Legacy of France’s violent colonial past

 

Alexis Jenni’s historical novel gives graphic explanation on the art of French art of warfare, the legacy of France’s violent colonial past and dramatises the 1990s Lyon : the occupied and liberated France of 1943 to 1945; the savage Indo-Chinese and Algerian insurgencies of the 1950s. Its English translation is done when France’s imperial legacy has stirred passion and polemic in the latest current French elections.   “This is France, this way of death,” Jenni aims to force the present to confront a past still poisoning it.

 

It began with defeat and occupation, redeemed by resistance and liberation. “France would never again be a German whore .. France was manly and mascular now.”

In 1991, French forces joined Operation Desert Storm to oust Saddam Hussien’s forces from Kuwait. “Everything was going wrong. I Just awaited the end. But then I met Victorien Salagnon, a veteran of the great colonial wars of Indochina, Vietnam and Algeria, a commander who had led his soldiers across the globe, a man with blood of others up to his elbows. He said he would teach me to paint; he must have been the only painter in the French Forces, but out there no one cares about such things. I cared, though. In return, he wanted to write his life story. And so he talked, and I wrote, and through him I witnessed the rivers of blood that cut channels through France, I saw the deaths that were as numberless as they were senseless and I began finally to understand the French art of War.”

 The French Art of War by Alexis Jenni translated by Frank Wynne, Atlantic Books £14.99, 613 pages.