Pierre Lagaillarde
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Pierre Lagaillarde (Courbevoie, 15 May 1931) was a founder of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) French terrorist group, opposed to Algerian independence. A lawyer at Blida in Algeria, he was a reserve officer of the paratroopers and was elected deputy of Alger. He took the presidency of the Association générale des étudiants d'Alger (General Association of Alger's Students) in 1957, and also took part in the Alger insurrection of May 1958, which brought Charles de Gaulle back to power. Lagaillarde was member of the Comité de salut public which opposed itself to the Algerian independence, and occupied the Gouvernement général de l'Algérie (local colonial administration). In November 1958, he is on the electoral list Algérie française (French Algeria), and then take the head of the insurrectionary movement during the week of the barricades in January 1960.
Lagaillarde was then detained in la Santé in Paris, and took advantage of his parole to escape to Spain (with Jean-Jacques Susini, Jean-Maurice Demarquet, Marcel Ronda and Fernand Féral Lefevre), where he joined Raoul Salan and founded with him the OAS on 3 December 1960. Deprived of his deputy status, he was condemned in absentia in March 1961 and condemned to ten years of prison, but benefitted from the 1968 amnesty law.
In October 1961 he was arrested in Madrid, along with the Italian neofascist Guido Giannettini [1]. Franco then exiled him to the Canary Islands.
[edit] References
- ^ René Monzat, Enquêtes sur la droite extrême, Le Monde-éditions, 1992, p.91. Monzat quotes François Duprat, L’Ascension du MSI, Edition les Sept Couleurs, Paris, 1972
