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.[1]
Biography
He is the nephew of Émile Osty, a canon noted for having spend much of his life translating the Bible. He obtained a degree in history at Toulouse, then became the secretary of the historian Joseph Calmette.
He volunteered for the French military in Octobre 1939. During the Germany occupation of France he escaped from France in March, 1942, into Spain, where he was interned for nine months. He rejoined the Free French forces as an officer of a group of commandos. He remained on active service for seven years before becoming a captain in the reserves. He received several decorations: The Légion d'Honneur, the Croix de guerre 39-45, the Croix de guerre des théâtres d'opérations extérieures (TOE)with four citations.
He was a war correspondent, particularly for Paris Match), or a participant during many events of the second half of the 20th century including the revolution of Azerbaïdjan, the war in Palestine, the Korean War guerre de Corée (wounded during the battle of Heartbreak Ridge), Indochina, Algeria, then VietNam, various revolutions in Latin America, etc.
He was a reporter for Paris-Presse from 1952 on and won the Prix Albert Londres en 1955.
He is the father of the actress Ariane Lartéguy.
Works
- Themes
Decolonisation, both in his reporting and in novels based on what he saw, particularly the bitterness of the combattants who sacrified for an ideal vision of France, being confronted by the mediocrity and the absence of vision of the politicians of the Fourth Republic.
He particularly explains why the Indochinese populations felt betrayed by the failure of reforms promised just after World War II; also the origins of the SAO (Secret Army Organization, the OAS in French) during the fiasco of the Algerian War.
Also major reporting from around the world in places such as Japan; finally, history, as in "To Die for Jerusalem".
His message is completely nonconformist and out of phase with our days, troublesome or bothering, because he finds himself, like his near-contemporary George Orwell, both anti-communist (while understanding the moral call of its doctrine) and pro-Western, but having at the same time a deep scorn for what the colonial system had become.