Marcel Bigeard, a proud, idealistic self-made man, to whom crusaders and knights of the Temple served as models, became a paratrooper general through the dagger and the barrel. This Lorraine patriot has become a legend while still alive.

 As a mythical hero symbolizing the heroic resistance of Dien Bien Phu, and being the inventor of the Bigeard cap, which has become more famous than Father Bugeaud’s, he will forever be the incarnation of the hard-line paratrooper, man of action, the supple feline warrior whose agility is complemented with sound tactics and shrewdness.

Aged over four times twenty, still very energetic and writing his fourteenth book, Bigeard wrote to us :

" Belonging now to the ‘old generation’, I can’t help shouting: Yesterday can be referred to, but what matters is tomorrow, and bawling ! "

Tomorrow I’ll turn twenty,
One step followed by another,
And that’s Life: a battle we never stop fighting till we enter the grave,
Yours old comrade.

We wish you many more years, Sir ; you will always be in our midst.