What happened in France in August 100, 50 and 10 years ago

August, 2015: Top honour for train attack heroes

Three Americans and a Briton were presented with the Legion d'honneur from French President François Hollande on August 24 for their part in thwarting a terrorist attack on a train from Amsterdam to Paris three days earlier.

The passengers all played a part in overpowering a suspected radical Islamist when he exited an onboard toilet brandishing a gun and wearing a knapsack containing more weapons and ammunition. 

Four people were injured, including the assailant. The latter initially claimed to be a robber, but later confessed he had wanted to "kill Americans" as revenge for bombings in Syria.

A 28-year-old Frenchman, known only as Damien A due to his request for anonymity, also later received the Legion d'honneur for being the first to tackle the gunman, as did the second passenger to intervene, a 51-year-old American-born Frenchman with dual nationality who was shot in the neck.

The Americans, all friends, later played themselves in a Clint Eastwood-directed film of the attack called The 15:17 to Paris.

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August, 1975: Coup in the Comoros

The first President of the Comoros, Ahmed Abdallah, was overthrown in a bloodless coup on August 3. The country, made up of three islands in south-east Africa, had only proclaimed its independence from France a month earlier. 

The coup was the first of four in the Comoros attempted by the infamous French mercenary Bob Denard who, along with other foreign mercenaries, seized the lone radio and television stations in the capital, Moroni. Opposition leader Ali Soilih became the new president.

Three years later, Denard helped restore Abdallah to power and became head of his presidential guard. His last attempt on the Comoros came in 1995, when he landed on a beach with 30 soldiers in rubber dinghies. The French army finally intervened and he was later given a suspended five-year jail term.

Denard claimed to have covert government backing for his unorthodox military activities in a string of former French colonial wars and coups in his lifetime. He died in Paris, aged 78, in 2007.

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August, 1925: Babar’s Laurent de Brunhoff born

Laurent de Brunhoff, born on August 30, 1925, grew up listening to tales his mother told him of an orphaned African elephant who escapes to Paris, before returning – now attired in a stylish green suit – to become king of his herd. 

His father Jean, an artist, illustrated the stories to produce Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar), which was published in 1931. Four more stories about the well-dressed pachyderm followed, before Jean died of tuberculosis in 1937.

Laurent, who was 12 at the time, later continued the Babar series, finishing off two books his father had started and adding more than 40 of his own. 

Despite initially harbouring dreams of becoming an abstract painter, he wrote in the New York Times in 1952: “Gradually I began to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it ought to be perpetuated.”

The last book – Babar’s Guide to Paris – was published in 2017. Laurent died in 2024.