C’était l’Algérie heureuse (1915-1965)

First, I want to talk about the Algerian Bled, my cradle, the land where I grew up between 1915 and 1935.

But I would also like to evoke my life as a man until 1965, in Algiers, Algiers-the-White, which remains for me the most beautiful city in the world.

In total, I will have spent fifty years on this land that saw me born. A half-century of Algeria that I want to recount to leave deep roots for my children.

For it is the roots of men that prevent them from being mortal. Our memories of youth remain our true riches, our finest inheritance. When they read us, in the evening by candlelight, our children or our children's children may say, upon closing this book: It was the time of happy Algeria.

Author of nearly two hundred medical publications, professor of infectious and tropical diseases in Algiers and then in Dijon, Fernand Destaing developed in the latter city a second activity in Medicine and History which resulted in the creation of a module, about thirty publications, and around twenty theses.

This work will be reissued in July 2015.