The Assassination plot at the École Militaire was dismantled in February, with the plotters arrested; its immediate significance is less in any operational details, which the narrative does not provide, than in the false reassurance its suppression gave the authorities. When a new threat to Charles de Gaulle emerged, the earlier success became a point of comparison: the OAS might be weakening, yet a foreign assassin could evade the networks and dossiers that had made its members legible to the state.

Background and dismantling

The available account identifies the plot as an earlier attempt against de Gaulle and dates its dismantling to February. The plotters were arrested, ending that particular danger. It does not describe their plan, intended method, or the circumstances of the arrests, so the episode enters the narrative as a completed operation rather than a dramatized scene.

For Alexandre Sanguinetti, the arrests marked a boundary between one security crisis and the next. In the two months that followed, he had been dealing with a wave of bank robberies and smash-and-grab raids. As the OAS apparatus came under pressure from the Action Service within and the police and CRS outside, he interpreted the robberies as the dying violence of an organization trying to finance exile. The École Militaire plot’s suppression helped make that interpretation seem plausible.

The reassurance proves fragile

The new report overturns that sense of progress. Sanguinetti sees the threat as a return to the point from which the February arrests had seemed to move him forward: the president’s life must be protected, but the suspected killer is still unidentified. The earlier operation had produced arrests; this one presents the authorities with an attacker known only by a codename and possibly not yet identified as a criminal suspect in any ordinary sense.

That difference changes what the police can do. Claude Lebel initially approaches foreign police chiefs through informal, preliminary inquiries, explaining that the authorities do not yet know whether an offense has been formulated or preparations begun. He gives them little more than a poor description, then asks whether their files—or their professional judgment—suggest a political contract killer with successful assassinations behind him. The search therefore begins not with a known network of plotters but with a category of person who may have operated outside the countries being asked to help.

From arrests to an unknown adversary

The earlier dismantling had encouraged confidence in files built from OAS connections and informants. The later investigation exposes their limit: the suspected assassin is a foreigner, and anonymity has carried him beyond a system designed to recognize domestic associates. As the police try to identify him, they must work from changing indications rather than from an arrested group whose membership and purpose are already established.

Lebel’s reasoning also shows why the new threat cannot be treated as safely ended once the plot is exposed. The assassin has his own timetable, and the police do not know where they have interrupted it. Even after learning that the authorities know of a plan against the president, he may not know how much they have discovered. Later, evidence that someone tipped him off about the exposure of his Alexander Duggan identity helps explain why he abandoned his route from Gap and moved quickly; it does not establish that the earlier École Militaire plot had the same leak or methods.

Consequences for the manhunt

The distinction between the arrested plotters and an unidentified professional shapes the secrecy and scale of the response. The government forbids publicity and a nationwide search while the threat remains unconfirmed, and Charles de Gaulle refuses to alter his public engagements. At the same time, preparations for the Liberation Day ceremonies include steel crowd barriers, searches of surrounding buildings and sewers, armed observers on nearby roofs, and searches of people who might otherwise pass as officials or clergy.

Even such precautions cannot settle the central question. Lebel believes the attacker remains in France, armed and concealed under another identity, and insists that he must be recognized when he emerges. A report that only an apparent disabled veteran has passed through a guarded gap illustrates the vulnerability of security procedures to an ordinary-looking identity and a plausible credential. In retrospect, the February arrests are not proof that the danger has passed; they are the contrast that makes the new danger visible—a plot contained through arrests followed by a pursuit in which the decisive adversary remains unidentified.