Alphonse Juin was a senior French Army officer who became a Marshal of France. A graduate of the Saint-Cyr class of 1912, he served in Morocco in 1914 in command of native troops. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, he was sent to the Western Front in France, where he was gravely wounded in 1915. As a result of this wound, he lost the use of his right arm.
Background
Alphonse Juin was born at Bône in French Algeria on 16 December 1888, the only son of Victor Pierre Juin, a soldier who became a gendarme after 15 years of military service, mostly in Algeria, and his wife Précieuse Salini, the daughter of another soldier and who had become a gendarme. He was named after his paternal grandfather.
Education
When Alphonse Juin was six, his family moved to Constantine, where he went to primary school, and learnt Arabic from the local boys. In 1902 he was awarded a bursary to study at the Lycée d'Aumale in Constantine.
In 1909 he passed the entrance examination for the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. At that time cadets were required to spend a year in the Army before commencing the course, so he enlisted in an Algerian regiment, the 1er régiment (fr) de Zouaves, quickly rising to corporal and then sergeant.
Alphonse Juin entered Saint-Cyr in 1910. Classes are named, and his class, the 94th, was known as promotion de Fès after the Moroccan city of Fès that was at the centre of the Agadir Crisis of 1911. Among the class of 223, which included eight foreigners from China, Turkey, Iran and Algeria, were future général d'armée Antoine Béthouart, three future généraux de corps d'armée, four future généraux de division and eighteen future généraux de brigade, including Charles de Gaulle. There would remain a special bond between members of the class, and de Gaulle would always address Juin using the personal pronoun tu. Juin, de Gaulle and Béthouart would give their names to the Saint-Cyr classes of 1966–1968, 1970–1972 and 2000–2003 respectively.
After graduating on 1 October 1912, Juin was commissioned as a sous-lieutenant in an Algerian regiment, the 1er régiment de tirailleurs algériens (fr). He soon saw service in Morocco in the Zaian War, participating in the fighting around Taza.
Career
A division commander during the Battle of France in June 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and was released a year later. On November 20, 1941, the Vichy government named him marshal and chief of the French forces in North Africa, replacing General Maxime Weygand. Although compelled to oppose the Allied landings there in November 1942, he quickly switched to the Allied side and subsequently commanded the Free French forces in Tunisia and Italy, leading them into Rome in June 1944.
Juin was appointed commander in chief of the NATO forces in central Europe in 1951. The following year he was made a marshal of France. In 1960, because of his French Algerian origins, he broke with his longtime friend President Charles de Gaulle in protest over the government’s Algerian policy. Juin retired in 1962 with the rank of general.
Juin was greatly opposed to de Gaulle's decision to grant independence to Algeria, although he remained steadfastly loyal to de Gaulle. In the wake of the Algiers putsch of 1961 and the Organisation Armée Secrète terrorist campaign, he was placed under house arrest. He was "retired" and his special privileges as a marshal were taken away. In December 1963, he suffered a thrombosis and was hospitalised in the Val-de-Grâce, where he was visited by de Gaulle. Delirious, Juin spoke of "Constantine, Algeria, my country", to which de Gaulle embraced him and replied "Yes, I know, your country is there".