After attending secondary school in Paris, Alain Savary graduated with degrees in law and political science, then qualified as a naval staff officer at the École du Commissariat de la Marine.

He participated in the Battle of France as a member of the naval staff, then travelled to Britain where, on 8 August 1940, he enlisted in the Free French Naval Forces (FNFL). With the rank of sub-lieutenant, he became aide-de-camp to the FNFL commander, Admiral Muselier. After the territory of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon sided with Free France, he was appointed as its governor, with the rank of lieutenant.

In June 1943, Savary was sent to Tripolitania, first on the naval staff, then as commander of the 2nd Squadron, 1st Regiment of Naval Fusiliers, which became an armoured reconnaissance regiment incorporated in the 1st Free French Division. With his unit, he took part in the Italian campaign, the Provence landings and the liberation of France, before being appointed to represent the Companions of Liberation on the Provisional Consultative Committee in October 1944.

In 1945, he was assigned to the Ministry of the Interior and thus embarked on a career as a senior civil servant and politician.

General secretary of the Office for German and Austrian Affairs in 1946, then councillor of the French Union, deputy for Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon and Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs, he was the first secretary of the Socialist Party from 1969 to 1971. Deputy for Haute-Garonne (1973-81) and chairman of the Midi-Pyrénées Regional Council (1974-81), he served as Minister for Education from 1981 to 1984.

Alain Savary was an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur and a Companion of Liberation, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 (with three citations), the Medal of the Resistance and the Silver Star (United States).

Source : MINDEF/SGA/DMPA

The son of a notable Mpongwe family, Charles N’Tchoréré was a student at the Ecole Montfort. Forced to enter the world of employment, he occupied a sales post in Cameroon.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, he left his German colony and returned to Gabon. In 1916, he voluntary enlisted to fight on the front line. At the end of the war, he decided to pursue a career in the military. Appointed to warrant officer in 1919, he fought in Morocco. After joining the officers’ training academy in Fréjus, he left at the rank of major in 1922. Sent to the Levant, Lieutenant N’Tchoréré was gravely wounded during operations in Syria. He was cited in 1925 to the Order of the Division and decorated with Croix de Guerre with a silver star.

Following a brief interlude working at the ministry of war, he asked to be sent to Sudan. In Kati he took the command of the out-of-ranks company of the 2nd RTS (Regiment of Senegalese Tirailleurs), at the same time as being headmaster at the army children’s school.

Promoted to Captain in 1933, he was appointed to the 1st RTS in Saint-Louis (Senegal) where he again was at the head of the school for troop children.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, he requested to take command of a battalion of Gabonese volunteers. Assigned to the Camp de Sauge, near Bordeaux, he was sent to the front on the Somme River where he took command of the 7th company of the 53rd RICMS (Mixed Colonial Senegalese Infantry Regiment). On 7 June, entrenched in the village of Airaines, near Amiens, Captain N’Tchoréré and his men, overwhelmed by German attacks, were taken prisoner after days of fierce resistance. However, a German officer refused to treat N’Tchoréré as an officer and when he refused to fall in line with the black enlisted soldiers, he was shot point blank.

For his conduct during the campaign in France, Captain N’Tchoréré was posthumously cited to the Order of the Division in October 1940 and then to the Order of the Army Corps in August 1954 and decorated with the Croix de Guerre with the silver gilt star attachment.

The 1957-1959 graduating year of the training academy for officers from overseas territories took the name Captain N’Tchoréré.

Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908 and served first in Morocco and then, during World War I, in the Mediterranean, before joining the Carmelite Order in 1920.

As a reservist he was mobilised in 1939 and assigned to staff headquarters in Cherbourg before being promoted to corvette commander. Taken prisoner on 19 June 1940, he escaped on the 22nd and joined General de Gaulle, who named him chief of defence staff for the Free French Naval Forces. Frigate Captain Thierry d'Argenlieu took part in the rallying operations in Africa in the autumn of 1940. Called back to London in July 1941, he was appointed France’s High Commissioner for the Pacific, where he notably presided over rallying the support of Wallis and Futuna in 1942. After taking part in the Casablanca Conference, he was named commander of the Naval Forces in Great Britain on 19 July 1943. On 14 June 1944, on board the Combattante, he brought General de Gaulle to France and accompanied him all the way to Paris, which they entered on 25 August 1944.

