OAS–Gaullist underground conflict

The OAS–Gaullist underground conflict is the covert war between the Secret Army Organisation (OAS) and the French Government, a struggle that reaches from Algeria to the streets and institutions of France. It supplies the political stakes behind the plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, but it is more than background: the opposing sides’ use of infiltration, reprisals, secrecy, and public persuasion shapes the conditions in which the assassination threat and the police hunt unfold.

Origins and political stakes

The conflict sharpens as the OAS gathers strength for another major attack on the Gaullist Government while the French Secret Service fights back. The novel places this struggle beneath the recognizable surface of Parisian life, describing an underground war whose brutality contrasts with the city’s public image of culture and civility. Its violence is not an interruption of ordinary political life so much as a concealed contest operating under it.

The OAS’s opposition to de Gaulle is expressed both as political argument and as a campaign of assassination. In its account, the movement believes that France is ruled by a dictator and that his death is necessary to restore the country to Frenchmen. Before the professional assassin is considered, its supporters have already made six attempts to kill de Gaulle: three are exposed during preparation, one is betrayed the day before it is to happen, and two are carried out but fail. Those failures have a tactical consequence. The prospective assassin explains that de Gaulle is already forewarned of the general intention, even without knowledge of a particular operation; heightened vigilance makes an attack more difficult and escape less likely.

The OAS also contests the Government in the arena of public opinion. Colonel Antoine Argoud, the behind-the-scenes instigator of the Petit-Clamart plot and the OAS operations chief in exile by 1962, understands the campaign as one to be fought through terror, diplomacy, and public relations. He arranges interviews across Western Europe for Georges Bidault, head of the National Resistance Council, the OAS’s political wing, so that the organisation’s opposition can be presented in ostensibly respectable terms. The parallel between public justification and covert violence is central to the conflict: the OAS seeks to make its cause persuasive while continuing to pursue the removal of de Gaulle by force.

Intelligence, infiltration, and retaliation

The Government’s principal covert instrument is the French External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service (SDECE). Within it, the Action Service becomes the centre of the anti-OAS campaign. Its agents infiltrate the organisation, sometimes reaching its highest councils, and pass information that enables authorities to seize OAS emissaries when they enter places where police can reach them. When wanted men cannot be drawn into France, the service also kills them abroad. The resulting disappearances leave relatives to suspect that the Action Service has liquidated OAS members, while the clandestine nature of the work makes confirmation difficult.

The OAS responds to the same secret war with extreme violence. It particularly hates the undercover agents known as the barbouzes. During the final struggle for power between the OAS and the Gaullist authorities in Algiers, the organisation captures seven of them alive; their bodies are later found hanging from balconies and lamp-posts, mutilated. The narrative does not claim that the complete record of torture and death can be recovered: what happened in individual cellars remains unknowable. The seven killings instead become a turning point in the conflict’s logic, prompting a Corsican vendetta against the OAS. Because Corsicans dominate both the Action Service and important parts of the Paris and Marseilles underworld, the Government’s covert campaign can draw on former underworld contacts as well as official agents. The fighting is at times nearly fratricidal, with OAS members who are pieds-noirs sharing characteristics and origins with the Corsicans pursuing them.

These methods also produce rumours of a parallel, unofficial police supposedly directed by Jacques Foccart, one of de Gaulle’s close associates. The account distinguishes rumour from institutional reality: no such parallel police exists. Actions attributed to it are carried out by the SDECE Action Service or by gang leaders from the milieu temporarily enlisted for Government work. The distinction does not make the conflict less coercive; it shows how the secrecy and deniability of the campaign blur the public’s understanding of who is acting in the state’s name.

The assassination threat and the secret manhunt

The professional assassination plot turns the wider conflict into an urgent problem of security and police procedure. De Gaulle’s earlier exposure to assassination attempts means that his protection cannot rely on the routine patterns that might leave another public figure vulnerable. The assassin’s assessment is that the security apparatus will remain alert, and that anyone who reaches the target may face an immediate response rather than the panic that could allow an escape. The Government therefore faces a difficult combination: it must protect de Gaulle while keeping the existence of the threat from becoming public.

The Minister of the Interior gives Claude Lebel responsibility for the investigation after briefing him on the Rolland report and the circumstances surrounding Viktor Kowalski’s death. Lebel receives extraordinary authority: his office can draw on the resources of the officials assembled at the meeting, with no spending limit. He turns that authority into practical infrastructure. Lucien Caron is made his sole assistant and secretary; the office is isolated from ordinary staff, supplied with a camp bed and coffee, and given ten outside telephone lines and a dedicated operator. The arrangements make the investigation a protected, continuously staffed operation rather than a normal police inquiry.

Its secrecy shapes the first international contacts. Lebel approaches foreign police commissioners without presenting the request as a formal enquiry between police forces, because the authorities are not yet certain that an offence has been prepared. He describes a man of whom they know almost nothing and asks whether their records suggest a political contract assassin with successful killings behind him. The appeal reveals the investigation’s central difficulty: the police must identify a highly capable foreigner when they have neither a confirmed name nor a reliable description, while avoiding publicity that might alert the target or expose the Government’s uncertainty.

As the investigation develops, routine records become consequential. A search of French archives under the name Alexander Duggan turns up evidence that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and was recorded travelling back toward Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel card places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30 and records a passport number matching information received from London. Lebel chooses a discreet conversation with the hotel proprietor over a conspicuous raid. The documents establish a traceable identity and itinerary, but do not establish that Duggan is still there: the proprietor confirms that the man had left before August 15.

Later, after a car is found near Ussel, Lebel orders a broad local search rather than an immediate confrontation. The team is to question people at farmhouses, village shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ huts, while concealing the true purpose of its inquiries from the press. If the man is found, the police are to surround him and wait rather than approach him. By the time Lebel receives a report from Tulle, fingerprints from both the car and a room at the château have been checked, yielding hundreds of matching sets. The investigation advances through the accumulation and comparison of records and traces, not through a single definitive clue.

Security, secrecy, and the conflict’s significance

The state’s response to the threat is itself constrained by politics. The President orders no publicity and no nationwide search while the authorities remain uncertain, fearing that public knowledge would invite ridicule abroad and make it appear that France’s President was hiding from one foreigner. He also insists that his public programme not be abandoned. The secrecy policy therefore protects the Government’s standing and preserves the appearance of normal public life, even as it limits the investigators’ freedom to warn the public or mobilize openly.

The precautions for the Liberation Day ceremonies show the material consequences of that choice. Crowds are held farther back behind steel barriers; the enclosed areas are searched, including the sewers; nearby rooftops are watched; and houses and flats are examined. Police enter the cornices and roof spaces of Notre-Dame de Paris, while priests, acolytes, choirboys, and even police and CRS personnel are searched or given special identification. Bullet-proof windows are secretly fitted to the President’s Citroën, and its driver is told to move faster than usual. These measures are designed to close access points without disclosing the full reason for them, yet Lebel recognizes their limits: the assassin has survived betrayal and pursuit, reached France, and may still be concealed under another identity. The final safeguard is therefore not a supposedly perfect perimeter but the human task of noticing him.

The conflict’s defining pattern is reciprocal escalation. OAS violence provokes infiltration and covert retaliation; those operations invite reprisals, while the danger of another assassination attempt drives the Government toward exceptional surveillance and secrecy. Neither side’s actions remain confined to the hidden world: the consequences surface in public security measures, political reputation, and the routines of police work. By joining an ideological struggle to the practical details of archives, telephone lines, border records, fingerprints, and crowd barriers, the narrative presents the underground war as both a contest of force and a contest over what the state can know, conceal, and defend.