Le rêve assassiné. Roman vrai

This work received the 2017 Prize from the Foundation for the Memory of the Algerian War and the combats in Morocco and Tunisia. The ceremony took place on October 19, 2017, in Paris.

In the night of April 8, 1958, while returning to their farm, Félix Vallat, mayor of Thiersville, and his wife Madeleine, a schoolteacher, were savagely assassinated by an FLN terrorist commando. Miraculously, their three sons survived.

That night, it was neither the agricultural engineer, nor the former RAF pilot, nor the peerless community leader who was being targeted. No, it was simply this true apostle of Franco-Muslim reconciliation who troubled the Algerian nationalists and who therefore had to be eliminated along with his entire family.

With them, they assassinated the dream of a new Algeria, an autonomous and fraternal, multi-ethnic and tolerant Algeria, closely linked to France: the Algeria that Albert Camus also dreamed of.

Maïa Alonso gives us here the true story of the life of the Vallat couple:

"I want to make the voices of all the actors in this drama heard – even that of the mastermind behind this heinous assassination, one of Félix Vallat's close Muslim friends. And if the terror of the FLN is singled out, the vengeance to which some desperate individuals resorted afterwards is no less obscured."

This novel is of burning relevance: will peaceful coexistence in the lands of Islam always remain a dream?

Maïa Alonso has already published four novels: L’odyssée de Grain de Bled en terre d’Ifriqiya (2013), Le soleil colonial (2014), Les enfants de la Licorne (2015), and Le papillon ensablé (2016).

254 pages – with documentation and about fifty illustrations.