Named Vice Admiral in December 1944, Thierry d'Argenlieu was entrusted with the highest functions from the end of World War II to 1947, including the position of France’s High Commissioner and Commander in Chief for Indochina between August 1945 and March 1947, before returning to the Carmelite Order.

Reverend Father Louis de la Trinité, Admiral Thierry d'Argenlieu, received the honours of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and Companion of the Liberation. He was notably awarded the Médaille Militaire, the War Cross 1939-1945 with three palms, the War Cross for Foreign Operational Theatres with a palm and the Résistance Medal with a rosette.

Mustafa Kemal was born in Salonika, Macedonia, on 19 May 1881.

After graduating from military high school and the military academy in Istanbul, he was appointed Staff Captain in 1905 before being assigned to the Fifth Army based in Damascus, Syria, fighting against the Druzes. At the same time, he formed a small opposition society, called Vatan ve Hürriyet (Motherland and Liberty). In Autumn 1907, he was appointed Senior Captain of the Third Army in Salonika, where he met the Committee of Union and Progress and the Young Turks who opposed the regime which re-established the Constitution in 1876. In April 1909, he became Chief of Staff under General Mahmud Shevket, commander of the army put in place by constitutionalist officers to combat the uprising in Istanbul led by the defenders of absolutism. 

He made a name for himself in December 19911, in Libya, during the Italo-Turkish war, winning the Battle of Tobruk before he took military command of Derna, in March of the following year. However, Montenegro having declared war on Turkey in October, he returned to take part in the first Balkan war which saw Turkey fighting against Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Chief of Staff in Gallipoli, he forced back the Bulgarian offensive. He was made military attaché to Sofia in 1913.

In November 1914, Turkey joined the war fighting alongside Germany. As Lieutenant Colonel, Mustafa Kemal was tasked with forming the 19th infantry division and made a reputation for himself during the German-Turkish counter-offensive which aimed to prevent the French and British troops landing in the Dardanelles Strait. Pushing back the allied assaults, he claimed a major victory on the Anafarta front in August 1915. Promoted to general, in 1916 he took command of the 16th army corps in the Caucasus then of the 2nd army in Diyarbakir. Confronting the Russian troops, he took Mus and Bitlis. Recalled to Syria, where he served under German General Erich von Falkenhayn, he was given command of the 7th army. When he returned to Istanbul in autumn 1917, he accompanied the crown prince Vahidettin on an official trip to Germany. He returned to Syria again in August 1918 where he took order of the 7th army against the British until the signing of the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918.

After the armistice and in opposition to the occupation and dismemberment of Turkey, he established an organised national resistance movement.

Appointed as general inspector of the northern and north-eastern armies in May 1919, he was tasked with assuring the security of the Samsun region, where Turkish, Greek and Armenian populations were fighting, and ordered the forces against the Greek troops which landed in Smyrna. 

Following disagreements with the Sultan’s politics, he made an announcement putting the Turkish War of Independence in motion, in the town of Amasya on 22 June 1919. He then called for national conferences to be held in Erzurum and Sivas in July and September respectively. Finally, the meeting of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara on 23 April 1920 resulted in the formation of a national government of which Assembly President Mustafa Kemal was elected as leader. 

Securing the withdrawal of the French from Cilecia and Armenia’s return of the occupied territories, he also succeeded in driving the Greeks out of Anatolia, importantly leading and winning the Battle of Dumlupinar (30 August 1922) and signing the Armistice of Mudanya on 11 October 1922.

In the meantime, the Sultan accepted on 10 August 1920 the Treaty of Sèvres which considerably shrank the Turkish Empire. Mustafa Kemal fought against this treaty and successes in having the Allies revise the terms. On 24 July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne put an end to the Armenian and Greek claims and recognised Turkish sovereignty across the entire national territory.

Having got this far, Mustafa Kemal went even further, introducing major political, economic and social reforms to bring Turkey into the modern age. The sultanate was abolished (1 November 1922) and the Republic declared on 29 October 1923. Elected President, he made Ankara the capital, incorporated secularism into the constitution and set the country on the path to economic development. In line with the law of 1934 enforcing Turkish citizens to adopt a surname, he took the name Atatürk, meaning “Father of all the Turks”

He died on 10 November 1938 in Istanbul.

