Second World War

The Second World War is a recurring historical reference point in The Day of the Jackal, though the novel’s central action takes place nearly two decades later. It enters through sharply different forms: Viktor Kowalski’s recollection of invasion and loss, Antoine Argoud’s service in the Free French Forces, the remembered authority of Charles de Gaulle’s wartime voice, and the Jackal’s calculated manufacture of a veteran’s identity. The war is therefore both personal history and political inheritance—and, in the Jackal’s hands, a collection of symbols that can be imitated for survival.

Childhood, invasion, and aftermath

For Viktor Kowalski, the war begins in occupied Poland as a child’s experience of danger and dislocation. He was twelve when the Germans invaded; a year later, his parents were taken away in a dark van. At fifteen, he had joined the partisans and killed his first German. These details establish the violence that preceded his adult life as a soldier, without turning his history into a simple account of patriotic enlistment.

The arrival of the Russians when Viktor was seventeen brought another break rather than a secure return to ordinary life. His parents had taught him to fear them, and he left the partisans, who were later executed on a commissar’s orders. He made his way west through Czechoslovakia to Austria, where hunger and displacement reduced him to a refugee in a displaced-persons camp. In 1946 he escaped, travelled south through Italy and reached France. The war’s end, in this account, does not end the sequence of flight, loss, and violence: it leaves Viktor stateless and on the move, before his eventual enlistment in the Foreign Legion.

The war’s political and military inheritance

The war also links Charles de Gaulle and Antoine Argoud to an earlier struggle for France. Argoud had served as a lieutenant under de Gaulle in the Free French Forces and fought in the liberation of France from the Nazis. That record stands in stark contrast to his later role as an OAS operations chief and instigator of the Petit-Clamart plot. His opposition to de Gaulle is not presented as the absence of a shared past; it grows out of a political and military history in which former comrades can become adversaries over what France should be.

For Marc Rodin, the memory of de Gaulle’s wartime leadership persists into the crisis of 1961. When the putsch tested the Army’s loyalties, soldiers across Algeria turned on their transistor radios and heard de Gaulle address them. Rodin had heard the same voice in June 1940. The remembered voice gives the 1961 appeal a personal and historical charge: a figure associated with national resistance now commands the loyalty of troops facing a choice between their officers and the state. The mutiny was broken through that broadcast, and Rodin’s remaining followers became part of the Secret Army Organisation. The old wartime association thus returns not as a shared national memory but as a force dividing the Army.

A veteran’s past as a disguise

The Jackal uses the war’s familiar medals and campaigns as props for an invented biography. At the flea market he buys aged decorations and a booklet identifying French military medals; using the guide, he assembles a bar that includes the Médaille Militaire, the Médaille de la Libération, and five campaign medals associated with the Free French Forces. He assigns himself decorations for Bir Hakeim, Libya, Tunisia, D-Day, and the Second Armoured Division of General Philippe Leclerc. The medals are not evidence of service but carefully selected credentials, made plausible by the public meanings attached to wartime sacrifice.

He also arranges his appearance around the part: a black beret, worn shoes, unclean trousers, and a long military greatcoat bought at the same market. The costume and decorations turn the war into something visible and portable, a past that can be put on when papers and appearance must persuade strangers. The effort contrasts with Viktor’s involuntary memories of invasion and flight: one man carries the war as injury and dislocation, while the Jackal borrows its insignia as equipment.

Memory, credibility, and narrative function

The war’s references also show how a remembered past can lend credibility to a false present. In Belgium, the Jackal claims that he is travelling to the Ardennes to visit the grave of an elder brother killed in the Battle of the Bulge between Bastogne and Malmedy. The account supplies a plausible reason for his journey and draws on a landscape associated with wartime loss. In the context of his disguise, the claim belongs to the same performance as the medals: it gives strangers a personal story to accompany the uniformed appearance.

Across these strands, the Second World War is neither a single shared memory nor a detached historical backdrop. For Viktor it marks the beginning of a life shaped by bereavement and displacement; for Argoud and de Gaulle it supplies a common political history later fractured by conflict; for Rodin it is bound to the authority of a voice that returns during the 1961 putsch. For the Jackal, it is a repertoire of credible details that can be assembled into a false identity. These contrasting uses make the war’s past active in the novel’s present, even when it is recalled only briefly or invoked as a story someone needs others to believe.