The Fury of the Legions

At last a French novel not written by, for, and about left-wing university graduates and their sexual-ideological traumas. Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions deals with that other France about which New York Times readers never hear except as “ultras” and “right-wing extremists.” Yet, this France is real, as real as Lartéguy’s characters, their problems, lives, and tragedies.

The “centurions” are the officers of the Indochina war, of the Suez campaign and Algeria, through whose tortured conscience the decline and the hopes of post-1945 France are reflected. Their drama is foreshadowed by a quotation from Marcus Flavinius, officer of the Legio Augusta, fighting in North Africa some 1800 years ago. The end of the quotation is this: “Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow-citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire. If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on the desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions!” It is this anger, this fury, that the novel explains, makes plausible.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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At last a French novel not written by, for, and about left-wing university graduates and their sexual-ideological traumas. Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions deals with that other France about which New York Times readers never hear except as “ultras” and “right-wing extremists.” Yet, this France is real, as real as Lartéguy’s characters, their problems, lives, and tragedies.

The “centurions” are the officers of the Indochina war, of the Suez campaign and Algeria, through whose tortured conscience the decline and the hopes of post-1945 France are reflected. Their drama is foreshadowed by a quotation from Marcus Flavinius, officer of the Legio Augusta, fighting in North Africa some 1800 years ago. The end of the quotation is this: “Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow-citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the Empire. If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on the desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions!” It is this anger, this fury, that the novel explains, makes plausible.