Alphonse Juin, son of a gendarme, was born in Bône, Algeria, on 16 December 1888. After his studies in Constantine and later in Algiers, he was admitted to Saint-Cyr in 1909. He graduated at the head of his class –the "de Fès" class, in 1912 – the same year as Charles de Gaulle. He chose to join the Algerian Tirailleurs. Assigned to Morocco at the end of 1912, Second Lieutenant Juin took part in the pacification operations in the country.

On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France. Lieutenant Juin joined the front with the Moroccan troops. In September 1914, he took part in the Battle of the Marne. Seriously wounded on the Champagne front in March 1915, he partially lost the use of his right arm. Captain in 1916, he joined the 5th battalion of Moroccan Tirailleurs at the Chemin des Dames. In February 1918, he completed army staff training at Melun before being seconded to the French military mission to the American army in October and assigned to developmental training courses for the liaison officers of the American Expeditionary Force.

He earned the certificate of the École Supérieure de Guerre in 1921 and served in Tunisia before returning to Morocco at the end of 1923, where he took part in the Rif Campaign. He returned to France with Maréchal Lyautey in the autumn of 1925 and worked under his orders at the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre. Promoted to the rank of Battalion Chief in 1926, he left for the 7th Algerian Tirailleurs regiment in Constantine the following year.

In 1929 he was put in charge of the military staff offices of the Resident-General of Morocco, Lucien Saint, and played an active role in the last phase of the Atlas pacification plan. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in March 1932, he became a professor of general tactics at the École Supérieure de Guerre in 1933 before being assigned second in command at the 3rd Zouave regiment in Constantine. He took command of this regiment on 6 March 1935. In June, he was promoted to Colonel. In 1937, he was assigned to the service of the Resident-General of Morocco, General Noguès, and also took courses at the Centre des Hautes Études Militaires.

Named Brigadier General on 26 December 1938, he was assigned to mobilisation at staff headquarters for the North Africa theatre of operations. As the situation in Europe was worsening, he was in Algiers preparing measures relative to raising divisions in Algeria and Tunisia. With the declaration of war in September 1939, he asked to serve in metropolitan France. The following 4 December, he took up command of the 15th Motorised Infantry Division. When the German forces launched their offensive in the west on 10 May 1940, his division entered Belgium, where it fought remarkably at Gembloux on 14 and 15 May. Further to the south, German troops broke through the front at Sedan. Juin received an order to pull back. He successively defended Valenciennes and the outskirts of Lille, providing cover for the retreat 1st French Army toward Dunkirk. He was captured in Lille on 30 May 1940 and imprisoned at Königstein fortress. Named Major General during his captivity, he was released in June of 1941 at Maréchal Pétain’s request as a specialist of North Africa. Named deputy to the Commanding General of the troops in Morocco on 16 July 1941, he was promoted to General of the Army Corps and replaced General Weygand at the head of the North Africa forces on the following 20 November. For the Army of Africa, he pursued the policy adopted by his predecessor: "defence against everybody" (both Axis and Allied forces).

On 8 November 1942, the British and Americans landed in Algeria and Morocco. Juin, who was not informed of the operation, was arrested in Algiers by members of the local resistance movement. The authorities quickly took back control of the city. Juin was freed and intervened to obtain a cease-fire between the landing forces and the French troops. Back in the war on the Allied side, the Army of Africa then participated in taking back France’s national territory, with Tunisia as the first theatre of operations. During this campaign (November 1942 – May 1943), General Juin commanded the French Army Detachment and was named Army General on 25 December 1942. He held the position of acting French Resident-General in Tunisia starting on 8 May 1943. During the summer, he set up the French Expeditionary Corps that he led into the Italian Campaign. After several successful battles, on the Pantano in December 1943, on the Rapido and at Belvedere in January 1944, he was victorious at Garigliano on 13 May, opening up the way to Rome for the Allies. He then moved north to Sienna and northern Tuscany. Juin left the French Expeditionary Corps and Italy in August.

