Les Disparus des Argonnes France 2 series, Digi Mart USA News (Mourmelon, Marne, France): One Friday evening in 1981, Gilles Veyrades, on weekend leave, missed the traditional family dinner with his parents and brothers. The next day the young conscript could not be found, and he never reappeared.
Faced with the inaction of military authorities, who described the case as a desertion, Gilles’s mother, Jocelyne, did everything possible to find her son. As the years passed, other young men also vanished under similar mysterious circumstances.
This story is at the heart of the series Les Disparus des Argonnes, available on France.tv and broadcast on France 2 from Wednesday evening. It is loosely inspired by the disappearances near the Mourmelon military camp in the Marne, a case that has remained unsolved for nearly forty years.
At least eight young men disappeared in the 1980s near the Mourmelon military camp. In 1988, Adjutant-Chief Pierre Chanal was arrested near his vehicle parked on a path in a commune in Saône-et-Loire.
Inside his camper van, gendarmes found a Hungarian hitchhiker who had been bound and held captive.
Two years later, the assize court sentenced Pierre Chanal to ten years of criminal imprisonment for rape and unlawful confinement. He was released from prison in 1995 and remained free until a new trial opened in 2003, nearly twenty-three years after the first disappearance, on charges of premeditated kidnapping and murder after DNA traces potentially linked him to three missing men.
Pierre Chanal took his own life a few months later and was never tried.
Author and screenwriter Julie Peyr drew on the case for her 2022 novel Les Disparus des Argonnes (éditions des Équateurs), which has now been adapted for television. Speaking at the recent La Rochelle Fiction Festival, she said the true story had interested her for a long time and that she had kept press clippings since she was 20.
Two aspects struck her: that young men were the ones disappearing, and that the army denied they had vanished against their will. Over the years, families spent their lives pressing authorities for answers.
The production is a fiction rather than a documentary series. Many elements are invented and depart from the real facts, and the locations, names of places, the barracks and the characters are all fictional.
Peyr said she considers herself a novelist, not a journalist, and that her work was not an investigation of the case. The character of Jocelyne Veyrades, played by Alix Poisson, does not correspond to any real person; she was created to embody the families of the missing and their persistence over the years.
In the series, Jocelyne, dismayed by the silence of the institutions, appears on the set of a television programme about missing persons, a format reminiscent of the 1990s French show Perdu de vue. Actor Mehdi Nebbou plays the host, and his brother Safy Nebbou directs the series.
Safy Nebbou said his interest lay less in the original case itself than in one woman’s struggle against institutions and the family fallout it caused.
