De Gaulle's heightened security state

Charles de Gaulle's heightened security state turns public ceremony into a tightly controlled security operation, yet cannot remove the danger posed by an assassin who has stayed ahead of the investigation. Its defining tension is political as well as practical: the authorities must protect the President without publicly admitting that a foreign professional killer may be hunting him, and Charles de Gaulle refuses to abandon the appearances around which the threat is organized.

Threat and political limits

The precautions follow a warning that is unusually difficult to contain. The OAS has already made six attempts to eliminate Charles de Gaulle: three were exposed during planning, one was betrayed the day before, and two were carried out but missed. The Englishman advising Marc Rodin explains that those failures have made a professional assassination harder, not easier. Charles de Gaulle is already forewarned of the general intention, so security routines will not have lapsed into complacency; if a shot is fired, guards are prepared to pursue the attacker rather than panic. The threat therefore calls for vigilance, but its broad outlines are already politically dangerous.

At first, the government cannot be sure that Colonel Rolland's report is reliable. It rests on the account of Viktor Kowalski, who has since died, while enquiries in Vienna are still underway. The Interior Minister presents this uncertainty as one reason that a nationwide search for a foreigner known only by a codename is not yet realistic. More decisively, Charles de Gaulle orders that there be no publicity, no nationwide search, and no sign outside a small circle that anything is wrong. He fears that the press and foreign governments would interpret conspicuous security measures as evidence that France's President is hiding from a single foreigner. The order also makes the investigation itself a secret: senior officials are sworn to silence and told to give the matter immediate personal attention.

Precautions without public alarm

The resulting security effort begins in a deliberately deniable form. Customs officers at every French border post are told to examine the luggage and passports of tall, blond male foreigners, with a DST official checking documents for possible forgeries. The searches are meant to look like routine spot checks; even a traveler who notices the increased scrutiny is not supposed to recognize that it is directed at a particular profile. At the same time, the government rejects a proposal to seize one of the three OAS chiefs in Rome. The plan is ruled out for diplomatic reasons, and the President supports that decision despite knowing why the proposal was made.

Claude Lebel's approach to foreign police forces reflects the same constraint. He spends hours contacting senior investigators, but cannot yet describe his request as an official enquiry between police forces: the authorities are not certain that an offence has reached the stage of preparation, and they know neither the suspect's name nor much about his appearance. What he can disclose is the kind of man they must seek: a top-level political contract killer with successful assassinations behind him, not an ordinary gangland gunman. The limited description and the need for discretion leave police colleagues to understand the target of the warning without receiving a full public account of the threat.

Securing the ceremonies

By the eve of the ceremonies, Charles de Gaulle has refused to alter any part of his published itinerary. He is due to rekindle the Eternal Flame at the Arc de Triomphe at ten, attend High Mass at Notre-Dame de Paris at eleven, visit the memorial to the martyred Resistance at Mont-Valérien at 12:30, and return to the palace before an afternoon ceremony. At four, he is to present Medals of the Liberation to ten Resistance veterans in the square before Gare Montparnasse. The choice of the station square carries its own sense of transition: construction is underway nearby, and the old station facade may soon disappear.

Officials respond by making each ceremony a searched and guarded enclosure. Steel barriers are to be erected hours ahead of time, with the enclosed areas searched from top to bottom, sewers included. Nearby roofs are watched by armed observers who survey other roofs and windows; houses and flats are searched, and nobody passes the barriers without an official role in the ceremony. At Notre-Dame de Paris, policemen are placed among the cornices, on the roof, and among the spires. Priests, acolytes, and choirboys are searched for concealed weapons. Even police and CRS personnel are to receive special lapel badges at dawn, so that an attacker cannot simply masquerade as a security officer.

The protections extend to the President's transport and to anyone approaching him. Bulletproof windows are secretly fitted to the presidential Citroën, without telling Charles de Gaulle, who officials expect would be furious. His regular driver is instructed to travel faster than usual to frustrate a snap shot at the car, while Jean Ducret gathers especially tall officers and officials to form a protective screen without making its purpose obvious to the President. Everyone within two hundred metres is to be searched, with no exceptions; press and diplomatic passes are to be replaced at dawn, and anyone carrying a package or an unusually long object is to be removed. These measures reach beyond ordinary screening, but their secrecy is intended to keep the public appearance of an unchanged programme intact.

The public test of the security plan

On August 25, 1963, Paris is scorching hot and crowded for the Liberation Day commemorations. Seventy-five thousand police and other security personnel work to keep order, while the public sees little of Charles de Gaulle as he moves through ranks of guards and officials. A group of tall officers and civil servants forms a human shield, and his four bodyguards flank him, carrying automatic weapons beneath their jackets. Their distinctive, ready posture makes the practical purpose of their protection visible even though the wider operation remains concealed.

At the Arc de Triomphe, the ceremony proceeds as planned while hundreds of men with binoculars and rifles watch from the roofs overlooking the square. As the motorcade leaves for Notre-Dame de Paris, those watchers stand down. The cathedral receives another, less visible layer of protection: clergy have been watched as they robe, two riflemen occupy the organ loft without the Archbishop's knowledge, and plainclothes police are embedded among worshippers. The security measures also create conspicuous false alarms beyond the immediate entrance, where bystanders are hustled away for reaching inside their jackets. The first ceremonies therefore show both the reach of the precautions and the suspicion they impose on ordinary gestures.

Vigilance and the limits of protection

The preparations do not convince Claude Lebel that the danger has passed. He reasons that the assassin has already had time to plan, has survived betrayal and pursuit by two leading police forces, and may now be in hiding with a gun and another identity. The Jackal knows that the plot has been exposed in principle, but Lebel believes he cannot know how much the authorities have discovered or where their investigation stands. The assassin's timetable remains his own; the police have been working for seventy-two hours without knowing how far along that timetable they are. Their chance is to identify him under his new name and locate him before he acts.

Lebel also connects the Jackal's escape from Gap to a possible warning about his Alexander Duggan identity. If enquiries show that the car was transformed on the journey from Gap to Ussel, Lebel reasons, the paint may have been bought in Gap after the suspect learned that his alias had been discovered. He cannot establish from this alone who passed the information, but suspects that the contact may be Valmy. The episode underscores that physical barriers and searches operate within an information contest: the police are trying to make the city harder to penetrate while also trying to learn what the fugitive knows.

When officials ask how The Jackal could bring a weapon near Charles de Gaulle, Lebel has no specific answer. He insists only that the assassin believes he can do so, and that he must emerge the next day if he is to follow his plan. With the planned safeguards already extensive, Lebel's remaining task is to walk through the ceremonies and keep his eyes open. The heightened security state thus ends at the edge of certainty: the state can search, screen, watch, and surround its President, but it still depends on recognizing a man who may appear under yet another face.