De Gaulle refuses to change his public schedule

Charles de Gaulle’s refusal to change his public schedule turned an assassination warning into a test of political authority as well as police effectiveness. He ordered that the threat remain secret and that his appearances continue unchanged: the state would have to protect the President without giving the impression that a foreign assassin had made him retreat.

The warning and the President’s decision

Roger Frey delivered Colonel Rolland’s report to Charles de Gaulle at his desk in the Élysée Palace. De Gaulle read it in three minutes, folded it carefully, and asked Frey what he wanted. Frey began setting out the measures he considered necessary to avert the danger. When he invoked the interest of France, the President interrupted: in his view, that interest required that France’s President not be seen cowering before a hired foreigner. The formulation made the dispute larger than the immediate question of personal protection. Frey was asking what the administration should do about a threat; de Gaulle answered in terms of what the presidency could not be seen to concede.

The Interior Minister’s chief of cabinet, Alexandre Sanguinetti, pressed the practical objection. The President’s public programme, he argued, had to change until the assassin was caught. Frey told him that de Gaulle would cancel nothing and that there would be no alteration, not even by an hour or a minute. The instruction applied not only to the visible calendar but also to how the danger could be discussed: the affair had to be handled in complete secrecy.

Secrecy as a governing order

The report did not yet establish every part of the case. Frey stressed that Rolland’s analysis depended on the account of Viktor Kowalski, who had since died, and that enquiries in Vienna were still under way. The government could not be certain that the account was correct. A nationwide search for a foreigner known only by a codename would therefore be difficult to justify, even apart from the President’s objections to public alarm.

De Gaulle’s formal orders nevertheless went further than postponing a public announcement. There was to be no publicity, no nationwide search, and no sign outside a small circle that anything was wrong. He feared that disclosure would give the Press a story, invite mockery from other countries, and make additional security measures look like evidence that the President of France was hiding from one man. Frey warned Sanguinetti that de Gaulle had made the consequences of a leak unmistakable: if details, or even the general impression of the affair, became public, senior officials would pay for it. Secrecy and the unchanged schedule thus became connected requirements. A conspicuous response might protect the President physically while also announcing that the threat had forced a change in his conduct.

A covert investigation with a public-facing limit

The orders placed the investigators in a difficult position. Sanguinetti protested that the President was impossible to protect if he would not accept countermeasures. Frey acknowledged the constraint but maintained that a search based on an unverified report and a codename was not yet a realistic public operation. The President’s security could be strengthened only without making that strengthening visible as a retreat or revealing the investigation to the country.

An hour after the briefing, Claude Lebel emerged from a conference where Frey had assigned him the task. The instruction was not a request for advice: Lebel would establish his own office and have access to the resources of the organizations represented at the meeting, without a limit on costs. He immediately organized the work around secrecy, turning his assistant Lucien Caron into a combined secretary and aide, ordering a camp bed and coffee for the office, and reserving telephone lines. The improvised arrangements show the practical counterpart to the President’s formal restriction: an intensive investigation had to be built inside a small, concealed operation rather than announced as a national emergency.

Lebel also approached foreign police forces cautiously. He explained that he could not yet make an official enquiry between police forces because investigators did not know whether the intention to commit a crime had even entered the preparation stage. He described the target only indirectly, asking whether his colleagues knew of a top professional political assassin with successful killings behind him. The method let the search draw on international knowledge without openly naming the suspected target or exposing the threat as a confirmed plot.

The unchanged schedule and the expanding precautions

As the investigation developed, police work had to accommodate the fact that the public appearances were still going ahead. A later search of the archives found records showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan had entered France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22 and appeared on a return passenger report on July 31. A hotel card bearing Duggan’s name and matching passport number placed him in a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Lebel chose a quiet conversation with the proprietor over a disruptive raid; the proprietor confirmed that the man was gone by August 15. Such routine records offered leads that did not depend on a public alert.

The same tension shaped searches outside the capital. When a car was found, Lebel ordered Commissaire Valentin to send as many men as possible to Ussel and conduct a square search outward from the site. They were to ask at farms, shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks about a tall blond Englishman who spoke good French, carried several bags, and might look as though he had slept rough. The Press was to be kept away; local reporters could be told that officers were searching for someone dazed after a car crash. If the man was found, the police were to surround him rather than approach him. The investigation’s secrecy was therefore not just a rule at the top: it governed what officers said, where they searched, and how they handled a possible encounter.

By the time preparations were discussed for the Liberation Day ceremonies, security measures had become extensive without replacing the public programme. Crowds would be held farther back behind steel barriers, the enclosed areas searched down to the sewers, and nearby roofs watched by armed officers. Houses and flats would be searched; officers would occupy the cornices and roof of Notre-Dame de Paris; and even priests, acolytes, choirboys, police, and the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité would be checked or specially identified. Bulletproof windows were secretly fitted to the President’s car, while measures were taken to make him harder to target without his noticing the full extent of the precautions.

Lebel could not explain how The Jackal might get close, only that he had reached France with a gun despite betrayal and pursuit by two police forces. The final safeguard he could offer was attentiveness: the assassin would have to emerge, and someone would have to recognize him. De Gaulle’s refusal therefore set the terms of the manhunt but did not make the threat disappear. It compelled the police to search and reinforce security while keeping both the operation and its visible consequences within the limits imposed by the President.