French Air Force

The French Air Force is represented in the novel chiefly through Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry: a serving officer whose conviction and execution make his military status inseparable from the political crisis surrounding Charles de Gaulle. The service is not depicted through its operations or command structure; instead, its presence is concentrated in the fate of one officer who believed he was acting for France and was condemned by the state.

Bastien-Thiry’s military identity

Bastien-Thiry is identified as a French Air Force colonel and as an employee of the Air Ministry. He was thirty-five, married, and the father of three children. His professional and family life formed the conventional exterior of a man who, in private, had developed a deep grievance against Charles de Gaulle. He believed de Gaulle had betrayed France and those who had recalled him to power in 1958 by yielding Algeria to Algerian nationalists.

The narrative distinguishes Bastien-Thiry’s political conviction from personal grievance: he had not suffered materially from the loss of Algeria. He regarded himself as a patriot serving his country by killing the man he considered a traitor, and belonged to the Secret Army Organisation, which sought to kill de Gaulle and overthrow his government. His military rank identifies his place in the armed forces, but the account does not suggest that the French Air Force as an institution supported his cause or participated in his actions.

Conviction and execution

On March 4, the Supreme Military Court sentenced Bastien-Thiry and two others to death; three more men, including Georges Watin, were sentenced in absentia. On March 8, de Gaulle heard appeals for clemency for three hours in silence. He commuted two of the death sentences to life imprisonment, but Bastien-Thiry’s condemnation remained in force. His lawyer then told him that the execution was fixed for March 11; Bastien-Thiry initially smiled in disbelief before being told plainly that he would be shot.

At six-forty that morning, in the courtyard of Fort d'Ivry, Bastien-Thiry stood bound to a stake before a firing squad. A priest murmured as the soldiers prepared their rifles; after the shots, the coup de grâce was nearly lost beneath the rising traffic noise beyond the walls. The scene reduces the presence of the French Air Force to the condemned officer’s rank, while placing his death amid the ordinary sounds of a waking city.

The service in the novel

The French Air Force is not given a separately described policy, mission, or institutional response. Its significance here is personal and political: Bastien-Thiry’s identity as an officer stands alongside his role in a clandestine campaign against the president, and his execution demonstrates the state’s refusal to spare him. The contrast between a military officer’s claim to patriotic duty and the government’s judgment of his actions gives the service a narrow but consequential place in the novel’s account of loyalty, rebellion, and punishment.