Word: larteguy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...needn't have. The 1960 bestseller (The Centurions) by Jean Larteguy described with a certain politico-military sophistication how French colonels, beaten in Indo-China, applied terrorist tactics to the struggle for Algeria. From this epic theme, Director Mark Robson has derived one of those big bad action pictures in which the explosions look frighteningly real but unfortunately don't kill off the actors fast enough...
...contention that a revolutionized Army is the key to a new Revolutionary France is wide of the mark. Sartre's contrary theory of involution--that the desperation and violence of the Army is corrupting whatever survives of a healthy France--is, I think, more accurate. Perhaps Larteguy is just when he blames domestic decadence for the impotence of the Army in the colonies; but he does not convince me that it can and must therefore save France...
...fairness, I should say that I doubt anybody could sell me on such a theory. But if anyone could, it certainly wouldn't be Larteguy. The problem, as I suggested above, is that The Centurions is a very bad novel. Larteguy has allowed his venomous feelings towards France and his intoxication with the military to overwhelm his book...
Perhaps in an effort to give them life, Larteguy has granted them all rich and complex lives; but the effect of this maneuver is simply to show up the author's romanticized psychology. In point of fact, The Centurions almost emerges as an argument for more and better sexuality. The identification of "real men" with strong sexuality is not silly, but it makes funny reading in what is otherwise a propagandistic tract...
Besides the soldiers and their women, The Centurions features two journalists, one hard-boiled and opportunist, the other more dreamy and appealing. It doesn't require too much imagination to realize that Larteguy (who writes for Paris-Presse) has there-by introduced himself explicitly into his novel. Evidently, he considers his own personality so complex that he must employ two characters to do justice to it. This would be offensive, except that one finishes The Centurions feeling that its author has only been playing with himself all the way along anyway...