Jules Roy (22 October 1907 – 15 June 2000) was a French writer. "Prolific and polemical" Roy, born an Algerian pied noir and sent to a Roman Catholic seminary, used his experiences as the French colony and during his service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War to inspire a number of his words. He began writing in 1946, while still in service, and continued to publish fiction and historical works after his resignation in 1953 in protest of the First Indochina War. He was an outspoken critic of French colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and later civil war, as well as a strongly religious man.
Like his friend Albert Camus, Roy was a white settler in French Algeria. He was born in Rovigo, Algeria, and spent his childhood on the farm of his maternal grand-parents, the Pâris, petits colons who lived at the village of Sidi Moussa, about eight kilometres north of the town. Roy was the fruit of an adulterous liaison between Mathilde Roy, the wife of a policeman, and Henri Dematons, a school-teacher.
In 1995, Roy, who had been living in France for many years, returned to Algeria and visited his mother's grave in the small pied noir cemetery at Sidi Moussa. During World War II, Roy commanded a Royal Air Force squadron which was engaged in bombing the Ruhr Basin; he described the missions in La Vallée heureuse (Charlot, 1946). In June 1953 he resigned from the army, a colonel, in protest at the government's policies in the First Indochina War.
His Le Voyage en Chine (Julliard, 1965) recounts the story of a visit to Mao Zedong's China during which he planned to make a film portraying what he had imagined to be the successful transformation of the society, only to be disappointed at the lack of access to real conditions. Manès Sperber points out that unlike most such "pilgrims to Utopia", Roy did not only look for what he had already found, but also criticizes him for failing to see through the propaganda-laden words of the people he interviewed. Sperber holds that events such as the 1953 Berlin uprising teach us the "unforgettable lesson" that even people who have spent the decisive years of their lives under a monopolitical system can still rise up against it; this — and reflection on the failure of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the subsequent crackdown, events of which Roy well knew — shows up the avoidability of his mistake in taking the platitudinous eulogies of the stage-managed interviews at face value.
Roy spent the last years of his life in Vézelay, following his interest in the life of Mary Magdalene. He married Mirande Grimal, and had children, Jean-Louis and Genevieve. Following divorce he married Tatiana Soukoroukoff in 1965. Both children survived him.
