupation of France to Spain in March, 1942, where he was interned for nine months. He then rejoined the Free French forces as an officer in a group of commandos and remained on active service for seven years before becoming a captain in the reserves, receiving several decorations: The Légion d'Honneur, the Croix de Guerre 1939-1945, and the Croix de Guerre des Théâtres d'Opérations Extérieures (TOE) with four citations. A reporter for Paris-Presse from 1952 on and a war correspondent for Paris Match, Lartéguy either wrote about or was a direct participant in many of the violent events of the second half of the 20th century, including the revolution in Azerbaijan, the war in Israel/Palestine, the Korean War, where he was wounded during the battle of Heartbreak Ridge, as well as Indochina, Algeria, the renamed Vietnam, and various revolutions in Latin America. The father of the actress Ariane Lartéguy, he won the Albert Londres Prize in 1955.

Themes

In his many books of journalism, non-fiction, and novels based on what he saw, particularly the bitterness of the combatants who sacrificed for an ideal vision of France, being confronted by the mediocrity and the absence of vision of the politicians of the Fourth Republic, Lartéguy has been primarily concerned with the processes and consequences, sometimes tragic, of decolonization. He wrote about why the Indochinese populations felt betrayed by the failure to implement reforms promised just after World War II. He also wrote about the origins of the Secret Army Organization (SAO) (the OAS in French) during and after the fiasco of the Algerian War.

Lartéguy has been, for many decades, a nonconformist out of phase with his times, annoying or provoking because he has been, like his near-contemporary George Orwell, both anti-communist (while understanding the attractions of its doctrine) and pro-Western, but having, at the same time, a deep scorn for what the colonial system had become.