![]() ![]() In secondary schools, even the most liberal history masters underplayed the gruesome details of that conquest as it evolved into full-scale colonisation. ![]() This was enough to whet the imperial appetite: Paris dispatched the Army to Algeria and a retaliatory expedition turned into conquest. We knew that in 1830, the Bey of Algiers had slapped a French consul in the course of an argument about debt. We were the unfortunate, unwilling heirs of French history: the building of the Empire had been sanitised for us by our school books and teachers. Some of us felt we were involved in the wrong conflict, on the wrong side. ![]() We could only nurse our nostalgia, and, as French citizens subject to national service, we were forced to take part in the unsavoury end of the colonial adventure in North Africa. In those easy Manichaean years, not having read Koestler or Orwell, some of us even wished we’d been able to fight with the International Brigades in Spain. We weren’t old enough to have joined either the Free French in Britain or the Resistance against the Nazis in France. I had been called up for 12 months, but like many young Frenchmen of that unlucky generation, I was kept in the Army nearly two and a half years owing to unforeseen ‘events’ in North Africa. In 1954 I was stationed near Versailles, doing my national service with the 93rd Infantry Regiment. ![]()
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