After following a reserve officer cursus during his military service, Beltrame became a serving reserve artillery officer, assigned first to the 35th Airborne artillery regiment in Tarbes and then the 8th artillery regiment in Commercy. He then transferred to the Gendarmerie and was briefly assigned to the Mobile Gendarmerie armored unit in Satory, near Versailles, before being selected in 2003 for the elite gendarmerie parachute squadron (EPIGN), also based at Satory.[9] He deployed to Iraq in 2005 and received military honors for his service there.[10] He then joined the Republican Guard, part of the national gendarmerie that provides guards of honor and security for the State. He was stationed at the Élysée Palace between 2006 and 2010 and then took command of a Departmental Gendarmerie company in Avranches from 2010 to 2014. After staff service with the Ministry of Ecology and post-graduate training in Business administration and Economy, he joined the Carcassonne Departmental gendarmerie unit in southwestern France in August 2017 as deputy commander.
Trèbes terrorist attack
At about 11 a.m. on 23 March 2018, Redouane Lakdim, a terrorist claiming allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), stormed a supermarket in Trèbes armed with a handgun, a hunting knife, as well as three homemade bombs. He shot two people dead and took others hostage. Police negotiated for release of the hostages; Beltrame offered to take the place of the final one, a female cashier. Beltrame set his mobile phone on a table with its line open so that police outside could monitor activity inside. After a three-hour stand-off, Lakdim stabbed and shot Beltrame. In response, GIGN operatives stormed the supermarket at 2:40 p.m. and killed the assailant. Beltrame died from his injuries at 5 a.m. on 24 March[11] at Carcassonne hospital.[1] According to an autopsy report, Beltrame had sustained four bullet wounds but died from stab wounds to the throat.[12][1]
Personal life
Beltrame was reared in a nonreligious family but, at age 33, he converted to Catholic Christianity, receiving the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation in 2008 after spending two years as a catechumen.[13] In 2015, he made a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Sainte-Anne d'Auray, "where he asked the Virgin Mary to help him to meet the woman of his life" and shortly afterwards, "he became friends with Marielle, whose faith is deep and discreet."[13][14] He had married his partner in a civil ceremony in August 2016,[15] but they had planned a church wedding in June 2018 at the Basilica of Saints Nazarius and Celsus.[16] Prior to the terrorist attack at Trèbes, Beltrame made a pilgrimage to Compostela.[17] Beltrame had also been a Freemason and received public honours from his Grand Lodge,[18] but he had distanced himself from the fraternal order during his last years.[19] He had an interest in the history of France and its Christian roots.[13] A week before his death, Beltrame buried his father, who had drowned in the Mediterranean in August 2017 and whose body had been recently recovered in the nets of a fishing boat.[20]
A national tribute was paid to Beltrame at Les Invalides on 27 March 2018 with Macron presiding.[21] French flags and the banners of the Gendarmerie and the National Assembly were lowered to half-staff and many cities announced that streets, squares or buildings would be named in the colonel's honour. There are streets so named in Rosny-sous-Bois, Saint-Fargeau-Ponthierry, Mont-Saint-Aignan, Richwiller, and Provins.
^In her first public statement, his widow said that "His was the heroic achievement of a gendarme and the heroic achievement of a Christian. For him, the two were bound together." Le Figaro.
^Early reports claimed that a priest had married the couple while Beltrame lay on his death bed, but Aude Bariéty, the priest himself, refuted the story as nonsense, that the couple could not be married because Beltrame was unconscious at the time. Le Figaro, 25 March 2018.
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