“It’s obviously an honor, I wasn’t necessarily expecting it. “On July 14, gendarme Adrien D., 37, will parade for the first time in Paris, on the Champs-Elysées. At his side, 75 other “everyday heroes”, as the gendarmerie calls them, who have distinguished themselves over the past year by their bravery and dedication to serving the population. Adrien saved the lives of four people who were in a burning house, in Val-de-Meuse (Haute-Marne), in September 2020. With his colleague Victor, he did not hesitate to enter the pavilion to rescue two elderly people who were asleep.
Once these two victims were out of danger, the soldiers returned to the house, in which there were two other people, including a 98-year-old woman who could not get around on her own. “We tell ourselves that any of our colleagues would have done the same thing as us,” explains Adrien. We just had the feeling that we had accomplished our work. “When you are caught up in your intervention, you do not think about that at all”, abounds Major Thierry M., who will parade for the first time on the Champs after 28 years spent in the gendarmerie. “It’s an important one in a military career,” he underlines.
“Crowning a career in the gendarmerie”
Commander of the community of brigades of Saint-Jean-du-Gard, he was mobilized last May, for four days, to find and arrest the suspect of a double homicide in Les Plantiers in the Gard. In Paris, Thierry M. intends to represent “all the soldiers” of his unit, “the whole of the institution, and also [ses] comrades who went to the ultimate sacrifice and who will not be there ”. “It is a ceremony which can crown a career in the gendarmerie”, observes for his part the gendarme Yannick N., 29 years old. Last August, he arrested a drunken man who assaulted his mother and attacked a municipal police officer in Grau-du-Roi (Gard).
Joined the mobile gendarmerie eight years ago, Yannick will celebrate his thirtieth birthday in Paris on July 15. When he parades on the most beautiful avenue in the world, he knows that his mother will watch him on TV, probably moved. The gendarme will also think of his father, who died last January. “He would have liked to see that,” he says. “It will be a way for me to pay tribute to him. “