The Jackal—Charles de Gaulle

The Jackal—Charles de Gaulle relationship is the novel’s central contest between a professional assassin and the president he is hired to kill. It begins as a transaction shaped by the OAS’s political aims, but quickly becomes a struggle over information, timing, and public visibility: the Jackal plans alone, while de Gaulle refuses to let the threat dictate his movements. The more the authorities understand the danger, the more sharply the two men’s different kinds of power come into focus.

A Contract Against a Public President

The OAS’s leaders present the assassination as a means of restoring France to French control. Their case is built on the belief that de Gaulle’s death is necessary to bring down his regime, and on the record of six earlier attempts: three exposed during planning, one betrayed on the eve of the attempt, and two carried out but unsuccessful. When Marc Rodin considers hiring a professional, he wants to establish whether the job is possible before committing the organisation’s money. The Jackal answers that no person is beyond an assassin’s bullet and identifies de Gaulle’s frequent exposure to the public as an exploitable vulnerability. Earlier attackers, he argues, failed in part because they were unwilling to risk their own lives to make success certain. The proposed contract thus rests on a contradiction: de Gaulle is exposed because he appears in public, yet the political attackers have not previously found a way to turn that exposure into a successful attempt.

The arrangement is not simply a transfer of money. The Jackal is to receive a substantial payment, while the OAS expects to provide him with a contact in Paris who can relay accurate information about de Gaulle’s movements and any changes to his security routine. Casson argues that this intelligence may make the difference between success and another failure. He asks Rodin to delay notifying the assassin of the transfer until the Paris contact is ready. A covert agent has been placed close to someone in de Gaulle’s immediate circle, but Casson expects that several more days will be needed before the agent can provide consistently reliable information about the president’s whereabouts, journeys, and public appearances. The information channel is meant to connect the assassin to the target’s schedule; it also gives the OAS a limited role in an operation whose execution it cannot fully control.

The delay, however, does not shape the Jackal’s preparations. By the time the OAS leaders consider when to send the relevant instructions, he has already selected his day and is proceeding with his own plans and contingencies. The eventual payment goes ahead, with Rodin expecting further backing from right-wing industrialists and bankers if de Gaulle is killed. The contract therefore combines political ambition and financial expectation on the employers’ side with professional independence on the assassin’s. The OAS can commission the attempt and offer assistance, but it does not set the moment at which the Jackal will act.

A Threat That Cannot Be Publicly Managed

When the Jackal’s intended target becomes known to the French authorities, the danger changes from a secret contract into a national emergency. Colonel Rolland’s report warns that, if the account is true and the foreign-born assassin is already preparing the attempt, the plot is the most dangerous conception the terrorists could devise against the president. The problem is not only the possible attack. The Jackal’s foreign identity places him beyond the familiar files and infiltrated networks on which the authorities have relied to track OAS members. The investigation must therefore proceed with very little certainty about the person who threatens de Gaulle, even as the consequences of a mistake are immense.

The first response must also accommodate de Gaulle’s own insistence on how the threat is handled. Roger Frey seeks measures to avert the danger, but de Gaulle rejects the appearance of yielding to a hired foreigner. He will cancel no public engagement and permit no alteration to his schedule, not even by an hour or a minute. He also demands complete secrecy; if knowledge of the affair, or even its general impression, reaches the public, those responsible will face consequences. These instructions make the president’s public role part of the conflict itself. His visibility creates the exposure the Jackal has identified, while his refusal to withdraw prevents the threat from visibly governing the state’s conduct.

For the authorities, secrecy and continuity are not easy companions. The investigation has to prepare against a possible attempt without alerting the public, and it must protect a president who will not change his programme. The British Prime Minister later understands the French request for assistance as arising from the fear that an assassin, presumably hired by the OAS, may be on the loose in France for a future mission. But the initial request made to foreign police is deliberately limited: Lebel seeks suggestions about the identity of a professional killer without explaining why France needs them. The threat is serious enough to cross borders, yet its political sensitivity requires that its significance remain unstated.

The Assassin’s Timetable and the Manhunt

Lebel’s international appeal defines the suspected enemy through the kind of work he has done: not a gangland gunman, but a political assassin with successful killings behind him. He gives the police chiefs a poor description and no name, acknowledging how little is known. The inference is nevertheless clear to them: there is only one target in France likely to interest such a killer. Their agreement to search their files turns the private danger to de Gaulle into a transnational police problem, even while official disclosure remains deliberately narrow.

The Jackal’s advantage is that the French police do not initially know the name under which he is travelling. After learning that the operation has been exposed, he weighs whether to withdraw or continue. He knows the dangers have grown because he will be attacking a security system now on guard, but believes his plan can still defeat it. His assumed identity, legitimate passport, additional false papers, and disguises give him room to move; in his view, the police are searching for the wrong passport and have only a rough description. He is not merely evading the authorities after the threat has emerged. He measures what they know, compares their knowledge with his own, and chooses to proceed.

The contrast between the two men’s control of time becomes central to Lebel’s reasoning. The police know a plot exists but do not know where the Jackal is in his timetable or when he intends to strike. Lebel believes there is still a chance to arrest him under his new name before he realizes how much the investigation has uncovered. When records eventually connect the name Alexander Duggan to entries into and out of France, Lebel interprets an earlier stay in Paris as reconnaissance: the killer has already prepared the operation and travelled as an ordinary, apparently respectable visitor. Yet even the discovery of Duggan does not guarantee control. An apparent tip-off leads the Jackal to move quickly, and the authorities suspect that someone has told him his identity is exposed. The investigation can narrow the gap, but each new fact has to be tested against the possibility that the assassin is moving faster than the police can react.

The Contest at the Point of Access

The approach to de Gaulle is ultimately a problem of access as much as identity. Lebel considers how a well-armed stranger might get near a president guarded so closely that even women’s handbags are suspect within twenty yards and men carrying long packages are removed from the vicinity of public appearances. His questions about a possible weapon and its concealment register the practical obstacle the Jackal must overcome: the target’s public exposure does not mean the target is unguarded. The assassin’s plan must exploit a public occasion while passing through layers of suspicion designed to make that occasion safe.

Lebel later recognizes that the Jackal has chosen his day rather than simply leaving France as soon as his identity is threatened. He asks whether de Gaulle has engagements outside the palace that day or over the following two days, looking for the connection between the assassin’s delay and the president’s schedule. At the ceremony perimeter, a sentry reports that the only person allowed through a gap in the street closure was an old, sick-looking cripple with an identity card and a war-invalid card, giving an address on Rue de Rennes. The report brings the relationship to its most concrete point: de Gaulle’s unchanged public appearance creates a guarded perimeter, and the Jackal’s disguises are directed at crossing it. The tension between the two is therefore not simply that one man wishes to kill and the other is at risk. It is that the Jackal seeks to turn the president’s public presence into an opening, while de Gaulle’s refusal to disappear from public life makes that same presence both a political statement and the focus of an increasingly urgent security operation.