Named general chief of the national defence staff under General de Gaulle, Head of the Provisional Government, he entered liberated Paris on 25 August alongside the General. As France’s liberation continued, he dedicated himself to reorganising the French armed forces to enable them to play a full role at the end of the operations. At the same time, as a military expert, he carried out many missions, notably to Moscow in December 1944 where he took part in the negotiations on the future Franco-Soviet pact and to the United States in April of 1945 for the foundation of the United Nations. In April 1946, General Juin was sent to the Far East to negotiate the withdrawal of Chinese troops occupying northern Indochina.

In 1947, Juin returned to North Africa where he was appointed to the position of France’s Resident-General in Rabat, Morocco. The situation in the Far East continued to deteriorate, however, and in October 1950, the government sent him on a new mission to Indochina. Inspector general of the French armed forces in January 1951, he took on command of the allied forces in the Central Europe sector the following September under the Atlantic Alliance. His functions put him in the centre of domestic and international problems: France’s place in the Atlantic Alliance, the debate on the European Defence Community (EDC), the movement of the North African countries toward independence, the war in Indochina, etc. At the same time, he was promoted to the rank of Maréchal de France on 7 May 1952 and was admitted to the Académie Française on 26 June.

In February 1957, he published his first book, “Le Maghreb en Feu”, and then dedicated himself to writing his Memoires and various books.

Maréchal Juin died on 27 January 1967.

He had received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and held the Médaille Militaire, the War Cross 1914-1918, the War Cross 1939-1945, the War Cross for Foreign Operational Theatres, the Colonial Medal for Morocco and Tunisia, as well as many foreign decorations.

In May of 1927, L’oiseau blanc, the plane flown by Charles Nungesser and François Coli, disappeared over the Atlantic. This accident put an end to the life of one of the “Flying Aces” of the Great War.

Charles Nungesser was born in Paris on 15 March 1892. He was a daredevil from childhood, with a passion for mechanics, driving race cars and flying airplanes.

In 1907, after studying at the école des Arts et Métiers, Charles Nungesser travelled to South America.

He worked as a mechanic in Buenos Aires for an engine importer, participating in one of the first automobile rally raids in the Andes in 1909. He became part of the aviation world, showing off his talents as a pilot at an air show and during many flights over Uruguay and Argentina.

When the Great War broke out, Nungesser returned to France and joined a cavalry regiment.

He took part in the battle of the borders but was surrounded. He managed to get back to the French lines on 3 September 1914 after intercepting a German army staff car, killing the four officers riding in it and crossing the entire region occupied by the Germans at high speed.

This act of bravery earned him the French Médaille Militaire.

But Nungesser, who dreamt of aviation, asked to enlist in the air force. On 22 January 1915, he started training and on 8 April obtained his pilot’s licence. He was assigned to the 106th bomber squadron based in Saint-Pol, near Dunkirk, and flew his first mission over occupied Flanders on 11 April, flying a Voisin 3.

On the 26th, Nungesser engaged in his first dogfight against a German Albatros. His Voisin was hit four times, but he brought the plane back to the base. He received an army commendation for his exploits.

Nungesser was named warrant officer on 5 July and went to Nancy with his wing. He shot down his first enemy aircraft in the night of 30-31 July.

Wounded, he returned to the front to continue his missions

After an advanced training course for fighter missions, Charles Nungesser joined the N65 fighter squadron, based in Nancy, in November. It was during this period that he painted the fuselage of his Nieuport with his legendary coat of arms: a black heart with a silver skull and crossbones above a coffin with burning torches on either side.

During the Battle of the Somme in September 1916, Nungesser achieved the feat of shooting down three enemy planes in the same day. In December, his twentieth victory earned him an army commendation and the Military Cross.

Wounded and discharged, he nonetheless received an authorisation to continue flying and shot down two enemy planes on 1 May 1917. On 16 August he scored his thirtieth victory. But due to his injuries, his health began to fail, notably after he was seriously injured in a car accident in which Pochon, his mechanic, was killed. Nonetheless, Lieutenant Nungesser was back on the front in December.

When he shot down his thirty-sixth plane on 5 June 1918, he received another commendation as well as France’s Legion of Honour, declaring, “After this, I can die now!”

