1. SNIPER FIRE
NO ONE WHO was there that day ever forgot what he saw. The ceremony would have been memorable enough on its own; the dire emergency that plunged it into chaos gave it the aura of a truly exceptional, almost supernatural event. It was as though God had decreed that, at the end of the latest episode of the saga titled ‘France’, every plot-line should converge at Notre-Dame-de-Paris on the 26th of August 1944. The leading actor, appropriately named de Gaulle, was placed where he could be seen from every angle. He seemed to belong to the same field of vision as the towers of the cathedral. As the great bell tolled, dinning each historic moment into the collective memory, ten thousand brains whirred like movie cameras, recording every sight and sound for the benefit of future grandchildren whose procreation struck them there and then as a sacred obligation. The race would continue undiminished, massed behind a leader whose invulnerability had been tested before the eyes of the civilized world.
The man whose voice had resonated from the tomb of exile and emboldened his cringing listeners in their darkened rooms had stridden into Paris like a giant. Though his gauntness bore poignant testimony to four long years of London fog and English food, he still had the bearing of a leader. He had stooped beneath the Arc de Triomphe and laid a cross of white roses on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He had walked the full length of the Champs-Élysées, cheered from every tree and lamp post, saluted by officers whose cratered cheeks were moist with tears, and kissed by pretty girls who darted from the crowd waving handkerchiefs and ribbons. The tanks of General Leclerc had rumbled along at his side like the chariots of myrmidons. Only occasionally had he been obliged to ask his comrades at the front of the procession to remain a few steps behind him.
On the Place de la Concorde, the smiling generals climbed into cars and were whisked along the Rue de Rivoli to the Hôtel de Ville, where de Gaulle was received by the Liberation Committee as head of the provisional government. When he emerged on the balcony to address the crowd, the surge of officers behind him almost sent him tumbling over the edge. One of his subordinates later described how he had squatted at the General’s feet, embracing his knees to prevent him from falling headlong into the sea of faces. ‘The enemy is teetering’, said de Gaulle to the crowd, ‘but fights on on our soil. We who shall have seen our history’s finest hour must prove ourselves worthy of France to the very end.’
From the Hôtel de Ville, de Gaulle and his government-to-be crossed the river and reached the cathedral of Notre-Dame at 4.20 in the afternoon for the service of thanksgiving.
As so often happens when thousands of people witness the same event, no two accounts are the same. There is even some doubt about the identity of the villains who nearly ruined the hour of triumph. The file remains open to this day, but since disaster was averted and the final outcome has never been in doubt, even the most determined conspiracy theorists have shown little interest in the case.
The BBC’s Robert Reid, who had arrived from Saint-Lô a day before with the US Army, was well placed to observe the critical moments. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, near the west door of the cathedral, holding his microphone. As soon as the emergency was over, he rushed to find his recording man, who was staring at the disc on his turntable: it was covered in tiny fragments of medieval stone. The two men hurried over to the Hôtel Scribe to submit the recording to the censors. There was a heated discussion about the desirability of telling the world that General de Gaulle had nearly been assassinated. Finally, permission was granted, and the recording was broadcast the next day on the BBC’s War Report, then retransmitted by CBS and NBC.
Spellbound listeners heard Reid’s hoarse, high-pitched voice above the cheers of the crowd: ‘The General is being presented to people. He is being received…He’s being received…’ Suddenly, there was the crackle of gunfire, voices crying out and the sound of a Yorkshireman and his microphone being trampled by a crowd of Parisians. There followed a few moments of silence. Then the mutedly ecstatic voice of Reid returned. He might have been narrating a novel by John Buchan, but the sounds of commotion all around him confirmed the veracity of his report:
That was one of the most dramatic scenes I have ever seen!…Firing started all over the place…General de Gaulle was trying to control the crowds rushing into the cathedral. He walked straight ahead into what appeared to me to be a hail of fire from somewhere inside the cathedral…But he went straight ahead without hesitation, his shoulders flung back, and walked right down the centre aisle, even while the bullets were pouring around him. It was the most extraordinary example of courage I have ever seen! There were bangs, flashes all about him, yet he seemed to have an absolutely charmed life.
Years later, Reid wrote a more detailed account of the incident. It was published by his grandson in 2007. The snipers appeared to have taken up position inside the cathedral – in the upper galleries and behind the great organ – and also on the roof. A man standing very close to Reid was hit in the neck, and others were injured as they tried to hide behind pillars and under chairs. Estimates of the number of casualties vary from one hundred to three hundred. He remembered the reek of cordite mingling with the smell of incense, and ‘the crazy scene’ of modern warfare in a twelfth-century cathedral. And, like everyone else, he marvelled at the sight of General de Gaulle standing bare-headed before the altar like a man sent from God: ‘There were blinding flashes inside the cathedral, there were pieces of stone ricocheting around the place.’ ‘Heaven knows how they missed him, for they were firing the whole time.’
