March 11, 1963

March 11, 1963, is the date Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry is executed by firing squad at Fort d'Ivry, but in The Day of the Jackal it marks not a conclusion but a reversal. Bastien-Thiry’s death is meant to end further attempts on Charles de Gaulle’s life; instead, news of the execution prompts Marc Rodin, the OAS’s new operations chief, to consider a course of action that brings the President closer to death than at any earlier point in his career. The date thus joins the failed past to the danger still to come.

The Execution at Fort d'Ivry

The scene opens at 6:40 on a cold March morning in the main courtyard of Fort d'Ivry. Bastien-Thiry, a French Air Force colonel, stands bound to a stake driven into the gravel, facing the firing squad from twenty metres away. A soldier’s foot scuffs the grit as a blindfold is placed over his eyes; the priest’s murmuring is followed by the crack and mechanical clatter of twenty rifle bolts being charged. The details make the execution a military procedure carried out at close range, not an abstract sentence pronounced at a distance.

The city beyond the prison walls continues its ordinary morning. A Berliet truck sounds its horn as another vehicle crosses its path, and traffic swells until it masks both the order to aim and, moments later, the coup de grace. The rifle volley sends pigeons briefly into the air, but otherwise makes no ripple in the waking city. This contrast between the courtyard’s finality and the city’s indifference gives the date its particular force: an event intended to settle a national crisis is absorbed into everyday noise.

Sentence and Clemency

The execution follows a sequence of legal decisions. On March 4, the Supreme Military Court sentences Bastien-Thiry and two others to death; three more condemned men, including Georges Watin, remain at large. On March 8, Charles de Gaulle listens in silence for three hours as the condemned men’s lawyers plead for clemency. He commutes two death sentences to life imprisonment, but Bastien-Thiry’s sentence stands.

That night Bastien-Thiry’s lawyer tells him that the execution is fixed for March 11. Bastien-Thiry continues to smile and insists that no French firing squad will raise its rifles against him. The confidence is contradicted by the event that follows: he is bound, blindfolded, and shot. His misjudgment gives the scene a personal dimension beyond the formal judgment. The date records not only the state’s decision, but the moment when his expectation of immunity is decisively overturned.

A Broadcast That Reverses the Meaning of the Date

On the morning of March 11, the execution is reported on the French-language news of Radio Europe Number One, whose signal reaches much of Western Europe. In a small hotel room in Austria, Marc Rodin hears the report and switches off his transistor radio. The broadcast does not simply announce that a condemned man has died: it reaches the newly appointed OAS operations chief and sets in motion a train of thoughts and actions that brings Charles de Gaulle nearer to death than at any earlier time in his career.

That reversal is the date’s central narrative significance. The execution is framed as an attempt to close a cycle of political violence, yet the news of its completion becomes the occasion for renewed danger. The novel first shows the firing squad as the apparent end of the threat, then follows the consequences of the report beyond the prison courtyard. March 11 therefore functions as a hinge in the story’s chronology: the state carries out a sentence meant to end the danger, while the news gives Rodin a new point from which to act.

From the Plot’s Beginning to the Manhunt

The later pursuit of the assassin develops on a different scale from the firing squad. When Claude Lebel receives the assignment, the Minister of the Interior gives him a directive rather than an invitation to advise. Lebel is granted his own office, access to information, and the resources of the organizations represented at the briefing. He responds by setting up a tightly controlled working space: his regular secretary is to be transferred or placed on paid leave, an assistant is to become his sole secretary, a camp bed and washing equipment are brought in, and ten outside telephone lines and a dedicated operator are requested. The urgency of the investigation is expressed through its demands on offices, staff, communications, and time.

Lebel’s first international approaches show how little the authorities initially know. He tells foreign police commissioners that he cannot yet make an official enquiry between forces because investigators are unsure whether even an intention to commit an offence has taken shape. They have no name and only a poor description. Their defining lead is instead a professional profile: the unknown man would have to be a leading contract assassin with several successful political killings behind him. The gap between the threat’s presumed scale and the investigators’ sparse information is one of the problems the ensuing operation must overcome.

The search then turns to records and geography. An overnight review of the Pantheon archives uncovers entries showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France from Brussels on the Brabant Express on July 22 and was recorded on the Etoile du Nord Express returning from Paris to Brussels on July 31. A hotel card in the name of Duggan, bearing a passport number that matches information from London, places him at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Rather than order a disruptive raid, Lebel visits the proprietor quietly and establishes that the man was no longer there by August 15. The paper trail narrows the inquiry, but it also shows how an assumed identity can leave apparently consistent traces.

Later, Lebel directs police in the region to search outward from the point where a car was found, using a square-search pattern and questioning farmhouses, drivers, village shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks. The suspect is described as a tall, blond Englishman who speaks good French, carries three suitcases and a handgrip, and may look as if he has slept rough. The press is to be diverted with a false explanation about a dazed casualty from a car crash, and officers are told to surround the suspect rather than approach him if they locate him. A subsequent report from Commissaire Valentin in Tulle adds the question of fingerprints from the car and the room at the château. These procedures belong to the manhunt rather than to the execution itself, but they complete the temporal arc opened by the date: from the apparent finality of a firing squad to a dispersed investigation dependent on records, local witnesses, and controlled information.