French Government

The French Government is portrayed as both the target of an escalating underground war and the authority responsible for containing it. Its fight against the OAS draws on secret-service violence and a vast police mobilization, yet the attempt to protect Charles de Gaulle is constrained by his insistence on secrecy and on continuing his public engagements. The resulting tension between state power, political legitimacy, and operational necessity shapes the pursuit of the Jackal.

Political rupture and the origins of conflict

The Government’s confrontation with the OAS is rooted in the break between military expectations and the political course France takes over Algeria. Marc Rodin, whose service in Indochina had convinced him that politicians betrayed soldiers, went to Algeria in 1956 believing the Army would complete what he regarded as its historic mission. He understood Algeria as part of France and expected the Government to give the Army the support needed to defeat the rebellion. Instead, the war widened, while the costs, conscript demoralization, and limits of military victory failed to alter his convictions.

Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 initially seemed to Rodin to promise the restoration of French power and support for French Algeria. The eventual recognition that de Gaulle’s vision did not include that outcome turned Rodin’s hopes into hatred of the political system and of the President. In April 1961 he led nearly his whole battalion into the putsch. De Gaulle helped defeat it through a radio broadcast heard by troops across Algeria: the radios issued as a harmless diversion carried the President’s appeal when the Army’s loyalty was tested. Rodin retained 120 officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted men, many with earlier combat experience. With other putschists, they formed the Secret Army Organisation, pledged to overthrow the President.

The French Government’s political authority thus faces armed resistance from men who understand themselves as defending France and the Army. The OAS’s subsequent exile does not end the conflict. Its campaign reaches metropolitan France, where violence and government countermeasures unfold beneath the ordinary appearance of Parisian life. The account presents this not as a conventional contest between public armies, but as a clandestine war fought through terror, intelligence, and retaliation.

State apparatus and clandestine retaliation

The French Government’s secret-service response is described through the structure of the SDECE. Its responsibilities encompass espionage abroad and counter-espionage within France. The organization is divided among intelligence, counter-espionage, communist affairs, finance, and administration; its Action Service is the operational center of the anti-OAS struggle. Based in unremarkable buildings near Boulevard Mortier, it sends out a force of about a hundred men, mainly Corsicans. Their training includes small-arms and unarmed combat, radio communication, demolition, sabotage, interrogation, kidnapping, arson, and assassination.

The Government’s methods exist in a deliberately blurred space between formal institutions and unofficial-looking force. Some members of the broader group known as the barbouzes had underworld backgrounds and retained criminal contacts; the story notes allegations of a parallel police acting for a presidential confidant, but says that no such separate police organization existed. Activities attributed to it were carried out by Action Service personnel or temporarily enlisted gang bosses. After seven barbouzes are killed in Mission C in Algiers, Corsican involvement in the Action Service takes on the character of a vendetta against the OAS. Since some OAS members are French settlers from Algeria, the violence can approach fratricide.

The Government also faces a contest over public explanation. Antoine Argoud, the OAS operations chief in exile and instigator of the Petit-Clamart plot, understands that the campaign must combine terror with diplomacy and public relations. He arranges a series of Western European newspaper and television interviews for Georges Bidault, the former Foreign Minister and head of the National Resistance Council, the OAS’s political wing. The interviews present the OAS’s opposition to de Gaulle in more respectable terms, placing a sober public argument beside the organization’s bombings and other violent tactics. The success of this propaganda effort alarms the Government as much as the attacks themselves.

Escalation and the succession of plotters

An attempted assassination plot at the École Militaire sharpens the Government’s response. The plan is to shoot de Gaulle in the back as he enters a hall, with the gunman firing from the eaves of an adjacent building. Georges Watin is to be the trigger-man, but escapes again. A sniper-scope rifle is found at Robert Poinard’s flat, and Poinard, Jean Bichon, and Paule Rousselet de Lilac are arrested. De Gaulle attends the military ceremony on schedule, this time in an armoured car, a concession he dislikes.

