Jean Lartéguy

Jean Lartéguy (1920–2011), the pen name of Lucien Osty, was a French soldier, war correspondent and novelist whose career was shaped by the wars of decolonisation. Born at Maisons-Alfort and raised in Lozère, he joined the Free French forces during the Second World War and served with the Commandos d’Afrique. He later served with the French battalion in the Korean War, where he was seriously wounded. After leaving active service he became a war correspondent, reporting from Korea, Indochina, Algeria and other conflict zones for publications including Paris-Presse and Paris Match. He won the prestigious Prix Albert-Londres for journalism in 1955. His direct experience of soldiers, guerrillas and collapsing colonial regimes became the foundation of much of his fiction.

Lartéguy is best known for novels examining professional soldiers caught in the transition from conventional warfare to insurgency and counter-insurgency. The Centurions follows French paratroopers from defeat and captivity after Dien Bien Phu into the Algerian War, exploring how their experiences in Indochina change their ideas about warfare, loyalty and political power. Its sequel, The Praetorians, continues the story in Algeria and examines the increasingly dangerous relationship between the army and the French state. The Mercenaries also belongs to this broader sequence of novels about soldiers shaped by Korea, Indochina and Algeria. Lartéguy wrote around fifty books altogether, ranging across colonial warfare, revolution and guerrilla conflict in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Although his novels frequently sympathise with the soldiers he knew, they also depict the moral and political damage produced by wars in which military victory and political success are no longer the same thing.