Place du 18 Juin 1940

Place du 18 Juin 1940 is the forecourt square before the old Gare Montparnasse, at the southern end of Rue de Rennes. In the novel, it becomes the Jackal’s chosen vantage point for an attempt on Charles de Gaulle and the setting of the final Liberation Day ceremony. The place matters at once as a practical arrangement of distances, buildings, traffic, and sightlines, and as a public landscape marked by the history that the assassin means to exploit.

Name and setting

The square was formerly called Place de Rennes. After the Gaullists took power at City Hall, it was renamed Place du 18 Juin 1940. On July 28, the Jackal notices the new nameplate and recalls the date it commemorates: the day in 1940 when Charles de Gaulle, then an exile in London, broadcast to the French that defeat in a battle did not mean defeat in the war. The naming places the square within the history of resistance and national survival; its later use for a ceremony honouring Resistance veterans makes that history part of the scene rather than merely a street label.

The old station occupies the square’s southern side, while Rue de Rennes, Boulevard de Montparnasse, and Rue d’Odessa feed traffic into the open forecourt. The square’s scale and surroundings are important to the plot. It is large enough to host a formal public gathering, but bounded by buildings whose upper floors offer possible views over the ceremony. The station, meanwhile, is both a dominant feature and a complicated part of the setting: its offices and upper windows are expected to be crowded with security personnel.

The place is also presented as a landscape on the verge of physical change. Work has begun on foundations for a new station set back from the existing site; the old station is expected to give way to an office block and shopping precinct. The ceremony may be the last Liberation Day occasion on which its facade remains untouched. The old building thus stands between historical memory and planned redevelopment: its forecourt is still a civic stage, but the station that frames it is already marked for replacement.

The Jackal’s reconnaissance

The Jackal’s decisive visit begins with a comparison of possible sites. Other places he has examined during the preceding week remain possibilities, but Place du 18 Juin 1940 feels to him like the certainty. He faces the square from Rue de Rennes and considers the corner houses and the buildings nearest the forecourt, looking for a position that combines a workable firing angle with a suitable distance. From the top floor of a corner house on the western side of Rue de Rennes, the centre of the forecourt is about 130 metres away.

His assessment is architectural and tactical. The two corner houses where Rue de Rennes opens onto the square are obvious candidates. The first three houses farther up that street offer possible, though narrow, firing angles; beyond them, the angle becomes too restricted. He makes a corresponding calculation for the first three buildings along Boulevard de Montparnasse, which runs through the square from east to west. Farther along, the angles narrow and the distance grows. No other building dominates the forecourt at a useful range apart from the station itself, which he regards as unavailable because security men will occupy its upper office windows.

He does not settle the question by a glance. He studies the western corner houses first from the terrace of the Café Duchesse Anne, sitting near the traffic for three hours and watching the facades across the street. After lunch at the Hand Brasserie Alsacienne, he examines the eastern facades, then walks along the street and looks more closely at the entrances of the apartment blocks he has selected. The scene makes the square legible as a set of opportunities and exclusions: each view is tested against distance, angle, and the likelihood of being watched.

A square converted into a security perimeter

On Liberation Day, the square is the destination of a published presidential itinerary that the government has decided not to alter. Charles de Gaulle 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 shrine at Mont-Valérien at 12:30, and return to the palace for lunch and a siesta. At four, he is to present Medailles de la Liberation to ten veterans of the Resistance in the square before Gare Montparnasse. The itinerary gives the square its fixed hour and turns the Jackal’s reconnaissance into an immediate security problem.

The precautions attempt to make the open setting controlled. Steel barriers are to be erected hours before each ceremony, and the enclosed areas searched from top to bottom, sewers included. Houses and flats are to be searched; armed watchers on nearby rooftops are to watch the opposing roofs and windows. Only officials and ceremony participants may pass the barriers. At the square, the barrier guarding Rue de Rennes lies about 250 metres up the street from the forecourt, while the station facade stands about 200 metres beyond the square. From his post, the young policeman Pierre Valremy can see men marking out places inside the forecourt for the veterans, officials, and band.

The precautions reshape the square before the ceremony begins. Roads and side streets are blocked, rooftops watched, the station filled with officers, and the buildings inside the perimeter searched from basement to attic. Trains are diverted from the station for the afternoon. Lebel finds that officers report no one has passed through the barriers since they were raised at noon; from where the crowd is held back on Boulevard de Montparnasse, spectators are too far away to see what is happening in the square. The security plan makes the forecourt appear sealed, while also leaving Lebel to search for the possibility that the threat has entered by some means the cordon has failed to recognise.

The ceremony and its significance

The ceremony’s arrangement fills the forecourt with distinct groups. Cars stand nose to tail against the station facade. Across from them, beside the railings separating the forecourt from the square, are the ten medal recipients. Officials and the diplomatic corps occupy the east side; on the west, the Garde Republicaine stands in red plumes and burnished helmets, with its bandsmen forward of the guard of honour. Protocol officials and palace staff gather around one of the cars as the band begins the Marseillaise. These positions give the square the ordered geometry that the Jackal had studied from outside: a public ceremony laid out within the very sightlines he assessed.

At the barriers, Valremy watches a crowd assemble in the heat, waiting for a distant glimpse of the president. Among those spectators is an old man who appears to be struggling down the street, in a sweat-stained black beret and long greatcoat, with medals on his chest. The disguise draws pity rather than immediate alarm. Later, Lebel recognises the significance of the aluminium crutch and runs to act. The square’s security has been designed around visible entrances, searched buildings, and watched windows; the Jackal’s approach exploits the gap between the old veteran he appears to be and the armed assassin those precautions are intended to stop.

Place du 18 Juin 1940 therefore concentrates the novel’s conflict into a single civic space. Its name recalls a declaration of national persistence; its planned ceremony honours people who resisted occupation; its old station is itself about to disappear. Against those layers of public memory, the Jackal treats the forecourt as a firing problem, while the police try to turn it into a sealed perimeter. The square joins commemoration, security, and the threat of violence in one place, and its open, carefully measured layout becomes the ground on which those competing purposes meet.