GIGN - WE WERE THE FIRST

On 5 September 1972, the hostage-taking at the Munich Olympic Games revealed the rise of a new form of terrorism for which law enforcement was barely prepared. A few months later, on 3 November 1973, twenty-five gendarmes selected on the basis of their files presented themselves at Maisons-Alfort to undergo a new type of selection process in order to join GIGN No. 1, an elite gendarmerie unit that young Lieutenant Christian Prouteau had been tasked with establishing. None of them really knew what to expect, but the eighteen candidates retained would soon discover that their commanding officer demanded the impossible of them in order to be able to respond to the most extreme situations. Together, they would have to invent everything from scratch to reach an operational level never previously achieved. This is the unvarnished story of the first ten years of the GIGN — the story of eighteen strong-willed men led by an atypical commander. In rising to the challenge of increasingly complex missions, they would also have to convince a few "guardians of the temple" who were resolutely hostile to the very existence of an elite unit within the gendarmerie. For the first time, the protagonists agreed to give their testimony on these formative early years that shaped the identity of the GIGN.