After another hospital stay, Nungesser returned to the front on 14 August.

On the 15th, he scored his forty-fifth and last victory.

When the war was over, Charles Nungesser agreed to set up a flight school in Orly. But this great athlete and daredevil had in mind a project to fly across the Atlantic.

On 8 May 1927, L’oiseau blanc, the plane flown by Nungesser and Coli, a comrade in arms, took off from Le Bourget, headed for the North American continent. He was never seen again.

“I was twenty. I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of your life.” These words were written by a young man, Paul Nizan, aged twenty-six at the time. They introduced his first book published in 1931, Aden, Arabie, an extremely inflammatory pamphlet against colonialism, which set the tone for his future work: open, controversial and intentionally despairing.  Waving the flag of mutiny and guided by the principles of communism, Paul Nizan, throughout his short career, relentlessly assailed the established order, ferreted out the failings of bourgeois society and watched out for the harbingers of history. 

Born on 7 February 1905 in Tours to a middle class family, his father had previously worked in rail before the war, at 19 years of age Paul joined the Ecole Normale Supérieure, one of France’s elite universities. His fellow students in his graduating year included philosophers and writers Ray Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre. On reading Aden, Arabie, Sartre, his inseparable friend who was always confused with him (one had a divergent strabismus and one a convergent strabismus), described him as "absorbed in studying his fingernails and releasing his violence with a sly and underhand serenity." But this apparent coolness, this brilliant demonstration of a charming dandy whose lilac outfits and concise way of speaking sent a tremble of excitement running through the ENS student ranks, belied his secret wounds.

"My only original trait is that periodically I suffer from depression," he once confided when chatting to the woman who would later become his wife, Henriette Alphen. "I’m neither joyful nor desperate, but I’ll admit during the main course that life doesn’t make any sense, and during dessert that nobody should be surprised if one day I enter the regular clergy.” Nizan would thus spend entire days in complete silence unless he ran away suddenly only to reappear a few nights later, haggard-looking, declaring his affiliations for somewhere between the extreme right and communism, and then discovered a passion for cinema. Tormented by a profound discontentment that gave him not a moment’s peace, obsessed by death, disgusted by the “official practice of philosophy”, he left to go to Aden, in Yemen, as a private tutor for an English family. Aden, “a compressed version of Europe” would be the opportunity for him to find his political consciousness. He returned a year later and opted for Marxism, the only concrete solution to his revolt. By late 1927, he had joined the French Communist Party. He was almost 23 and had a wife, one child, soon to be two, and the highest diploma for teaching philosophy.

A fervent militant, he stood as a candidate for the French Communist Party in the 1932 legislative elections in Bourg-en-Bresse, where he’d been teaching philosophy for a year. He then went on to pursue a career in literature and journalism and worked as editor in chief of the avant-garde magazine Bifur, which brought attention to Michaux, Sartre and Joyce; a literature critic at L’Humanité where he supported Céline, Breton and Lacan, and foreign politics correspondent for Ce Soir, then directed by Aragon. Between Moscow, where he was staying to organise the International Writers Congress, to Brest, the site of bloody riots as the Front Populaire grew in popularity, passing through England and Spain, the latter a few months before the Civil War broke, he was always on the front line.  A passionate international reporter, he still managed to pursue his literary career and published essays (Les Chiens de garde, Les Matérialistes de l'Antiquité) and novels (Antoine Bloyé, Le Cheval de Troie), one after the other, all to critical acclaim. In 1938, La Conspiration won the Interallié Prize. Ironically, only the French Communist Party remains somewhat reserved and even very critical with regard to his literary corpus since his publications could never be described as orthodox and did not toe the French Communist party line at the time. 

In 1939, his last publication Chronique de Septembre presented a detailed analysis of the negotiation mechanisms employed between Hitler, Daladier, Chamberlain and Mussolini that led to the Munich Agreement and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia.  He was surprised to learn of the German-Soviet Pact between Stalin and Hitler during his holidays in Ajaccio.

He immediately returned to Paris, impatient to find out the party position. The French Communist Party in fact approved the Pact. Faithful to his beliefs and his anti-fascist convictions, Nizan publically resigned from the FCP in September 1939.

