Many of them began their careers by fighting against the Nazis in 1943 or 1944, in the service of a cause about which it was impossible to have doubts. At the end of the war they remained in the Army. They were not to know that they would have almost twenty more years of fighting to do, throughout the slow and bloody death agony of the French colonial Empire. They were young officers, carried along by the wind of history, but, without their being aware of it, the wind changed and began to blow against them.
Following the victory of 1945 all they experienced was an uninterrupted series of defeats; in November 1954, some months after the disaster of Dien Bien Phu, when the Viet Minh had only just released those of them who survived the re-education camps, another war was beginning, which ended eight years later – in spite of electric-shock torture, waterboarding and summary executions – with Algerian independence.
The Algerian War opened a grievous wound in French history which has palpably not healed to this day. But it was not French wounds, nor even history, that interested me; I was only interested in the trajectory these officers followed, as a paradigm of the way in which man, as he plunges into his own inner darkness, loses his soul. I wanted to capture all that is tragic, incomprehensible and appallingly banal about this trajectory. To capture the moment when we open our eyes in horror at the mirror reflecting back at us the very image of everything we have sought to fight against.
And I fear that what Algeria has given to humanity is only one opportunity, among many others, for it to open its eyes in horror at itself.
J. F.