Former journalist at Le Monde, Régis Guyotat comes to present his new book at the Librairie Nouvelle d’Orléans

It is not entirely a coincidence that the work is released June 3, 2024, a few days before the European elections. It is even perfectly anchored in current events.

« The extreme rightthat is to say, those who make foreigners the source of all evils, to which are added those nostalgic for Vichy or French Algeria and the OAS, are on the way to governing France », We can read in a press release from the publisher Corsaire.

The book in question? “The Man in the Balaclava. Being an immigrant in Orléans during the thirty glorious years”, signed Régis Guyotat, former journalist at Le Monde and producer at France Culture, which he will present and dedicate this Saturday June 22, 2024 at the Librairie Nouvelle d’Orléans (Loiret) from 5 p.m.

These foreigners who rebuilt France

Author of several reporting bookshe will come as a neighbor since he has lived in Orléans since 1967.

In this new work, Régis Guyotat tells how foreigners participated in the reconstruction of France and in particular of the Johannine city after the Second World War.

Between 1958 and 1968, they were approximately two million arrived in France. In Loiret, they are estimated at twenty-five to thirty thousand. Most were recruited by the National Immigration Office (ONI) in Portugal and the Maghreb. Many come from Algeria, which conquered its independence in 1962.

“Delivered to the most difficult work, housed in unworthy conditions, exposed to racism, these men came from elsewhere, when the oil crisis in 1973 caused unemployment to reappear, became the target of the right-wing governments of the time and the nascent far right of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and supposedly the cause of the problems of French society,” writes Corsaire.

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