Claude Lebel—Maurice Bouvier

Claude Lebel and Maurice Bouvier are linked by a professional relationship that becomes the command structure behind the pursuit of The Jackal. Bouvier is not the detective who develops the case’s deductions: he is the senior officer who recognizes Lebel’s investigative strengths, secures his appointment to the task, and helps make an unusually broad national operation possible. Their alliance joins institutional authority to painstaking police work, while the pressure of the manhunt tests how much room a quiet, methodical deputy can retain under scrutiny from the government and senior officials.

Professional Standing and Appointment

Lebel’s position beside Bouvier grew out of a record built on patient casework rather than publicity. As a detective, Lebel was known for being slow, precise, methodical, and painstaking. He understood police work as the routine accumulation and repeated checking of details, assembled until the evidence formed a case capable of standing up in court. Occasional flashes of inspiration strengthened that method, but did not replace it. He disliked publicity and had not built his reputation through press conferences.

That record had brought Lebel steadily through the ranks. When the headship of the Homicide Division of the Brigade Criminelle became vacant, three years before the manhunt, even other candidates agreed that Lebel deserved the post. In three years leading Homicide, he had never failed to secure an arrest, although one accused person had been acquitted on a technicality. The role brought him closer to Bouvier, the chief of the Brigade Criminelle and, like Lebel, an old-style policeman.

After Lebel’s predecessor died suddenly, Bouvier asked for Lebel to become his new deputy. The account offers a possible, but explicitly uncertain, explanation for the choice: colleagues suspected that Bouvier, often occupied by administration, valued a retiring subordinate able to handle major cases quietly without overshadowing his superior. The narrative leaves open whether that suspicion was fair. What is clear is that Bouvier trusted Lebel with responsibilities that made him an obvious candidate when the government needed a detective to lead the search for a political assassin.

The Manhunt Is Entrusted to Lebel

At the government briefing, Bouvier’s assessment of his deputy is decisive. Asked to identify France’s best detective, he names Lebel, his own deputy. The Minister of the Interior summons Lebel, who emerges an hour later dazed and bewildered after listening to a fifty-minute briefing. The assignment is not presented as a consultation or a request: it is a directive, accompanied by extensive information about the threat.

The authority granted to Lebel is exceptional. He is to establish his own office, obtain the information he needs, and draw on the resources of the organizations represented around the table without limits on costs. Bouvier’s endorsement thus helps turn Lebel’s personal investigative ability into a command with national reach. After the briefing, the copies of the report are gathered for the Minister’s safe, but Lebel is allowed to retain Bouvier’s copy. His first request is for confidential cooperation from the heads of major foreign criminal-investigation forces, whose files might contain information about a professional assassin. Bouvier is part of the chain through which that request is made possible: the Minister grants it after Lebel explains that personal contacts between senior Western police officers can be used without making the enquiries official.

Practical Support and Institutional Pressure

Once the meeting ends, Bouvier joins Lebel and takes him aside. He acknowledges that he was the person who proposed assigning the case to the Police Judiciaire, because the other groups would have talked in circles. His support is therefore both personal and organizational: he has helped place the work with Lebel’s service and now turns immediately to the practical consequences for his deputy.

Bouvier tells Lebel to abandon all his other work and promises to assign staff to take over his outstanding cases. Lebel chooses to keep his existing office. Bouvier accepts that choice but transforms the room into the headquarters of the operation, with no other business to interfere. He asks whom Lebel wants to assist him, leaving the detective to shape the working arrangement rather than imposing a replacement office or a predetermined team.

The operational provisions that follow show what that backing means in practice. Lebel instructs his assistant to keep the investigation secret, make the assistant his sole confidential support, arrange a camp bed and washing equipment in the office, and secure a percolator with coffee, milk, and sugar. He also requires ten outside telephone lines and a permanently available operator. Requests for other facilities are to go directly to department chiefs under the authority of his name, and a memorandum is prepared to empower his assistant to seek whatever Lebel would personally request. These are Lebel’s instructions, but they can function because the extraordinary priority Bouvier and the government have granted the office.