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, two questions were asked: who were the snipers, and – a largely rhetorical question – how on earth did General de Gaulle survive the hail of bullets? Eventually, when peace had returned to Europe and the heroes of the Liberation were mired in domestic politics, a third, insidious question was asked, though only in private: was the identity of the snipers somehow connected with de Gaulle’s miraculous survival?
None of these questions has ever been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Reid himself saw four ‘raffish-looking’ gunmen being led from the cathedral: they were dressed in grey flannel trousers and white singlets, and appeared to him ‘very obvious Germans’. Meanwhile, across the square, a nine-year-old boy, whose father worked as a chauffeur at the Préfecture de Police, had climbed out of the window of his fourth-floor apartment onto a sloping zinc roof. Crouching behind the stone parapet, he looked over at Notre-Dame and observed shots being fired from the top of the towers. Some moments later, ‘a few suspects’ were marched onto the square. The boy, whose name was Michel Barrat, identified them as ‘miliciens’, which is to say, members of the French paramilitary force that had served as auxiliaries of the Gestapo. As he leaned over and peered down at the square, he saw one of the arrested men being beaten up, and perhaps killed, by the crowd. ‘That brutal scene is still engraved on my memory’, he wrote in 1998.
While these arrests were taking place, sporadic gunfire was still scattering the crowd, though no one could tell whether the shots were being fired by German snipers or by trigger-happy soldiers of the Résistance.
The Liberation of Paris was a bloody and protracted affair. On 26 August, when de Gaulle marched down the Champs-Élysées, the city was still swarming with German soldiers, Gestapo officers, Vichy militia and other collaborateurs. Some of those desperate men may have hidden in the cathedral, seeking sanctuary or vowing to die in a blaze of vengeful glory. Anyone familiar with the story of Quasimodo would have known that, apart from the sewers, there was no better hiding place in Paris. When he was asked why no one had thought to conduct a search of all the stairways and galleries of the cathedral before the service of thanksgiving, the gardien of the towers replied, ‘It’s like the catacombs in there!’ A thorough search was conducted after the shooting, but according to a lieutenant-colonel serving with the Second Armoured Division, the officers who were sent up into the towers to investigate ‘found no one there but policemen’.
De Gaulle himself suggested a third possibility in his Mémoires de guerre. He, more than anyone else, was aware of the dangerous vacuum created by the retreating tide of fascism. He knew that yesterday’s comrades might be tomorrow’s political rivals, and that, despite the presence of the American army, a coup d’état might occur at any moment. In his memoirs, written in the 1950s, when he was preparing his return to power, he asked himself and his readers, ‘Why would a German soldier or a milicien have shot at chimneys instead of aiming at me, when I was exposed and in the open?’ He hinted, none too delicately, that the mysterious snipers were members of the French Communist Party: ‘I have the feeling that this was a put-up job, perpetrated with the political aim of spreading panic in the crowd and justifying the continued imposition of a revolutionary power’.
If the communists had been hoping to prove themselves indispensable by maintaining a state of terror, the attempt failed completely. The gun-battle at Notre-Dame only established Charles de Gaulle as the uncontested political and spiritual leader of the new republic. By striding up the aisle and standing at the altar in a hail of bullets, he had written himself into every future history of France. Some of the men who were trying to elbow their way into the new regime thought that de Gaulle had effectively conducted a coup d’état of his own, but any sly insinuations were silenced by the glorious outcome, and the unanswered questions would soon be of purely academic interest: What had those policemen been doing in the towers, and how had the snipers in the cathedral eluded the search party? Who were the arrested men seen by Robert Reid and the boy on the roof? And why did the official inquest that was held immediately afterwards find no trace of any arrest?
Only a man who begrudged de Gaulle his hour of glory would have bothered to ask such questions, and only a man who hoped to emulate his triumph might have wondered what lessons could be learned from his masterly manipulation of what appeared to be a totally unpredictable event.
2. OBSERVATORY GARDENS
LATE IN THE EVENING of 15 October 1959, a man who looked rather pleasantly self-satisfied, though perhaps a little nervous, sat in the famous Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, guarding the remains of a delicate sauerkraut and a bottle of Gewürztraminer. The waiters who buzzed about his table showed by the swift discretion of their gestures that this was a regular and honoured customer. He had the good looks of a man who, though well into his forties, is cheered by the sight that greets him in the shaving-mirror every morning. In the evening (as on that evening), the merest hint of dilapidation – a kink in his thin black tie, a slightly rumpled collar, the five-o’clock shadow on his upper lip – suggested a day devoted to matters that transcended personal appearance but without posing any serious threat to elegance. He had what he might have called an air of quiet dignity. An occasional crinkling of the eyes and a boyish pout that a novelist might have described as ‘sensual’ and ‘indicative of a strong will’ endowed him with a certain charm that, until recently, had served him well.