The episode angers the President. He summons Interior Minister Roger Frey and makes clear that the assassination attempts have gone too far. The Government seeks to make an example of senior conspirators while the Supreme Military Court is still trying Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry and others for the earlier plot. The Court sentences Bastien-Thiry and two others to death; three more fugitives, including Watin, also receive death sentences. De Gaulle commutes two sentences to life imprisonment but leaves Bastien-Thiry’s sentence in place.

The French Government’s action against Argoud produces an unintended consequence. After locating the former colonel in Germany, the Action Service abducts him and delivers him, bound and blindfolded, to the police in Paris. The operation demoralizes the OAS, but it also removes the man whose flair and inspiration had guided its offensive. His deputy, Marc Rodin, takes command of operations aimed at assassinating de Gaulle. The capture therefore weakens one part of the organization while advancing a more dangerous successor into authority.

Secrecy, authority, and the manhunt

When the plot against de Gaulle becomes the object of a secret investigation, the President limits the Government’s response even as he authorizes exceptional institutional resources. At first, senior officials cannot treat the intelligence as certain: the threat rests on Colonel Rolland’s interpretation of information from Viktor Kowalski, who has since died, and enquiries in Vienna are not complete. The Interior Minister also points out that a nationwide hunt for a foreigner known only by a codename would be difficult to justify on uncertain evidence.

De Gaulle’s formal instructions are nevertheless explicit. There is to be no publicity, no nationwide search, and no indication outside a small circle that anything is wrong. He fears that public knowledge would invite ridicule abroad and make it appear that the President of France is hiding from one foreigner. Officials are warned that disclosure, even as a general impression, would bring consequences. At a meeting of departmental chiefs, the Interior Minister repeats the requirement for absolute secrecy and instructs them to give the case immediate personal attention rather than delegate it, except where a task can be assigned without revealing its purpose.

The scale of the authorization is striking beside the limits placed on its visibility. Claude Lebel is brought into the conference after reading Rolland’s report under the scrutiny of senior officials. The assignment is a directive, not a request: he is to have his own office, access to necessary information, the resources of the represented departments, and no cost ceiling. He turns that authority into practical arrangements, including ten outside telephone lines, a dedicated operator, a camp bed, washing supplies, and a percolator for the long work ahead. His assistant, Lucien Caron, is to be the only person brought into the secret in that capacity.

The Government’s precautions are correspondingly broad, but disguised as routine. Customs officers at every French border post are told to inspect the luggage of tall, blond male foreigners and have passports checked by Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire officials for possible forgeries. The public explanation, if anyone asks, is routine spot-checking; the nationwide targeting is not to be disclosed. Meanwhile, the Quai d’Orsay rejects a proposed abduction of one of the OAS chiefs in Rome on diplomatic grounds, with the President supporting that decision despite knowing why the idea was raised.

Public ceremony as security test

The contradiction between secrecy and protection becomes most visible in preparations for Liberation Day. The President refuses to change his itinerary: he is to rekindle the Eternal Flame at the Arc de Triomphe, attend High Mass at Notre-Dame de Paris, visit the shrine at Mont-Valérien, and later present Medals of Liberation to ten Resistance veterans at Gare Montparnasse. Construction is already under way for a new station set back from the old site, making the ceremony an occasion tied to a changing public landscape as well as to remembrance.

The security plan reaches into every part of the day. Police are placed on Notre-Dame’s roof, among its spires, and inside the building; priests, acolytes, and choirboys are searched. Special lapel badges are prepared for police and Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité personnel in case the Jackal tries to pose as a security officer. Bulletproof windows are secretly fitted in the Citroën DS 19, even without the President’s knowledge, and Jean Ducret brings in unusually tall officers to surround him without attracting his notice. Everyone within two hundred metres is to be frisked, while press and diplomatic passes are replaced at dawn and anyone carrying a package or a long object is to be removed.

These arrangements show the French Government trying to secure the President without appearing to retreat from public life. The effort is therefore not simply a cordon around a person: it must protect an exposed itinerary, conceal the scale of the danger, and avoid provoking the political spectacle de Gaulle has forbidden. The same state that can mobilize its departments, border posts, and police forces remains bound by the President’s insistence that the public programme continue unchanged. That tension gives the Government’s role its defining character: immense operational reach, exercised under severe political constraints.