Mobilised, he continued to militantly campaign on the front, passionately discussing his position with his fellow men.

Posted in Lille as an interpreter for the British army, he was killed on 23 May 1940 when the Germans attacked Dunkerque. He is buried at the national cemetery La Targette in Neuville-Saint-Vaast.

(Saint-Rémy-en-Provence, 1604-Paris, 1665) 

Blaise François Pagan, a French army engineer and Vauban's teacher, founded France's first fortification school with Errard de Bar-le-Duc and Antoine Deville. He wrote L'Art de la fortification, where he incorporated the bastion into the fortification's ground plan. Blaise François, Comte de Pagan, was born in Saint-Rémy-en-Provence, near Avignon.

His family, of Neapolitan origin, was a branch of the house of Luynes. At a very young age he entered into the service of Louis XIII as an army engineer. The young nobleman participated in the siege of Caen and the battle of Ponts-de-Cé in 1620, the sieges of Saint-Jean-d'Angély and Clérac in 1621 and, in 1622, the capture of Navarreins and Montauban, where he lost his left eye. In 1623 he was an engineering officer during the siege of Nancy. Pagan won fame during the 1629 siege of Suse when he led French troops across the barricades surrounding the town. During the Thirty Years War he worked with Deville at the sieges of Corbie, Landrecies and Hesdin. Pagan also participated in the sieges of La Rochelle and served in Italy, Picardy and Flanders.

Pagan went blind in 1642. He was promoted to maréchal-de-camp, but abandoned his military career and spent his retirement studying mathematics, history, geography, astronomy and the art of fortification. In his Treatise on Fortifications (1645), Pagan described where to locate the most exposed bastions' salients in order to adapt them better to the terrain. Building fortification works outside the walls, he argued, would help space out deep defence and slow down an attack on the main fort. The bastions' flanks are perpendicular to the line of defence to obtain perfect reciprocal flanking. From that point of view he differed from Deville, who maintained that bastions were just added, isolated forward works later connected to the fort. Heavy artillery would ensure defence. He recommended up to 30 cannons per bastion on three levels. The outside included a covered walkway with a small parade ground on the counterscarp (principle of active defence). He advised using the space between the couvre-faces and main wall for the surrounding villages' residents to camp in. His ideas remained theoretical until Vauban incorporated them into his first defence system.

Pagan was also an astronomer and conceived a theory of the planets. He presented his work in Théorèmes des planètes (1657), Les Tables astronomiques (1658) and Astrologie naturelle (1659). A mathematician as well, he wrote Théorèmes géométriques in 1651. His other writings include Relation de la rivière des Amazones (1658) and Œuvres posthumes (1669). In 1652 Pagan was sentenced to eight years in the Bastille for "boasting that he would make the King die by magic". He spent the rest of his life there, forgotten by the king and Cardinal Mazarin. "I am a sick, old man of 78 years..." he wrote in his last letter, dated 28 November 1665. "One day Your Excellency... will learn that I was found phtisical and frozen to death; in this weather I have no fire in my room, and what's more I am barely dressed. I beseech Your Excellency to remember that I have been here 13 years and 12 days, and to beg the King our lord, for the love of God, to give me liberty so that I may go home."

Hero of Free France

Author of a very successful book, "Le Grand Cirque" (The Big Show), Pierre Clostermann died on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 in Montesquieu-des-Albères. He was 85.

Born on 28 February 1921 in Curitiba, Brazil, son of a diplomat, Pierre Clostermann joined the Free French in England on 18 March 1942 and served in the "Alsace" fighter group.

Captain at the end of the war, he added up over 2,000 flying hours, nearly 600 battle flights, 33 recorded victories and 5 probable victories, as well as a large amount of material destruction: 225 lorries, 72 locomotives, 5 tanks, 2 motor torpedo boats.

Named “Companion of the Liberation” on 21 January 1946, he began a career in politics. He was re-elected 8 times, notably in the Bas-Rhin department. In 1951, he was elected MP for the Marne, then MP for the Seine (1956-1958), MP for the Seine-et-Oise (1962-1967) and for the Yvelines (1967-1969).

