Roger de Saivre (1908-1964) was a French politician. A supporter of the Révolution nationale, he served as co-Cabinet Secretary to Marshal Philippe Pétain from 1941 to 1942. He was deported to the Dachau concentration camp for his vocal criticisms of the Nazi invaders in 1943. After liberation in 1945, he served as a member of the National Assembly, from 1951 to 1955 representing French Algeria. He was a proponent of the French Empire.
Paul Aussaresses (French: [pɔl osaʁɛs]; 7 November 1918 – 3 December 2013) was a French Army general, who fought during World War II, the First Indochina War and Algerian War. His actions during the Algerian War—and later defense of those actions—caused considerable controversy.Aussaresses was a career Army intelligence officer with an excellent military record when he joined the Free French Forces in North Africa during the Second World War. In 1947 he was given command of the 11th Shock Battalion, a commando unit that was part of France's former external intelligence agency, the External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service, the SDECE (replaced by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE)).
Aussaresses provoked controversy in 2000 when, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he admitted and defended the use of torture during the Algerian war. He repeated the defense in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, further arguing that torture ought to be used in the fight against Al-Qaeda, and again defended his use of torture during the Algerian War in a 2001 book; The Battle of the Casbah. In the aftermath of the controversy, he was stripped of his rank, the right to wear his army uniform and his Légion d'Honneur. A 2003 documentary revealed that, after moving to Brazil in 1973, Aussaresses had advised South American dictators on the use of torture widely used against leftist opponents to the military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay. Aussaresses also admitted to advising the CIA for the Americans' Vietnam era Phoenix Program, which utilized torture.
Aussaresses, recognizable by his eye patch, lost his left eye due to a botched cataract operation.
François Coty (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa kɔti]; born Joseph Marie François Spoturno, [ʒɔzɛf maʁi fʁɑ̃swa spɔtuʁno]; 3 May 1874 – 25 July 1934) was a French perfumer, businessman, newspaper publisher, politician and patron of the arts. He was the founder of the Coty perfume company, today a multinational. He is considered the founding father of the modern perfume industry.
In 1904, his first success, fragrance La Rose Jacqueminot launched his career. He soon started exporting perfumes from France, and by 1910 he had subsidiaries in Moscow, London and New York. During the 1917 Russian Revolution, his assets in Moscow, which consisted of stocks and funds were confiscated by the Soviet government, making him a lifelong enemy of Communism.
By the end of World War I, his financial success made him one of the richest men in France, allowing him to act as patron of the arts, collect works of art, historic homes and seek to play a political role.
In 1922, he gained control of daily newspaper Le Figaro. To check the growth of socialism and Communism in France, he founded two other daily papers in 1928.
In 1923 he was elected senator of Corsica, and was mayor of Ajaccio from 1931 to 1934.
Fearing the spread of communism, he subsidized various right-wing movements. In 1933, faced with a political class that he considered incapable, he published a reform of the State and founded his own movement Solidarité française, which became more radical after his death.
At the time of his death, at age 60, his fortune was greatly diminished as a result of his divorce, the high cost of running his press empire and the repercussions of the economic crisis of 1929.
Maurice Challe (5 September 1905 – 18 January 1979) was a French general during the Algerian War, one of four generals who took part in the Algiers putsch.
A native of Le Pontet, Vaucluse, and a veteran of the Second World War, Challe transmitted the Luftwaffe order of battle to the British prior to D-Day and backed De Gaulle's return to power. Challe initially served his conscription service in the infantry and was later commissioned as a pilot officer in military aviation, going on to become commander of the French Air Force in Algeria between 1955 and 1960.
In July 1956, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, in violation of agreements he had signed with the British and French governments. On 14 October 1956, Challe visited British Prime Minister Anthony Eden at Chequers, accompanied by French Minister of Labor Albert Gazier. The two Frenchmen told Eden of the secret negotiations between Israel and France regarding a proposed Israeli attack on Egypt followed with military occupation by European powers, to control the Suez Canal. Eden backed the plan with UK resources including military forces, directly leading to the Suez Crisis.Challe was a French Air Force general whose greatest military success was in the realm of counter-insurgency operations during the Algerian War. His offensive, begun in March 1959, succeeded in substantially weakening the ALN. Through the use of speed and concentration of force, Challe kept the ALN insurgents in constant retreat and disorder. His innovative tactics would be studied and emulated by others - notably Syrian government forces in the Syrian Civil War seeking to keep insurgency at bay and off balance. The Challe Plan was only partially completed before he was reassigned to France.
A line of electrified wire, minefields and other military barriers, the Challe Line, was named after him. It doubled another defence work, the Morice Line, which fortified the border and separated Algeria from Morocco and Tunisia.He was Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces Central Europe (CINCENT) from May 1960 to his deliberate resignation in February 1961.Challe was one of the heads of the Algiers putsch of 1961, along with Raoul Salan, Edmond Jouhaud, and André Zeller. A prime reason for Challe's involvement was his concern that the Muslim harkis who had served with the French Army against the FLN would be subject to reprisals in the event of Algerian independence. In the event, large numbers of these loyalists were massacred in 1962. After the failure of the putsch, he and Zeller surrendered to the French Army (while Salan and Jouhaud created the OAS). Challe was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. He was freed in December 1966 and received amnesty from President de Gaulle in 1968. Challe died on 18 January 1979, aged 73, in Paris.
Maxime Brunerie (born 21 May 1977) is a French convicted criminal and former neo-Nazi activist, known for his 14 July 2002 assassination attempt on Jacques Chirac, while he was still the President of France, during the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris.