Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité

The Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) are France’s large paramilitary public-order force, described in the novel as numbering 45,000 men. Their riot squads embody the state’s capacity to impose order in the streets, but that capacity is politically divisive: the force is feared and resented by opponents across the political spectrum and by ordinary people affected by the controls imposed in its name. In the investigation of a threat against Charles de Gaulle, the CRS’s size does not translate into an ability to pursue an unidentified assassin; only after the state’s security measures have been organized around that unknown threat does the force become part of an exceptional security perimeter.

Public-order force and political reputation

The CRS is associated with Alexandre Sanguinetti, the Interior Minister’s chief of staff and the official who has mobilized its anti-riot squads during the preceding two years. The force is characterized as paramilitary, with a scale and public profile that make its methods consequential well beyond any single demonstration. Its presence is not politically neutral in the eyes of the characters: the same force can be presented as an instrument for keeping public order or condemned as a threat to civil rights.

The extreme left hates and fears Sanguinetti for his readiness to deploy the CRS and for the hard tactics used against demonstrations from either the left or the right. Communists call him a Fascist, associating some of his methods with those of states behind the Iron Curtain. The extreme right also loathes him, invoking the suppression of democracy and civil liberties. The account gives that hostility an additional political context: efficient policing has helped prevent a breakdown of order that might have enabled a right-wing coup claiming to restore order. Thus, opposition to the CRS comes from enemies who disagree with one another, even as they converge in their denunciation of state coercion.

The resentment extends beyond organized political camps. Decrees associated with Sanguinetti’s office have brought street barriers, identity-card checks at major road junctions, and roadblocks on main roads. The force is also linked in the public imagination to widely circulated images of young demonstrators being struck to the ground with CRS truncheons. The press, apart from the relatively small Gaullist press, reviles Sanguinetti and labels him Monsieur Anti-OAS. The narrative presents the CRS, and the policies carried out under Sanguinetti’s authority, as a conspicuous face of the state’s security response—and of the civil-liberties costs that response imposes.

Place in the national security apparatus

The head of the CRS attends the Interior Minister’s confidential meeting on the assassination threat alongside the chiefs of France’s principal security and police departments. The novel situates the force within a wide institutional network: the Police Judiciaire commands the national detective force, while other bodies handle counter-espionage, records, state-property protection, and public order. In the meeting’s account of departmental responsibilities, the CRS is one of the represented sections of the broader security structure. Its chief sits at the foot of the conference table, opposite the Minister, a position that makes the force visibly part of the state’s response even though the immediate problem is not a street disturbance.

The meeting also exposes the limit of mobilizing that structure. Commissaire Maurice Bouvier reasons that the agencies cannot identify or act against the assassin while they lack a name: the CRS cannot pursue a man when it does not know whom it is pursuing. The obstacle is not a shortage of officers or a lack of formal reach, but the absence of an identity that would let any branch turn a general threat into a specific target. In this police-procedural logic, mass capacity cannot substitute for detective work. The force belongs to the machinery that may eventually act, but it cannot independently resolve the mystery on which action depends.

Secrecy, investigation, and the limits of deployment

The government’s response is constrained by Charles de Gaulle’s insistence that the threat remain secret. The Interior Minister explains that the information rests on Colonel Rolland’s analysis of Viktor Kowalski’s statements, and that its truth has not yet been established. A nationwide hunt for a foreigner known only by a codename would therefore be premature. More decisively, the President orders no publicity and no nationwide search, fearing that visible precautions would make France appear to be hiding from a single foreigner and would expose the affair to press and foreign ridicule. The chiefs are sworn to silence, and any later action must also be kept secret.

That policy places the CRS inside a security system whose scale must be exercised selectively. The police begin targeted checks at border posts for tall blond foreign men and scrutinize passports for possible forgery, while the public-facing explanation is that the searches are routine. When Claude Lebel later directs a search around Ussel, he orders local officers to question farmers, shopkeepers, hotels, and other likely witnesses, to keep the press away, and—if they find the fugitive—to surround him without approaching. These instructions illustrate the distinction between mobilizing police resources and using a large public-order force to make a conspicuous pursuit. The operation depends on discreet intelligence-gathering before it can become an arrest or a wider deployment.

Security at the President’s public appearances

As the investigation approaches Charles de Gaulle’s published Liberation Day itinerary, the scale of protection increases sharply. The President refuses to alter his schedule: it includes the Eternal Flame at the Arc de Triomphe, High Mass at Notre-Dame, a visit to the shrine at Mont-Valérien, and an afternoon presentation of medals to Resistance veterans near the Gare Montparnasse. The CRS is implicated in preparations that must protect him without openly acknowledging the assassin’s existence.

The precautions include special lapel badges for police and CRS personnel, issued before dawn in case the assassin attempts to pass himself off as a security officer. Everyone coming within two hundred metres of the President is to be frisked, while passes for the press and diplomatic corps are to be changed. These measures promise disruption for the very groups who might otherwise expect ordinary access to a public ceremony. They also reveal the practical contradiction at the heart of the operation: the state must make security unusually visible to those entering the area while preventing the public from understanding why.

The CRS therefore signifies both the reach and the vulnerability of the state’s response. Its 45,000-member force can be deployed against demonstrations and incorporated into an extensive protective plan, yet its numbers alone cannot identify an assassin who has no known name. The novel’s contrast is between force applied to visible crowds and investigation directed at an invisible individual. The CRS belongs to the first capacity; the manhunt can succeed only when the second supplies the identity that makes pursuit possible.