From Free France to the counter-revolutionary crusade.
The man is entirely in his nom de guerre:“Conan”, which this Breton from Morlaix, son of a man killed in 1915, chose when he joined, among the first, General de Gaulle in London.
Originally an artilleryman, then an aviation observer, he found himself on June 15, 1940 in a hospital bed:he had been injured in a bombardment. He did not wait to be recovered to reach Saint-Jean-de-Luz, from where he embarked for England. On July 1, he joined the Free French Forces and was assigned to the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion.
Active second lieutenant out of the ranks, he will be in all the campaigns of the FFL:in Cameroon, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria. Accidented at the start of the siege of Bir Hakeim, he was evacuated to Egypt.
Captain at the age of thirty, he volunteered for the parachute drops and returned to England, where the French SAS were trained; he will command, as captain, the 3rd regiment, which includes 640 paratroopers, including 65 officers. The unit will be dropped in France by small commandos, on seventeen departments, to engage in actions of sabotage and harassment.
Conan jumps between Mâcon and Chalon-sur-Saône. The 3rd French SAS became the 3rd RCP, which was to be commanded by Colonel de Bollardière, while ChateauJobert took charge of the first training center for airborne troops at the beginning of 1945.
L he school operates in Lannion then in Pauldron. It will be the incubator of the paratroopers, the "mother house" from which will come out tens of thousands of patentees destined to serve in the airborne troops. Conan is one of the creators of what will become the "para style". Small, dry, energetic, with a bald head, a triangular face elongated by a dark goatee, it is a figure and a face that you will not forget.
In the spring of 1947, he left for an initial two-year stay in Indochina, where he took command of the colonial demi-brigade of SAS parachutists. He made a second stay from 1950 to 1952 at the head of the Red Berets, and he discovered what would become the ideological foundation of the fight of his whole life:the opposition between communist materialism and Christian spiritualism. Lieutenant-Colonel ChateauJobert, a believer, and even a mystic, was one of the first paratroopers to campaign for the simplistic idea that wars, and especially colonial wars, are only conflicts between "Good" and "Evil". . (He tends to capitalize.)
Here he is totally won over to what he calls the “counter-revolution”. When he left the Far East, where he was in charge of the airborne troops in the South, he was one of the most ideologically motivated officers in the French army.
In Algeria, he commanded the 2nd Colonial Parachute Regiment. After operations in Algiers and Nementchas, the unit jumped on Port-Saïd on November 5, 1956. But the Franco-British expeditionary force withdrew, and Conan was more and more convinced that the army was betrayed by civil power, whatever it is.
Appointed to head the overseas parachute brigade, when he was only a colonel, he was in Bayonne on May 13. During the putsch of the generals of April 1961, he was in post 3u Niger and found himself at the fortress stops. One of the first to join the O.A.S., Conan will take charge of the Constantinois.
Sentenced to death in absentia, he succeeded in leaving Algeria for a long exile, from which he would not return until the amnesty of 1968. Preoccupied with doctrinal research on the "counter-revolution", he has since preach what he considers to be the good word. Colonel Chateau-Jobert published in 1978, at the Presses de la Cité, his Memoirs under the title:Lights and lights on my trace.