That latitude comes with a burden. Bouvier tells Lebel that senior officials will require an evening progress briefing at the Ministry, every night at ten o’clock. He and Max Fernet had tried unsuccessfully to prevent the arrangement. Bouvier explains the irony of the officials being available to offer advice, then promises that he and Fernet will attend in case the meeting turns hostile. His role is not to free Lebel from accountability; it is to stand beside him within a system of accountability he cannot remove.

Bouvier also makes the uncertainty of the assignment plain. There is no fixed timetable: the assassin might strike the next morning or wait a month, and the police must work flat out until he is caught or at least identified and located. Bouvier distinguishes that identification-and-location stage from what might follow, suggesting that the Action Service could take over thereafter. The exchange establishes both the urgency he communicates and the boundary of his own role: he supports the search while Lebel carries its investigative responsibility.

Cooperation Through the Investigation

Lebel’s subsequent work shows the method Bouvier backed. In confidential calls to foreign police chiefs, Lebel does not claim to be making a formal request between forces. He describes the enquiry as a tip-off, explains that the police do not yet know the suspected man’s name, and gives only a poor description. He then sharpens the question: the target is not a gangland gunman but a political assassin with several successful killings behind him. The approach depends on other investigators recognizing the significance of a carefully limited request. It is consistent with Bouvier’s choice of a detective whose strength lies in assembling information rather than announcing conclusions prematurely.

As the investigation develops, Lebel’s reasoning repeatedly has to distinguish what the evidence establishes from what remains a hypothesis. He warns officials that police intervention has lasted seventy-two hours but that only The Jackal knows his own timetable. The assassin may be in France, even in Paris, without knowing how far the investigation has advanced; police may still have a chance to find him under a new identity before he realizes how close they are. Lebel’s explanation makes uncertainty operational: it argues for continued pursuit, not for assuming either that the assassin has withdrawn or that the attempt is imminent.

A later deduction illustrates the same discipline. Lebel reasons that the paint required to transform the car may have been bought in Gap, and that the car may already have been altered before its journey from Gap to Ussel. If so, someone had warned The Jackal that the Duggan identity had been discovered. Lebel does not present the source as proven; he considers the possibility of a leak through the chain of officials and operators, then notes that the assassin has one known contact, Valmy. His willingness to separate an inference from a confirmed fact echoes the method that earned Bouvier’s confidence.

The pursuit also depends on Bouvier’s institutional authority being converted into local action. When Lebel receives urgent information from Commissaire Valentin, he orders a broad search around the point where the car was found near Ussel. Police are to question farms, roadside travellers, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks. The description is specific: a tall blond English-born man who speaks good French, has several pieces of luggage and substantial cash, and may look as though he has slept rough. The press is to be kept away under a cover story, and any location found is to be surrounded rather than approached. The demands are Lebel’s, but they exemplify the reach and urgency of the operation Bouvier helped establish.

Division of Responsibility

Bouvier’s contribution is clearest at the beginning, when he identifies Lebel as the right detective, and in the working arrangements that let the search proceed. As the case unfolds, Lebel makes the central deductions himself. After a week of apparent delay following the departure from Gap, he realizes that The Jackal has selected a particular day for the attack and asks whether Charles de Gaulle has engagements outside the palace. This recognition belongs to Lebel; the earlier relationship explains why he has the authority and institutional support to act on it.

The partnership is consequently neither a transfer of the investigation to Bouvier nor a portrait of a deputy working alone. Bouvier supplies standing, access, administrative cover, and reassurance when political pressure gathers around the case. Lebel supplies the procedure: guarded enquiries, comparison of records, deployment of search teams, and revisions to hypotheses as new information arrives. Their relationship gives the novel’s manhunt a practical foundation, making its progress depend not only on a detective’s insight but also on a senior colleague willing to entrust him with the resources, responsibility, and scrutiny that insight requires.