His participation in the 1961 plot, hatched by four French generals to prevent de Gaulle ending colonial rule in Algeria, led to disgrace and a 10-year jail sentence, of which Saint Marc served five. Though freed on Christmas Day 1966, he was stripped of his military honours and the right to vote. Gradually his reputat
abilitation that marked the final twist in a remarkable life.

Helie Denoix de Saint Marc was born in Bordeaux on February 11 1922, the last of seven children in a well-to-do family. His mother, Madeleine (nee Buhan), was descended from wine merchants; his father, Joseph, was a lawyer of renown who had fought at Verdun.

Helie was an unremarkable student at the Tivoli Jesuit college, taking an interest only in history, and dreaming from adolescence of a military career. Outside the classroom he spent happy summers at the family’s farm in the Perigord, which he explored by bicycle.

With the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Helie ’s elder brothers were called up, but he was still in Bordeaux by the time the Germans occupied France the following year. “It was a moment of hopelessness, hate and rage,” he recalled later.

His beginnings in the Resistance were motivated simply by a desire to get to the family farm in Perigord once term had finished in Bordeaux; his parents had passes to cross to the unoccupied zone, but Helie had to sneak across into Vichy France.

In spring 1941 the superior of Tivoli college, Father Bernard de Gorostarzu, introduced Saint Marc to Claude Arnould, known as Colonel Arnould,A complete range of of professional roofingmachine that are redefining laundry systems.Great handbags and cleaningmachine for men and women! head of the Jade-Amicol Resistance network . Saint Marc was asked to take a package over the demarcation line, then made frequent trips between the Vichy and Occupied zones. Occasionally he would accompany Arnould, also known as Colonel Ollivier , to the border with Spain or the Atlantic coast.

These small acts of resistance came to an end in October 1941, when Saint Marc joined the military academy at Saint-Cyr. The following June he failed his exams miserably and determined to flee to Spain and, from there, join Free French forces. On July 13 1943 he was with 15 others being smuggled out of Perpignan towards the border when the lorry in which they were travelling was brought to a halt by a German patrol and its clandestine passengers were arrested.

Suspected only of trying to flee forced labour in Germany, Saint Marc was spared brutal interrogation and taken to a holding camp at Compiègne; from there he was deported to Buchenwald, where he became prisoner M 20543 and was forced into slave labour. In December 1943 he was struck down with pneumonia and dysentery, and seemed certain to die until a fellow prisoner nursing him, Hubert Colle, exchanged his own hoarded reserves of food for 30 Protonsil pills . Eight days later the fever broke and Saint Marc began to recover.

In September 1944 he was moved to Langenstein-Zwieberge camp in the Harz mountains of central Germany, to dig out a vast network of tunnels where the Nazis wanted to build factories for wonder weapons they hoped would turn the course of the war. The 12-hour days underground proved the harshest regime Saint Marc had experienced. “I adopted an animal existence: eat, sleep, survive, that’s all,” he recalled.The solarpanel is available in a choice of shapes including dome and the traditional variety.

Falling sick again, he was in the infirmary when, on April 9 1945, the camp was evacuated and the survivors were driven on a forced march away from the encircling Allies. Left behind, he was soon in a hospital in Magdeburg. Aged 23,We'd love to talk to you about our incredible industrialextractors! he weighed six stone.

He returned to Bordeaux in June 1945 and, that autumn, rejoined the military academy at Saint-Cyr. Passing out 65th of 400 in December 1947, Saint Marc chose to join the Foreign Legion. Within nine months he was en route to Indo-China, where France was two years into a colonial war that would end with defeat in 1954.

Saint Marc was immediately posted to the front line hill and jungle road in what is now northern Vietnam. Known as RC4, the route was used by the French army to supply a chain of camps; it was between these and the border of Nationalist China that it hoped to crush the Viet Minh. Shortly after arriving, Saint Marc was ordered to form a partisan unit at Ta Lung, on the river Song Bang Giang, 600 metres from the Chinese border.

