He was one of the commanders in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and is thought by many to have been a dominating influence on French "unconventional" warfare thinking from that time onwards.

[1]: 167  He was one of the most decorated officers in France, and is particularly noteworthy because of his rise from being a regular soldier in 1936 to ultimately concluding his career in 1976 as a Lieutenant General and serving in the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

[3] Following a 6-year career in Société générale, Marcel Bigeard conducted his military service in France at Haguenau at the corps of the 23rd Fortress Infantry Regiment (French: 23e Régiment d'Infanterie de Forteresse).

[6]: 58  Volunteer for the franc corps, he led a combat group at Trimbach in Alsace and became quickly a sergent-chef then adjudant (warrant officer) at the age of 24.

Recruited as a paratrooper of the Free French Forces, he trained with the British Commandos, near Algiers during three months, then was assigned the preliminary rank of Chef de bataillon (major) at a directorate.

[8]: 33  In 1944, after paratrooper training by the British, he was parachuted into occupied France as part of a team of four with the mission of leading the resistance in the Ariège département close to the border with Andorra.

At the beginning of 1945, Bigeard created and managed during a scholastic semester, the regional cadres school of Pyla-sur-Mer, near Bordeaux, destined to form officers issued from the French Forces of the Interior.

[12] On July 1, 1946, Bigeard left the 23e RIC and formed south-east of Dien Bien Phu, a unit constituted of four commandos of 25 volunteers at the corps of the autonomous Thai Battalion.

[12] In the course of extremely fierce fighting, Bigeard fought off the attempts of the Vietnamese to destroy his unit and led his men into a successful break-out into the jungle marching for days and carrying all of their wounded until finally reaching a French fort.

[9]: 441–4 On December 31, 1953, Bigeard took command of the Airborne Groupment[6]: 330  constituted of the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment 1er RCP and the 6e BPC, intervening to intercept opposing divisions.

Parachuted on March 16, 1954, while the outcome of Dien Bien Phu was being sealed, Bigeard was promoted to lieutenant-colonel (along with other commanders) during ongoing fighting, making of him a recognized figure while leading his battalion on strongpoints Éliane 1 and 2.

[1]: 168  Bigeard called Dien Bien Phu a "jungle Verdun", the final and most intense battle in Vietnam as the Vietnamese used their Soviet-built artillery on the hills above to rain heavy fire on the French positions; every day the Vietnamese staged huge "human wave" attacks, sending thousand of infantrymen to try to storm the French lines, only to be repulsed time after time.

[12] The American pundit Max Boot wrote it was a tribute to Bigeard's toughness and the robust state of his health that he could take three bullets in his chest over the course of four months in 1956 and still be back to duty shortly afterwards.

In late 1956, the FLN had launched the Battle of Algiers, a campaign of assassinations and bombings targeting civilians designed to be the "Algerian Dien Bien Phu".

As one FLN directive put it: "A bomb causing the death of ten people and wounding fifty others is the equivalent on the psychological level to the loss of a French battalion.

The FLN favored murdering pro-French Muslims and pied-noirs by making them wear the "Algerian smile" – cutting out the throat, ripping out the tongue and leaving the victim to bleed to death.

"[12] In January 1957, a map was drawn up of the Casbah, a census was conducted and using files from the Algiers police department the paras started to staged raids to capture suspected fellagha.

[12] After the initial apparent victory in Algiers, in April 1957 Bigeard moved the 3e RPC back into the Atlas Mountains in pursuit of FLN groups in that province.

In 1958, Time magazine wrote of Bigard that he was "a martinet, but the idol of his men, who made them shave every day, no matter where they were, and doled out raw onions instead of the traditional wine ration because 'wine reduces stamina'.

"[2] The senior officers of the French Army, most of whom had graduated from Saint-Cyr, made no secret of their dislike for Bigeard, whom they viewed as a "jumped-up ranker" who disregarded orders if he thought them to be stupid.

[2] Accordingly, Bigeard went back to Paris where the minister of the armies, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, asked him to establish a center of instruction for cadres that opened at the end of April near Philippeville.

The École Jeanne d'Arc in Philippeville (modern day Skikda) was to provide field officers with a one-month training course in counter-insurgency techniques.

[15]: 74 He met on January 30, 1975, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who proposed the post of secretary of state attached to minister Yvon Bourges.

[18] Aussaresses would later serve as an advisor to the regimes of Augusto Pinochet and Jorge Rafael Videla during Operation Condor where "death flights" were used to dispose of dissidents.

In June 2000 Louisette Ighilahriz, a writer and member of the FLN, publicly stated that Bigeard and Massu had been present when she was tortured and raped at a military prison from late September to December 1957.

His funeral procession was held at the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Toul on June 21, in presence of former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Minister of Defense Hervé Morin.

Attempts by the French government to inter him in Les Invalides were "reversed because of public outrage" surrounding allegations of torture,[23] most prominently a petition in the left-wing newspaper Libération that called him an "unscrupulous adventurer" who used "heinous methods".

[24] This led to a lengthy controversy over where to bury Bigeard, which was ended in September 2012 when Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian decided to inter him at the Mémorial des guerres en Indochine in Fréjus.

Le Drian's attendance of the burial ceremony in November was criticized by the French Human Rights League, which suggested that praise for Bigeard "would amount to elevating torture to a military discipline worthy of being honoured by the state."

In France, several avenues, places and roads bear his name: During his career Bigeard authored or co-authored a number of books which also featured homages to adversaries.