THE TRAGIC END OF FRENCH ALGERIA - The true testimony of a young military reporter

Born in Paris in 1938, Jean-Baptiste Ferracci lived through the end of the Second World War in the capital, passing through events in his childhood that hardened him. At the end of 1957, he managed to enter the daily press as a reporter-photographer at the newspaper L'Aurore. He then covered, between news items and magazine features, the major events that shook French political life in 1958: the fall of the Fourth Republic and the rise to power of General de Gaulle, with one obsession: to be there to "make the front page".

In January 1959, he was called up to the 1er Choc at Calvi. Arriving in Algeria in June, he took part in operations in the Hodna and on the Tunisian border. Assigned in September as a reporter to the armed forces weekly Bled, he covered the "events in Algeria" both in the field and in the cities, where in Algiers he narrowly escaped death during the shooting at the barricades on 24 January 1960. Alongside our soldiers, moving from unit to unit or during operations whose accounts he shares with us, he travelled throughout Algeria, grew attached to the country he left in a hurry, released from his military obligations during the generals' putsch at the end of April 1961.

He then returned to his job as a reporter in the national press to cover, amid the ordinary flow of current events, the riots that bloodied Paris, the violent actions of the OAS, and the major trials of the generals and the "lost soldiers". After the Évian Accords in March 1962, his newspaper sent him back to Algeria to report on the unimaginable tragedies that followed the ceasefire: the sealing off of Bab-el-Oued, the shooting on the rue d'Isly, the tragic exodus of the French from Algeria, the anti-European rampage of 5 July in Oran, the massacre of the harkis.

This vivid chronicle of a turbulent era, which at times takes on the feel of a novel, offers the reader a unique perspective: that of a young reporter, both civilian and military, whose daily life at the heart of events that generations who did not live through them will discover sixty years on. Those who experienced them painfully will find themselves in these pages.

Jean-Baptiste Ferracci is the author of several works, including in 2007 Images vécues de l'Algérie en guerre, winner of the Prix Algérianiste 2008, prefaced by Hélie de Saint Marc, and L'Adieu – 1962 : Le tragique exode des Français d'Algérie, in 2012.