The Jackal’s assassination attempt on de Gaulle is the climax of the manhunt: a contract killer chooses a nationally resonant public ceremony, penetrates its heavily controlled perimeter, and comes within a fraction of an inch of killing Charles de Gaulle. The shot misses because de Gaulle bends to kiss a veteran; when the Jackal prepares to fire again, Claude Lebel kills him inside the building from which he had taken aim.

Background and the chosen setting

The Jackal’s target was not simply a public figure but a leader whose political importance was bound to France’s recent history. His reconnaissance brought him to the square at the southern end of Rue de Rennes on July 28. The place, formerly called Place de Rennes, had been renamed Place du 18 Juin 1940 after the Gaullists took control of City Hall. The new name recalled the date Charles de Gaulle had addressed the French from London, urging them to continue the war after France’s defeat. The Jackal paused before the nameplate, linking the square’s public meaning to the man he intended to kill.

The square also offered a view of the old Gare Montparnasse and its forecourt. The Jackal studied the surrounding buildings and the traffic crossing the broad space. The station was due to be demolished, and construction had begun for a replacement set farther back; the existing facade might therefore be present for one last Liberation Day. The place joined a practical line of sight to a charged landscape of memory. For Charles de Gaulle, the day commemorated the liberation of Paris; for the Jackal, it offered a predictable occasion on which his target would appear in public.

Claude Lebel later reasoned that the Jackal had planned the operation during his reconnaissance in the last eight days of July. The assassin understood that Charles de Gaulle would not stay away from Liberation Day, a ceremony that Lebel described as his great day. Lebel also judged that the Jackal had considered both the danger and his chances of escape: if he had believed the operation too risky, he would already have turned back. His continued presence suggested that he had prepared some means of overcoming the security measures.

The investigation and the security problem

The threat reached Lebel as an extraordinary state assignment. After listening to the Minister of the Interior’s briefing, he was ordered to establish his own office and given access to the resources of the agencies represented at the meeting, without a limit on costs. He made Caron his sole assistant, arranged for a camp bed and basic supplies, and secured ten outside telephone lines with a permanent operator. The practical details mattered: the investigation had to be powerful enough to mobilize the state, yet secret enough that no one outside the team learned what it was pursuing.

Lebel’s initial enquiries abroad had to remain deliberately incomplete. He asked foreign police forces to consider a political contract killer with successful assassinations behind him, while explaining that the French authorities did not yet know whether an offence had been planned or prepared. The request exposed the difficulty of the case: the police had neither a name nor a strong description, only the inference that the intended killer would be an elite professional. Once the investigation identified Alexander James Quentin Duggan in frontier and hotel records, however, it could connect a July 22 arrival from Brussels with a hotel stay near Place de la Madeleine through July 30 and a separate report listing Duggan on a July 31 train from Paris to Brussels. Lebel chose a discreet conversation with the hotel proprietor over a conspicuous raid.

As the search shifted to the countryside, Lebel directed police teams to begin at the place where the car had been found near Ussel and to make a square search. They were to question farms, regular drivers, village shops, cafes, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters, while keeping the press away by disguising the enquiry as a search for someone dazed after a car accident. When a report from Tulle reached Lebel, he asked about fingerprints from both the car and the room at the chateau; the prints from the two locations matched. These accumulated records and field enquiries did not remove the danger, but they narrowed the search while the assassin continued towards the ceremony.

The ceremony and the shot

Charles de Gaulle refused to change his published itinerary. On August 25, he was scheduled 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 the Liberation to ten Resistance veterans. The afternoon ceremony was to take place at four o’clock in the square in front of Gare Montparnasse. Security was intensified: people within two hundred metres were to be searched, press and diplomatic passes were to be replaced at dawn, and anyone carrying a package or a long object was to be removed. The precautions made the public occasion more difficult to enter, but did not persuade Charles de Gaulle to abandon it.

The ceremony drew a vast crowd, while seventy-five thousand people in uniform and civilian suits worked to keep order. Most spectators could scarcely see the Head of State behind the guards and police. Officials and palace staff also formed a human screen around him, alongside his four bodyguards. In the forecourt, the ten medal recipients stood opposite the parked cars; officials and diplomats occupied one side, while the Garde Republicaine and its band occupied the other. The Jackal was positioned above this ordered public space, with his rifle trained on the veterans’ line.

He selected the first veteran to receive a medal: a short, stocky man standing erect, whose head appeared in near-profile through the sight. Charles de Gaulle would approach him, listen to the account of his wartime valour, pin on the medal, and salute him. As the band played, Charles de Gaulle performed those acts and then bent to kiss the veteran on both cheeks, as custom required. From six floors up and about 130 metres away, the Jackal fired at the exposed temple he had been watching. The movement of the kiss carried Charles de Gaulle’s head out of the bullet’s path. The shot passed a fraction of an inch behind him and struck the sun-softened tarmac, where the bullet disintegrated harmlessly. The ceremony continued without an obvious interruption; the music played on as Charles de Gaulle moved to the next veteran.

The second attempt and its aftermath

The Jackal had never missed a stationary target at 150 yards, but the failed shot did not end the attempt. He opened the rifle’s breech, ejected the cartridge case, and loaded a second round. Lebel reached the building and confronted him as he was preparing the weapon. Seeing a fallen CRS man and the man’s MAT 49 submachine gun at his feet, Lebel dropped to his knees, seized it, and fired.

Half a magazine of nine-millimetre ammunition struck the Jackal in the chest, threw him back into the room, and killed him. His fall brought down a standard lamp. Outside, the band began another march; below, the ceremony continued under an invented explanation for the gunfire, which officials attributed to a faulty motorcycle silencer. That concealment echoed the secrecy that had governed the investigation, but the outcome was no longer in doubt. The assassination failed not because the public ceremony had been cancelled, but because its ritual included an unplanned movement at the decisive instant—and because Lebel arrived before the Jackal could take a second shot.