Raoul Duplan, a retired colonel, is found at home, a bullet in his head. The investigation stalls, until an anonymous letter is delivered: “The colonel died at Saint-Arnaud.”
Saint-Arnaud, Algeria, 1957.
On the rebound from a love affair gone wrong, young Guy Rossi, a law graduate, has enlisted to serve before call-up has even been announced. Aide-de-camp to Colonel Duplan, who commands the Saint-Arnaud garrison in the east of Algeria, Rossi’s mission is to study the latitude provided to the army by the special powers that have been unanimously voted in by the National Assembly. “No measures, not even those contrary to the greater principles of our laws, are to be ruled out,” Rossi concludes. This blank endorsement will lead to their ruin… in Algeria, and forty years later in France.