Emmanuel François Roblès was born 4 May 1914 into a family of preponderantly Spanish ancestry in the most Spanish of Algerian cities, Oran, where his father Manuel (the Spanish equivalent of Emmanuel), a mason, had also been born in March 1887. His mother, Antoinette Hélène Roblès, née Ruvira, born in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, in the department of Oran, in August 1890, was one-quarter French, her grandmother having married a Frenchman named Pon, from Lyons. Roblès's parents were married on 9 August 1911, at the Eglise du Saint-Esprit in Oran and in a civil ceremony three days later. A first son, René-Joseph, born to them a year later, died at the age of seven.

A month after Roblès's father left Oran in August 1913 to work on a new military hospital in Morocco, his wife, pregnant with Emmanuel...