Execution of Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry

The Execution of Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry is the novel’s opening execution and its first major reversal: the death of a man held responsible for an attempt on Charles de Gaulle’s life appears to close the danger, but instead helps initiate the plot that brings the President closer to another assassination. On March 11, 1963, Bastien-Thiry was shot in the courtyard of Fort d'Ivry. The scene gives the execution the weight of a public reckoning while making its political consequences unsettlingly immediate: the condemned man dies, but the movement against de Gaulle does not.

Verdict and Refused Clemency

The execution followed the Supreme Military Court’s verdict of March 4. Bastien-Thiry and two others were sentenced to death; three more men who were still at large, including Georges Watin, also received death sentences. On March 8, de Gaulle listened in silence for three hours as the condemned men’s lawyers appealed for clemency. He commuted two death sentences to life imprisonment, but Bastien-Thiry’s sentence stood. The distinction makes the execution the result of a considered decision rather than a sudden act: the appeal was heard, some sentences were changed, and Bastien-Thiry remained condemned.

That night, Bastien-Thiry’s lawyer told him the execution had been fixed for March 11 and explained plainly that he was going to be shot. Bastien-Thiry continued to smile and shook his head. He told the lawyer that no French firing squad would raise its rifles against him. The scene places confidence and impending death in the same gesture: his refusal to believe the sentence does not alter the decision, and the execution that follows makes his prediction tragically wrong. The novel gives this exchange a particular force because the lawyer’s announcement is both practical information and the last warning before the state carries out its sentence.

The Execution at Fort d'Ivry

At 6:40 in the morning, in the main courtyard of the military prison outside Paris, Bastien-Thiry stood bound to a stake driven into the gravel. A French Air Force colonel, he faced the soldiers from a distance of twenty metres. The narrative attends to the small physical actions that make the procedure irreversible: a foot scuffs the grit, a blindfold is wrapped over his eyes, and the priest’s murmuring is set against the crackle of twenty rifle bolts as the squad charges and cocks its carbines.

The surrounding city continues its ordinary morning. Beyond the prison walls, a Berliet truck sounds its horn as another vehicle crosses its path toward the city centre. Its noise masks the officer’s order to aim. The rifle fire produces no visible disturbance in the waking city beyond a brief flutter of pigeons; seconds later, the single sound of the coup de grâce is lost in the growing traffic. By setting the execution’s decisive sounds against vehicles, birds, and the city’s rising din, the passage makes the event both exact and strangely unregistered. A man is killed inside the prison, while everyday life outside gives no sign that anything has changed.

A Death That Begins Another Plot

The novel explicitly rejects the expectation that Bastien-Thiry’s death will end attempts on de Gaulle’s life. His execution was supposed to put a stop to them, but by a quirk of fate it marks a beginning. That reversal shapes the book’s opening: the narrative first shows the outcome of the earlier campaign against the President, then turns back to explain how the events of August 22, 1962, created the conditions for a new threat. The execution therefore acts as both conclusion and prologue, fixing the cost of the earlier attack before tracing the chain of decisions that follows.

The immediate link is the radio report. Bastien-Thiry’s execution was announced on the 8 a.m. news of Radio Europe Number One in French, a broadcast heard across much of Western Europe by listeners who tuned in. In a small hotel room in Austria, the report reached Marc Rodin, the new operations chief of the Secret Army Organisation. The novel identifies his room as the point from which a train of thoughts and actions began, bringing de Gaulle nearer to death than at any earlier time in his career. Rodin switched off his transistor radio and rose from a nearly untouched breakfast tray. The contrast is stark: the execution is over, yet its news becomes the stimulus for the next phase of the conspiracy.

Political and Narrative Significance

Bastien-Thiry’s death joins judicial punishment to the continuing underground conflict over de Gaulle. The court proceedings, the appeal for clemency, and the firing squad establish the state’s formal response to the attempt on the President. Yet the broadcast’s effect demonstrates the limits of treating that response as a definitive ending. Rodin’s succession to operational leadership turns the execution into a point of transmission: the removal of one leader does not dissolve the organization or its objective, and news of the punishment helps redirect the action toward a new plot.

The opening also establishes the novel’s method of suspense. It reveals the death and its date at once, then withholds the explanation of why that apparent ending marks a beginning. Rather than asking whether Bastien-Thiry will survive, the narrative makes the reader follow the consequences of his death: from the courtyard, to the radio audience, to Rodin’s room in Austria, and back through the preceding events. The execution is decisive not because it ends the threat to de Gaulle, but because the story makes its failure to end that threat the premise of what follows.