Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle is the novel’s endangered president and the political centre around which its plots of assassination and pursuit turn. The attempts against him are not merely threats to an individual: his opponents believe his death could destabilize France, while his refusal to retreat from public life makes his ordinary appearances part of the contest. Twice, the narrative places his characteristic composure against an imminent attack, and twice the details of his conduct become decisive.

Identity and Political Conflict

De Gaulle appears as President of France, a public figure whose authority is inseparable from the national crisis surrounding the story. Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, waiting in a café in Meudon before the 1962 ambush, is presented as a family man and Air Ministry officer whose conventional life conceals a profound grievance. He believes De Gaulle betrayed France and the men who brought him back to power in 1958 by yielding Algeria to Algerian nationalists. The contrast is central: the president’s actions are understood by his enemies not as a change of policy alone, but as a betrayal of the country they claim to defend.

The OAS presents its own justification in similarly absolute terms. Its representatives describe De Gaulle as a dictator who has polluted France and prostituted its honour, and argue that his death is necessary to restore the country to Frenchmen. Their account records six attempts by supporters: three uncovered during early planning, one betrayed on the eve of its execution, and two carried out but unsuccessful. The figures place the 1962 attack within a repeated campaign rather than making it an isolated act. The novel sets this declared political purpose beside the human cost and danger of treating a president’s death as a means of national restoration.

The Petit-Clamart Ambush

On August 22, 1962, De Gaulle leaves the palace with his wife, Madame Yvonne de Gaulle. At 7:45, he appears in his habitual charcoal-grey double-breasted suit and dark tie, courteously ushering her through the doors and guiding her down the steps to the waiting Citroën. She takes her place in the rear seat of the front car; he enters beside her. The departure is presented as a familiar, orderly routine, but the attackers are waiting beyond the city.

The plot’s timing depends on a consequential mistake. Bastien-Thiry has consulted a calendar for 1961 and believes dusk on August 22 will fall at 8:35. In 1962 it falls at 8:10. At 8:18 he sees the convoy travelling along the Avenue de la Libération at about seventy miles per hour and frantically waves his newspaper. The twenty-five-minute error has altered the conditions under which the ambush unfolds. The narrative links a seemingly minor act of preparation—a calendar checked for the wrong year—to a turning point in the history of France.

After the attack, Commissaire Jean Ducret reports what has happened to Villacoublay. When the convoy arrives ten minutes later, De Gaulle insists on going straight to the apron where a helicopter is waiting. Officers and officials crowd around the car and help the shaken Madame de Gaulle out. De Gaulle emerges from the other side amid the debris, shakes glass fragments from his lapel, ignores the officers’ anxious appeals, and walks around to take his wife’s arm. The sequence makes his concern for her, and his refusal to be drawn into the surrounding panic, more vivid than any speech could be.

A Presidency Under Continuing Threat

The earlier attacks shape every later effort to protect De Gaulle. Commissaire Jean Ducret, head of the president’s personal security corps, is described as a leading French authority on protecting an individual from assassination. By this point, six known plots have either failed in execution or been dismantled before they could be carried out. Yet repeated failure does not mean the danger has passed. Roger Frey recognizes that a new plan, devised by a colonel in Rome, could still bring down the political order through the death of one man. He fears that France’s institutions in 1963 would not withstand De Gaulle’s death and that a putsch and civil war could follow.

For the conspirators, the previous attempts have also changed the practical conditions of an attack. De Gaulle is forewarned of the general intention to kill him, though not of a specific plan. His protection can no longer rely on routines becoming relaxed after years without a serious attempt: security remains heightened, and the people around him are expected to react rather than panic if an attacker strikes. The narrative thus makes his survival both personal and institutional. The target’s continued life complicates every subsequent attempt, while the prospect of his death carries consequences far beyond the loss of a president.

The response is deliberately concealed from the public. In the search for a possible assassin, border officers are told to examine the luggage of tall, blond male foreigners entering France, scrutinize passports for forgeries with the assistance of a DST official, and present any searches as routine spot checks. The operation’s scale is national, but its defining method is discretion: even a traveller who notices increased scrutiny is not meant to know that a particular profile is being sought. De Gaulle’s vulnerability therefore produces a hidden security apparatus alongside the conspicuous protection surrounding his public appearances.

The Refusal to Withdraw

When the danger returns, De Gaulle does not agree to cancel public engagements. Officials argue that the programme must change and that appearances should stop until the assassin is caught. He rejects that proposal. The published schedule for August 25, 1963, remains in place: he is to rekindle the Eternal Flame at the Arc de Triomphe at ten, attend High Mass at Notre-Dame at eleven, spend time at the shrine of the martyred resistance fighters at Mont-Valérien at 12:30, return to the palace for lunch and a rest, and attend an afternoon presentation of Medals of Liberation to ten veterans whose Resistance service is belatedly being recognized.

This decision exposes the tension between security and public duty without suggesting that the danger is imaginary. The novel stresses that August 25 is scorching, just as August 22 had been a year and three days earlier, and that the ceremonies place De Gaulle repeatedly before witnesses. He is not simply protected from public view: at the medal presentation, officers and civil servants surround him, and their height makes each of them a kind of human shield; all four bodyguards are also present. The arrangements turn the ceremony into both a civic ritual and a defensive formation.

Ceremony, Gesture, and Narrative Role

The afternoon presentation gives De Gaulle a role distinct from that of a passive target. He pauses before each veteran, listens as the minister explains the recipient’s identity and citation, takes the medal from its cushion, and pins it to the veteran’s chest. As the band plays La Marjolaine, he steps back for the salute. The scene’s careful ceremonial sequence holds attention on small, deliberate movements even as an assassin watches for an opening. Public duty is shown not as an abstraction but as a series of gestures performed at close range.

At the critical instant, De Gaulle bends to kiss the veteran on both cheeks, following a familiar French gesture of congratulations. The assassin is watching the president’s position; De Gaulle’s unexpected movement coincides with the moment before the bullet leaves the barrel. The kiss is therefore more than a note of ceremony: it interrupts the attack at its point of execution. The president survives not through a retreat from public life, but within the very ritual that the attack is meant to exploit.

Across the two attempts, De Gaulle’s importance lies in the contrast between what political violence tries to make of him and how he is shown acting. To his enemies he is the embodiment of a political order that must be destroyed; to the security apparatus he is the individual whose continued survival may preserve France from upheaval. In the scenes themselves, he is also a husband who reaches for his shaken wife and a president who continues to meet veterans and carry out public ceremonies. The novel makes those concrete acts—not an invented account of his private thoughts—the measure of his composure and the basis of his significance to the plot.