journalist publisher war correspondent
Daudy was born on 17 June 1925 and spent his childhood in Ethiopia, where his father, Bernard Daudy, was the medical officer for the French-run Imperial Railway Company of Ethiopia, but died young from a snake bite. Daudy’s mother, a great beauty, later married Hubert Jules Deschamps, the historian and sociologist who governed French Somalia, Côte d"Ivoire and Senegal and ended his career in 1960 as Governor-General of the Colonies, at the peak of French colonial administration.
College of Juilly.
An Anglophile Frenchman, he moved to England and wrote a best-selling book about the English. During the Second World War, Daudy served in a Resistance network operating in and around Lyons. Interviewed in Marcel Ophüls"s 1969 documentary on occupied France, The Sorrow and the Pity, Daudy was later to say:
At its best the Resistance was the first classless society in France.
The two classes became comrades in arms, sharing the same dangers, and even death.
After the Second World War, Daudy worked as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, covering the Greek Civil War, the Korean War, the Far East and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. Daudy co-authored a leading work on the Korean War and later contributed to Thames Television’s leading television documentary history, of Korea: the Unknown War.
Daudy continued to write and to publish prolifically. Le Roi de Prusse (1960), a novel
Neige a Capri (first published in 1960, under the pseudonym of Paul Paoli)
Les Pigeons de Naples (1961, under the pseudonym of Paul Paoli)
Bal a Bale (1962, under the pseudonym of Paul Paoli)
L’Amour cousu d’or (1963), a novel
a preface to Eugène Fromentin’s Dominique (1965)
a preface to an edition of Prosper Mérimée (1964)
a preface to Hamilton’s Memoires du comte de Gramont- (1965)
Les Amants d’Italie (1966)
Le Vagabond de Malevie (1977, under the pseudonym of Adrien Barraud)
Le Criminel precautionneux (1978, under the pseudonym of Adrien Barraud)
Louisiana Force du Destin (1981)
Naples
Histoire generale de la peinture: Le XVIIe siecle
He served as Vice-President of the Royaumont Foundation (based at Royaumont Abbey) and also made his own Armagnac.
Along with the Honorary Robin Johnstone, Daudy was a founding Honorary Secretary of the Franco-British Council in 1972.
He was awarded the Administration Member of the Order of the British Empire for his services to Anglo-French relations. Daudy married first Janine Sommer (marriage dissolved), by whom he had two daughters, Martine and Florence, who both live and work in Paris. The family continue to live at Royaumont Abbey.
