Alexandre Sanguinetti

Alexandre Sanguinetti is Roger Frey’s Corsican chief of staff and one of the central administrators of France’s internal-security forces. He is presented as a controversial enforcer whose uncompromising approach to public order has made him widely feared and disliked. When Frey briefs him on the threat to Charles de Gaulle, Sanguinetti’s impatience exposes the conflict at the heart of the investigation: he is responsible for protecting the President, yet the President forbids the public measures that might ordinarily accompany such a danger.

Identity and Position

Frey summons Sanguinetti shortly after returning from the Élysée Palace. As chef de cabinet, or chief of personal staff, Sanguinetti has spent the previous two years handling much of the detailed work of directing France’s state-security forces on the Interior Minister’s behalf. His authority rests less on a single uniformed command than on his ability to mobilize a broad apparatus of police and security services. The account makes clear that he has established a formidable reputation, though its meaning changes sharply according to the observer’s political loyalties and view of civil rights.

That position places him close to the government’s decision-making while making him a conspicuous target of public resentment. Sanguinetti is not merely an official who receives orders: he has helped shape and execute the methods by which the state contains unrest. In the crisis over the assassin, he therefore speaks as an administrator accustomed to having substantial coercive resources at his disposal, and as a man who understands how little those resources can accomplish if their use is prohibited.

Public Order and Political Controversy

The account traces Sanguinetti’s unpopularity to the aggressive deployment of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the 45,000-member force used against street demonstrations from both left and right. Communists call him a Fascist, associating his public-order methods with those of regimes beyond the Iron Curtain. The extreme right condemns him in similar terms, citing the suppression of democracy and civil rights; the narration also suggests that the efficient prevention of disorder obstructs a right-wing coup that might otherwise claim to restore order.

Ordinary people have their own reasons to resent him. Decrees issuing from his office bring barriers into the streets, identity-card checks at major road junctions, and roadblocks on main roads. Public images of young demonstrators being beaten down by CRS truncheons deepen that hostility. The press has dubbed him Monsieur Anti-OAS, and, apart from the relatively small Gaullist press, it reviles him. The breadth of the criticism makes Sanguinetti a figure defined not simply by his methods but by the contested political consequences of those methods: they preserve order for the government while appearing to many citizens as a direct assault on liberty.

The narration says that he conceals any effect the public odium may have on him. Its description of his private devotion is pointed: Charles de Gaulle occupies the place of a deity in Sanguinetti’s personal religion, and Sanguinetti imagines himself as the head of its Curia. This image suggests the intensity of his loyalty without making him a detached observer of the President’s choices. His personal commitment and his official responsibility converge when he confronts the threat to de Gaulle’s life.

The Threat and the Limits of Action

Sanguinetti reacts to Colonel Rolland’s report with exasperation. He believes the state must protect the President and argues that the assassin could be caught, but he sees the prohibition on countermeasures as leaving the authorities to wait for an attack. Frey answers that the report remains uncertain: it rests on Rolland’s interpretation of information from Viktor Kowalski, who has since died, while enquiries in Vienna are still under way. At this stage, Frey argues, launching a nationwide search for a foreigner known only by a codename would not be realistic.

The decisive obstacle, however, is not merely the uncertainty of the intelligence. Charles de Gaulle has ordered absolute secrecy: no publicity, no nationwide search, and no hint outside a small circle that anything is wrong. He will not cancel or alter his public programme by even an hour or a minute. Frey emphasizes that disclosure could expose the President to ridicule at home and abroad and that de Gaulle has threatened severe consequences if the affair becomes public. Sanguinetti objects that the appearances must change; Frey makes clear that they will not.

The report also reveals why the usual strength of the security apparatus may not solve this particular problem. Rolland’s agents have penetrated high levels of the OAS, and the Interior Ministry possesses extensive dossiers on people connected, however remotely, with the organization. Yet those resources have been outflanked by the assassin’s anonymity: he is a foreigner, not a known figure in the ministry’s files. The weakness is not a lack of records or personnel but the absence of a usable identity. For Sanguinetti, accustomed to directing a vast domestic security operation, the foreigner’s obscurity turns administrative power into a source of frustration.

Narrative Role

Sanguinetti’s first appearance establishes the government’s predicament before the investigation develops into a police operation. His forceful reaction gives the threat immediate political weight, while Frey’s explanation shows that the investigation must be conducted secretly rather than abandoned. The distinction between acting and acting publicly becomes the governing constraint: the state can mobilize its services, but it cannot admit why they are moving.

His portrait also sets coercive capacity against informational vulnerability. The same official associated with roadblocks, identity checks, and the mass deployment of the CRS encounters a threat that the familiar machinery of surveillance cannot readily identify. Sanguinetti’s anger registers the pressure of that contradiction, while his loyalty to Charles de Gaulle helps explain why he accepts the President’s authority even as he challenges its practical consequences. He is thus presented as both an agent of state power and a witness to the limits imposed on it by secrecy, political dignity, and the assassin’s anonymity.