Promoted commander, Clostermann served in Algeria where he distinguished himself as lieutenant colonel of the French Air Force (1956-1957). He served as Vice President of the Commission of National Defence and the Armed Forces in the French National Assembly between 1963 and 1969.

Alongside his career as an engineer, he undertook a career as a successful author, notably telling the story of his experiences in World War II in “Le Grand Cirque” (The Big Show), in 1948, a book that sold over 3,000,000 copies.

(Born 7 February 1892: Budapest, Hungary – Died 3 June 1964: Val-de-Grâce, Paris)

Born with the army in his blood, Raoul Magrin-Vernery happily described how at seven years old he wanted to leave his family and enlist with the Boers...

The son of a French teacher posted in Vienna, Anne Magrin, Raoul Charles was taken under the wing of a Hungarian count who looked after his intellectual and moral education. Raised in the cosmopolitan milieu of Austro-Hungarian society, the young man acquired an ease for adapting to his surroundings that would serve him throughout his lifetime. When he returned to France he was raised by his grandmother in Avison in the Doubs. After studying at the Victor Hugo school in Besançon then in a seminary college in Ornans, driven by his life-long dream to wear a military uniform, he ran away at 15 to enlist in the Foreign Legion. Too young to be recruited, he returned to school and finally embarked on his military career on 10 October 1912 when he joined the Ecole Militaire Spéciale, France's foremost military academy, in Saint-Cyr.

Graduating in 1914, in Montmirail’s year, he was propelled into the eye of the storm in the 60th Infantry Regiment: Plaine d'Alsace, Morte-Fontaine (Oise), fighting on the Ourcq and Aisne rivers, a volunteer in the Aumetzwiller offensive (Moselle), the counter-attack in the Bois d'Haumont (Bois des Caures), the offensive on the Somme, Ypres, the battle for the Butte de Tahure in Champagne.

Exhibiting extraordinary bravery, he was gassed, wounded six times and cited 11 times, including seven times to the Order of the Army. Despite having 90% disability, he was promoted captain on 24 June 1916 with the 260th IR and received the Legion of Honour.

During peace time, he was sent to overseas theatres of operations, in Odessa (1919), Syria-Palestine (1920) where his bravery earned him a new citation and the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honour, in Algeria and in Morocco and then in Tonkin with the 5th Foreign Infantry Regiment. It was these missions that allowed him to fulfil his life’s ambition: to join the Foreign Legion, which he did in 1924.

On 23 February 1940, he quit the post of commander of the 4th Foreign Infantry Regiment in Morocco to take the helm of two marching battalions of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, a contingent of the expedition to Norway. On 5 May he landed in Ballangen, freed Bjervik and Narvik, liberated 60 allied prisoners and captured 590 Germans. The expedition was cut short and Magrin-Vernerey was sent to Brest on 15 June. When the armistice was declared, he left France with Captain Koenig and 500 of his men to fight under the command of General de Gaulle. Promoted to colonel, he became known as Monclar (the name of a town in Tarn-et-Garonne, his family's birthplace) for Free France. In December 1940, his 13th Demi-Brigade started its journey to Africa, to Dakar, Freetown and Cameroon where he wrote a small treatise on his theory of combat, Catéchisme du Combat. The brigade was sent to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and took part in the campaign in Eritrea alongside the Garbay battalion, taking the capital Massawa, and capturing the admiral and the general commanders-in-chief of the Italian forces. In Syria (June 1941), however, as well as refusing to participate in the rallying campaign in Gabon, he refused to join because he couldn't stand the idea of a fratricidal struggle within the French army. Appointed to brigade general in 1941, he held various commands in Great Britain and then in the Levant. He was named Companion of the Liberation.

After various missions in Algeria, Pakistan and Indochina, he was named inspector of the Foreign Legion on 25 June 1948.

Appointed to general of the army corps on 20 February 1950, and having almost reached the age limit, rather than retire Monclar volunteered to join the command of the French Battalion of Korea which he commanded until 1951 against the communist troops in North Korea.

He retired in Neuilly, on 21 October 1962, a living military legend and crowned with the glory of seventeen national and twenty-one international decorations. He was the successor to General Kienst as the Governor of the Invalides,

He held this post until his death in 1964.