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.

With the publication if 1960 of Les Centurions, Jean Lartéguy's name became almost overnight something of a household name in France. Opinions vary on the literary worth of Lartéguy's oeuvre, but there can be no doubt that during the sixties he was among the most widely read novelists in France as well as one of the most prolific, publishing nine novels, a half-dozen book length reportages and countless newspaper columns.

Lartéguy 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.

His four most famous novels

The Mercenaries, The Centurions, and The Praetorians, formed a loosely connected trilogy about the struggles and tribulations of mostly heroic French paratroopers; a fourth novel, the 1960 The Bronze Drums, although independent of the others, fits into the same context, focusing, however, on the wars and phony wars in Laos, a component of the French colony of Indochina. A 1966 film called Lost Command, starring Anthony Quinn and Alain Delon, was quite faithful to The Centurions. But, as Rieff writes in his review cited above:

It was hardly surprising that rootless Paris cosmopolitans, homosexuals, self-serving politicians, and traitorous leftists tended to be the villains in Larteguy's books, and far more so than the revolutionaries whom his commandos were fighting. But even the regular French army did not escape his scorn. "I'd like to have two armies," he once wrote... "the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight."

Torture

In The Centurions the protagonists are French paratroopers who have been captured by the Viet Minh after their disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They are subjected to months of intensive pro-communist indoctrination (or "brainwashing"), which they pretend is successful. They are, however, only learning the techniques of their captors in order to be able to put them to their own use for they have been greatly impressed by how the communists have used them to indoctrinate their entire population. Released and returned to France, they find themselves a few years later fighting the Algerian rebels. Having used the Viet Minh techniques to completely retrain a paratroop brigade, the protagonists then begin to use some of the other techniques they learned in Indochina. As Kaplan continues:

In the case of Larteguy's heroes, those "tricks," as he called them so disingenuously, included the lavish use of torture. Indeed, one of the principal characters in The Centurions, Captain Boisfeuras, was loosely modeled on Brigadier General Pierre Aussarresses, a hero of the French Resistance and a career officer who became one of the leading torturers in what came to be known as the Battle of Algiers, and whose frank defense in his memoirs of the crimes he and his comrades committed caused a scandal in France in 2001.