25 August 1963

25 August 1963 is the date of the Jackal’s attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle during the crowded Liberation Day ceremony in Paris. It brings the police manhunt and the assassin’s preparations to their decisive encounter: the Jackal fires from a concealed position, but a spontaneous gesture by the President makes the shot miss by a fraction of an inch.

A date shaped by the manhunt

The day’s significance reaches back through the investigation that Claude Lebel had been ordered to lead. After reading Colonel Rolland’s report, Lebel received a directive from the Minister of the Interior rather than a request for advice. He was granted an office, access to necessary information, and the resources of the organizations represented around the conference table, without a limit on expenditure. The order transformed a threat that had not yet become a confirmed offence into a national emergency.

Lebel built the investigation around secrecy and concentrated authority. He made Lucien Caron his sole assistant, arranging for him to serve as both secretary and administrative link to the departments whose cooperation Lebel needed. Their office was equipped with a camp bed, washing and shaving supplies, coffee, and ten outside telephone lines with a dedicated operator. These practical details made the office a working centre for a round-the-clock inquiry, not simply a place to receive reports.

The search crossed national boundaries before investigators knew the suspect’s name. Speaking to senior police contacts abroad, Lebel explained that the case was still only a tip-off and that the man might not yet have formed an intent to commit an offence. The distinguishing clue was the suspected attacker’s professional standing: he would have to be a political contract assassin with several successful killings behind him. The calls’ cautious framing reflected the investigators’ uncertainty, while the silence that followed Lebel’s description conveyed the seriousness of the category he was asking colleagues to search for.

Records, searches, and converging clues

The pursuit depended on piecing together ordinary records as well as dramatic field operations. A night-long check of the archives produced a card showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan had entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on 22 July. A second record placed a passenger under that name on the Etoile du Nord Express travelling from Paris to Brussels on 31 July. A Paris hotel card, bearing the same passport number reported from London, showed a stay near the Place de la Madeleine from 22 to 30 July. Rather than raid the hotel, Lebel quietly questioned its proprietor; he learned that the man was no longer there by 15 August.

When a car was found near Ussel, Lebel ordered Commissaire Valentin to organize a broad search from the discovery point. Police were to question farmhouses, drivers who regularly used the road, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shelters. The description was specific enough to guide inquiries—a tall, blond Englishman who spoke good French, carried three suitcases and a handgrip, and might look as though he had slept rough—but the search was to remain discreet. Valentin was told to keep the press away, even if that meant disguising the operation as a search for someone dazed after a car crash. If officers found the man, they were to surround him rather than approach him.

The evidence gathered at separate locations also fed the search. Lebel asked whether investigators had fingerprinted both the car and a room at the château; Valentin reported hundreds of sets, all matching. Records, physical traces, and local questioning thus accumulated alongside the larger national and international inquiry. The date of the attack marks not a sudden discovery but the moment when those parallel procedures could no longer prevent the Jackal from reaching his intended target.

The ceremony and the missed shot

The 25 August ceremony took place during a scorching summer heatwave. Paris was celebrating its liberation from German occupation nineteen years earlier, and the commemorations drew a very large crowd. Seventy-five thousand people were engaged in keeping order, while a dense arrangement of guards, police, officials, and civil servants kept most spectators from seeing the Head of State clearly. Some of the officials surrounding de Gaulle also served, without realizing it, as a human screen; his four bodyguards were close around him as well.

The Jackal nevertheless obtained a firing position six floors up and 130 metres from the ceremony. Through his telescopic sight he could see de Gaulle’s features and had the exposed temple aligned in his crosshairs. As the band played La Marjolaine, the President pinned a medal onto an elderly veteran. The Jackal squeezed the trigger as de Gaulle stepped back to salute.

The decisive movement came at the instant of the shot. Before the bullet had left the rifle’s barrel, de Gaulle bent forward to kiss the veteran on both cheeks, a customary gesture of congratulations. The bullet passed a fraction of an inch behind the moving head and struck the sun-softened tarmac, where it broke up harmlessly. The music continued; de Gaulle gave no sign that he had heard the shot and moved on to the next veteran.

The date’s place in the story

The attempted shot on 25 August repeats, with a different outcome, the defining danger of 22 August 1962. The earlier attempt at Petit-Clamart had begun a chain of events that, in the novel’s account, reached its termination on this later summer Sunday. The anniversary is therefore more than a backdrop: it makes the public commemoration of national liberation the setting for another attack on the President.

The scene’s outcome turns on the difference between a carefully prepared plan and an unpredictable human gesture. The Jackal’s aim is exact, and the distance and sightline appear to give him his opportunity; yet the President’s unplanned kiss changes the target’s position at precisely the critical moment. A ceremony designed to honour survival and public service continues almost undisturbed, while the attempt to kill its central figure fails within inches. The date thus concentrates the novel’s opposed forms of action: the assassin’s solitary precision and the layered, imperfect protections of a state operating in full public view.