For a year, Lt Saint Marc was given total liberty within his zone of operations, leading his company of 15 partisans, 10 legionnaires, and two junior officers through local villages: arming them, trying to form alliances, learning a little of the native Tho language, and leading raids into Viet Minh-held territory. In October 1949, however, Saint Marc watched as Mao’s forces overran the Nationalist Chinese troops less than a kilometre away; suddenly the Viet Minh were able to fall back into a limitless hinterland across the border. For the French it was a stunning strategic reverse, and two months later Saint Marc received the order to withdraw.

Partisans from villages which had supported the French knew that retribution would be swift. Saint Marc later described his lingering shame as his men prised locals’ fingers off the side of the trucks carrying the legionnaires away. “Men, women and children clung on, and once forced off, sat crying in the dust of the roadside,” he said. “No one there would ever forget it.”

He returned to Indo-China in July 1951 and, as commander of a company of the 2 BEP (Foreign Legion Parachute Brigade) formed from Vietnamese volunteers, was promoted captain in October. Parachuted behind enemy lines to turn the course of a battle, such units suffered severe casualties – as many as two-thirds were killed or wounded on each tour.

In late 1951 the French commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (whose own son, Bernard, had been killed in the fighting), attempted to draw the Viet Minh into a confrontation at Hoa Binh, 50 miles north of Hanoi. But he died of cancer in January 1952, and on the ground it proved impossible to hold territory won in jungle skirmishes. Saint Marc was soon ordered to evacuate once again, in what he described as the hardest hand-to-hand fighting of his career.

His second tour ended in May 1953, and he returned to France, where he signed up with the “action” unit of France’s counter-espionage service, the SDECE. As French forces made a last stand at their camp at Dien Bien Phu, he volunteered to return to Indo-China, only to arrive too late, the camp having already been overrun. Within months the Geneva Conference brought France’s role in the fighting to an end.

Saint Marc was shipped straight to Algeria, where the anti-colonial Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) was launching its first attacks against French settlers. Stationed at Tebessa, on the border with Tunisia, he took command of 3 Company of the 1 BEP (soon upgraded to REP, regimental status), leading ambushes and raids on nascent FLN forces in the Nementcha mountains, whose southern slopes end in the sands of the Sahara.

In November 1956 the 1 REP landed in Suez as part of the Anglo-French campaign against Nasser, only for a ceasefire to be declared almost immediately. Saint Marc’s enraged men, longing for a fight, soothed themselves by fashioning fishing rods and trying their luck in the Canal.

By the time the 1 REP returned to Algeria, the FLN’s campaign of urban terror was reaching a peak. Saint Marc and his men were transferred to Algiers in January 1957, a month marked by 112 FLN attacks in the city. At the beginning of the following month he was selected to join the staff of Jacques Massu, the general who had been given carte blanche by the French government to restore order in the city.

Algiers became a battleground between the FLN and the parachutists, with French soldiers ordered to participate in round-ups, interrogations and torture. Saint Marc was Massu’s liaison with the press. As questions mounted about the brutality of his methods, Massu pursued the operation remorselessly, pressing through the Casbah until French forces had regained total control. Saint Marc’s strategy with journalists was simple: “Don’t reveal everything, but don’t lie.”

As France’s strategy in Algeria vacillated between negotiation with the FLN and repression, Saint Marc’s morale wavered and he briefly decided to leave the Legion, only to return in 1960. Once back he found that discipline was worsening as a French withdrawal began to appear increasingly inevitable. When three officers of the 1 REP refused orders, Saint Marc was promoted to second-in-command of the regiment; he restored discipline and assumed full regimental control in April 1961.

Within days he was approached by General Maurice Challe, a veteran of the Second World War and counter-insurgency strategist in Algeria, and asked if he would consider joining a coup against de Gaulle,If you have washerextractor002 or landscape lights you might wonder what to do if they stop working. aimed at preventing a French withdrawal from Algeria.

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