Max Fernet

Max Fernet, director of the French Judicial Police system, is the senior police official whose national detective force becomes central to the hunt for the Jackal. His role is less that of a lone investigator than of an institutional commander: he understands both the scale of the machinery available to the police and the limits of what that machinery can know. His interventions help define the investigation’s method, from its cautious use of uncertain identification evidence to its eventual mobilization of detectives across France.

Identity and Command

The French Judicial Police system is presented as the country’s operative crime-fighting network, distinct from the French National Police’s small administrative office. Fernet commands the detective force itself. In 1963, that force has just over twenty thousand men under his orders, a reach extending well beyond its large headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres.

Its organization runs through seventeen regional headquarters, corresponding to France’s seventeen police districts, and then through 453 borough forces: seventy-four central commissariats, 253 constituency commissariats, and 126 local police posts. Together, the network reaches two thousand towns and villages. In rural areas and along the highways, the more general work of maintaining order belongs to the gendarmerie and mobile traffic police; in many places, these forces share premises and facilities with police agents. The distinction matters to the story: Fernet commands an immense investigative apparatus, but it is one system within a broader, sometimes overlapping structure of public order.

At the Interior Ministry briefing, Fernet sits beside Maurice Grimaud, with the senior figures responsible for other departments arranged around the table. The conference brings the hierarchy of the French National Police into view, while identifying Fernet as the head of the national detective force that can turn a central directive into investigations across the country.

Judgment Under Uncertainty

Fernet’s clearest statement of investigative caution concerns the prospect of producing an Identikit image of the Jackal. The suspected assassin had worn wraparound dark glasses during an incident lasting only twenty seconds, two months earlier. Fernet argues that a composite made from so little information would be unlikely to identify its subject reliably: such pictures can resemble hundreds of thousands of people, and some actively mislead investigators. His point is not simply that the description is poor. It is that formalizing weak recollection into an official-looking image may create false confidence rather than useful knowledge.

That restraint fits the investigation’s unusual starting point. The dead Viktor Kowalski has told the authorities everything he knows, but it is not much; the suspect’s name and identity remain unknown. The officials discuss the possibility of bringing back one of the men in Rome who knows who the Jackal is, but the Minister rejects further snatches after the diplomatic dispute caused by the Argoud affair. Fernet’s warning about the composite thus belongs to a larger problem: the police must act against a potentially imminent assassin without treating a thin description or a politically dangerous shortcut as a dependable solution.

Supporting Lebel’s Investigation

When Claude Lebel receives the assignment, it is a directive backed by access to the resources of the organizations represented at the Ministry meeting. Fernet is among the senior officials whose force is placed at Lebel’s disposal. After the briefing, he wishes Lebel luck and leaves the building, while Maurice Bouvier explains that he had recommended the French Judicial Police system for the task because the other departments might otherwise talk in circles.

Lebel’s first preparations translate that authorization into practical capacity. He orders his assistant to secure a private office, restrict access to the secret, obtain ten outside telephone lines and a permanent operator, and invoke the priority granted to the investigation when requesting facilities from other departments. Fernet’s department is part of the institutional reach that makes these demands actionable. Lebel also secures permission to approach foreign police chiefs confidentially, through personal professional contacts rather than official inquiries. The distinction preserves secrecy while allowing him to ask whether their files contain a political contract assassin with several successful killings behind him.

During the following three hours, Lebel and Caron use the secure communications room to contact senior crime investigators abroad. Lebel tells them that the inquiry is not yet an official request between police forces and that the authorities do not even know whether the intended offence has advanced to the preparation stage. The eventual question is exceptionally narrow: whether a man fitting the scant description could be a leading professional political assassin. Fernet’s skepticism about the value of a composite complements this approach, in which the investigation seeks a rare professional profile rather than pretending to possess a reliable face or name.

The Nationwide Manhunt

Fernet remains involved as the search shifts from inference to operational pursuit. When the police learn that the suspect’s white Alfa Romeo has been found, he asks when the alert was issued. Lebel reports that he listed the car as stolen and ordered road patrols to report it immediately, but not to approach its occupant if a lone policeman encountered it. He had issued the instruction at 5:15 p.m.; it should have reached the major road units by seven and the main towns during the night. The question of timing places Fernet at the point where a central alert, its transmission through the network, and the risk to individual officers meet.

After the car’s discovery at Ussel, Lebel orders Commissaire Valentin to send the strongest available team and as many men as possible. The search is to radiate outward from the vehicle: officers must ask at farmhouses, village shops and cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ shacks. They are to look for a tall, fair-haired Englishman who speaks good French, has three suitcases and a handgrip, carries substantial cash, and may look as if he has slept rough. Press curiosity is to be diverted with a false account of a car accident and a possibly dazed occupant. If the suspect is found, the officers must surround him rather than approach. This is the kind of distributed inquiry that Fernet’s national organization can support, though the instructions are Lebel’s and the immediate field command belongs to Valentin.

Once the threat becomes a murder hunt, Fernet commits the force on a still larger scale: every detective in the French Judicial Police system is to be taken off existing assignments and transferred to the case. The President’s movements are also to be reviewed, with the Presidential Security Corps tightening protection. In the closing conference, after Lebel remarks that the police effectively have three days rather than six hours to find the Jackal, Fernet asks how he knows. His question marks a final shift from organizing resources to testing the deduction that will determine how those resources are used.

Narrative Role

Fernet gives the pursuit institutional scale without displacing Lebel as its investigating mind. He supplies command authority, questions the reliability of an attractive but weak clue, tracks the timing of a nationwide alert, and helps make the detective force available for an all-out search. The contrast between the organization’s numerical reach and the investigators’ initial ignorance is central to his function: more than twenty thousand men can be mobilized, yet they begin without a name and with only a poor description. Fernet’s presence keeps that tension visible. The case depends not merely on deploying a large force, but on recognizing what its information can—and cannot—establish.