Paris Judicial Police headquarters at Quai des Orfèvres is the institutional and working center of the French Judicial Police system, and, during the hunt for the Jackal, the base from which Claude Lebel turns an urgent warning into a nationwide investigation. The contrast between its unremarkable offices and the reach of the operation is central to its role: a cramped room, a desk cleared for files, and a telephone bank support a search drawing on a vast police network and international contacts.

The headquarters and the national force

The headquarters stands on Quai des Orfèvres and is described as vastly larger than the administrative headquarters of the French National Police at 11 Rue des Saussaies, near the Interior Ministry. The distinction matters: the French National Police is presented as a small administrative office overseeing five crime branches, not as the detective force itself. The French Judicial Police system, directed by Max Fernet, is the force responsible for criminal investigation.

From its headquarters, the system controls seventeen regional headquarters, one for each of the seventeen police districts of Metropolitan France. Beneath them are 453 borough forces: seventy-four central commissariats, 253 constituency commissariats, and 126 local police posts. The network extends across two thousand towns and villages. In 1963, just over twenty thousand men served under Fernet’s command. In rural districts and along the highways, the National Gendarmerie and mobile traffic police also maintained order; in some areas, gendarmes and police agents shared accommodation and facilities.

This structure gives the headquarters both a physical and an administrative significance. Its scale places it at the head of a dispersed system, but the narrative’s manhunt depends on the system being activated through specific instructions, records, and local inquiries rather than on size alone.

Lebel’s appointment and working office

After a fifty-minute briefing by the Interior Minister, Claude Lebel leaves a conference dazed by the directive he has received. He is to establish his own office, obtain all necessary information, and draw on the resources of the organizations represented at the meeting, without a cost limit. The instruction makes the headquarters the setting for an exceptional concentration of authority in a single investigator.

Maurice Bouvier accompanies him downstairs, and they leave the building in a Citroën. When Lebel returns to his office, he considers the immediate practical problem of explaining to Amélie why he will not be coming home. He does not dwell on the extraordinary reach of his new powers. Instead, he calls in Lucien Caron, whom he has chosen as his right-hand man, and has him read the Rolland file.

The room itself is modest: twelve feet by fourteen, with two windows facing the river and the Latin Quarter, two desks, a secretary’s desk, several chairs, six large filing cabinets, and shelves crowded with almanacs and files. It scarcely resembles the nerve center of the largest manhunt in France. That mismatch gives the office its narrative force: national authority is exercised amid ordinary furniture, paperwork, and the familiar limits of police accommodation.

A secret command post

Lebel quickly turns the office into a sealed working unit. He orders Caron to take on both the assistant’s and secretary’s duties, has the usual secretary transferred or placed on paid leave, and forbids anyone else from being admitted to the secret. He asks for a camp bed, bedding, washing and shaving supplies, and a coffee percolator, anticipating that the investigation will keep them there for long hours.

He also directs the switchboard to reserve ten outside lines and one operator for the office. If other departments question requests for resources, Caron is to invoke Bouvier’s authority; Lebel’s office has top priority across ancillary services. A circular memorandum is to notify every department chief at the ministerial meeting that Caron is empowered to requisition whatever Lebel could request himself. The headquarters thus becomes more than a place to work: the office is reorganized into a confidential command post with access to the wider state apparatus.

The scale of the operation does not eliminate uncertainty. In the basement communications room, Lebel and Caron spend three hours contacting leading police officials abroad over high-frequency lines. Lebel cannot yet present the matter as a formal enquiry between forces: the authorities do not know whether the planned offence has reached the stage of preparation, and they lack even a name and a reliable description. He asks foreign colleagues to consider whether their records identify a professional political assassin with successful killings behind him. The investigative reach of the headquarters is international, but its first request rests on a deliberately limited account of what is known.

Records, field orders, and the manhunt

The headquarters coordinates both archival checks and work in the field. When information identifies Alexander James Quentin Duggan, records establish that he entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and left for Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel card links the name and passport number to a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine, where Duggan stayed from July 22 through July 30. Rather than order an immediate raid, Lebel visits the proprietor quietly in the small hours; he learns that the man was gone by August 15 and avoids waking the hotel’s other guests.

The headquarters also directs searches beyond the capital. After a car is found, Lebel instructs Commissaire Valentin to send as many capable officers as possible to Ussel and organize a square search centered on the discovery site. The team is to question farmhouses, regular road users, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ huts. The description is precise enough to guide local enquiries: a tall, blond Englishman who speaks good French, carries three suitcases and a handgrip, has plenty of cash, and may look as though he has slept rough. Lebel insists that the press be kept away and that, if the man is found, officers surround him rather than approach him.

Later, Lebel receives a report from Valentin in Tulle and asks whether the car and the room at the château have been fingerprinted. Valentin confirms that both produced hundreds of sets of prints, all matching. The exchange shows the headquarters’ role in connecting dispersed evidence: a regional report reaches Lebel’s office, where it can be weighed alongside the wider investigation.

The nerve center’s limits and significance

The headquarters concentrates authority and information, but it cannot make the Jackal’s timetable visible. At a conference, Lebel explains that the killer alone knows when he intends to strike, and that the police cannot tell where they have entered that schedule. Their best chance is to identify him under his new name and locate him before he realizes how far the investigation has progressed. In another deduction, Lebel recognizes that the Jackal’s week of apparent delay after leaving Gap was not wasted time: it indicates that he has chosen a specific day for the attempt.

The building’s importance therefore lies less in any single revelation than in the machinery it enables. Files connect names to border crossings and hotel registrations; operators keep outside lines open; an assistant turns directives into memoranda; regional officers search roads and villages; and reports return to Lebel for interpretation. The headquarters is the fixed point of a pursuit whose target survives by changing names and moving through the country. Its plain office and immense reach embody the procedural tension of the manhunt: the police can mobilize a national system, yet must still discover, record, and interpret each fact before the next move can be made.