The Brasserie Lipp was François Mitterrand’s favourite eating-place. It was half a mile from the Senate and half a mile from the apartment that he occupied with his wife and two sons in the Rue Guynemer on the quiet side of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Though he enjoyed a reflective stroll through the streets of the Left Bank, he had apparently decided that evening, for safety’s sake, not to walk home. His blue Peugeot 403 was parked across the road, ready to be driven away at a moment’s notice. It was close to midnight, and, although the Flore and the Deux Magots were still busy, the traffic had thinned out and there was little danger of his being trapped in one of those interminable Chinese puzzles of tightly parked cars which, to foreign visitors, are one of the wonders of Paris.
He sat downstairs, near the door, in the brittle, tinkling light of mirrors and ceramic tiles depicting huge, fleshy green leaves and parrots paradoxically camouflaged by their vivid colours. On the ceiling, smoke-cured Cupids twisted their little brown bodies to aim their arrows at invisible targets. Even at this late hour, he was half-expecting his former colleague, Robert Pesquet, to turn up at the Lipp. For a moment, a man with Pesquet’s build had stood in the shadow of a doorway across the road, but then had disappeared. It would not have been surprising if he had changed his mind. With the confusion that now prevailed, one often found oneself associating with unreliable, slightly sinister fools like Pesquet.
Fifteen years had passed since the day he had saved the General from falling off the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. Naturally, de Gaulle had not looked to see who had saved him, and Mitterrand himself had told the story so many times with slightly differing details that he was not even sure that it had actually happened. On the following day, General de Gaulle had summoned him to the War Ministry and, recognizing the man who had refused in 1943 to merge his own resistance group with the Gaullists, had said, like an impatient headmaster, ‘You again!’ Instead of confirming him as the self-appointed Minister for Prisoners of War, de Gaulle had informed him that his services would not be required in the new government.
With de Gaulle’s retirement from politics in 1946, his own career had taken off. He already had the velvety charm that later earned him the nickname ‘the Fox’. The devious road-map of his past, which had taken him from xenophobic nationalism to almost simultaneous distinction in the Vichy regime and the Résistance, and then to that broad domain of opportunity called the centre-left, now looked almost like a bold itinerary based on long-held convictions. He had been the youngest Minister of the Interior in French history. Recently, he had served as Minister of Justice, which had enabled him to amass a considerable treasure of experience, friends, contacts and compromising dossiers on all sorts of people, though not, as it happened, on Robert Pesquet. But then Pesquet was able to compromise himself without anyone’s assistance.
Pesquet, too, had lost his seat in the recent elections, when de Gaulle had returned triumphantly to power. Yet while Mitterrand himself had been salvaged by the centre-left and given a seat in the Senate, Pesquet was still in the political wilderness. He was thought to have links with the secret paramilitary units that waged a war of terror on the ‘traitors’ who wanted to abandon Algeria to the Arabs. In fact, Pesquet was simply a victim of his political philosophy: ‘Keep your eyes on the bottom of the leading sheep’, he liked to say, ‘and look neither left nor right.’ Evidently, he had chosen the wrong sheep. His so-called friends on the right had hardly leapt to his defence when he was accused of planting the bomb that was found in the toilets of the Assemblée Nationale. And Pesquet’s clownish retort had scarcely served his cause: ‘Why the hell would I have tried to blow the bogs up when it’s the only useful place in the whole building?’
He peered out at the street, distinguishing the dark figures outside from the reflections that flitted across the screens and mirrors. From a certain angle, a man who seemed to be heading for the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés would suddenly vanish into himself and set off in the opposite direction. Sitting in the window of the Lipp, one could inspect a passing woman from the front and then, without turning one’s head, complete the assessment from the rear. Robert Pesquet materialized from neither direction. He looked up at the wall above the telephone and the humidor. The clock, for once in agreement with its reflections, said midnight. He waited another twenty or thirty minutes, then walked out into the street, feeling the car keys in his pocket.
The October nights had turned chilly. He climbed smartly into the driving seat, turned the key and started the engine at the first attempt.
The Peugeot 403 had been the result of a careful selection process, like a stylish outfit that appeared to owe its elegance to chance. It was the perfect car for a prominent centre-left, anti-Gaullist politician with a foot placed quite firmly in the socialist camp. With its (purely hypothetical) top speed of 128 kph and its neat but almost dowdy corporation, it exuded robustness and reliability; yet it also had a certain modestly aspirational quality. The leather trim, the cigarette lighter and the fog lamps, which came as standard, looked to a future of international travel and freedom from material cares. The gear lever was mounted on the steering column, which provided an extra seat up front. Despite the folding armrests and the reclining front seats, the 403 seemed more likely to be used for holidays with a medium-sized family than for escapades with a mistress.
He drove across the square, heading east, then signalled right to turn into the Rue de Seine.
At that moment, according to what was, for a time, the only available account, a small dark car took the same corner rather too tightly and almost wedged him up against the kerb. There was nothing unusual in this, but, as he told reporters shortly afterwards, it made him ‘vigilant’. These were, after all, troubled times. He was hardly the most faithful advocate of decolonization – as Minister of Justice, he had called for Algerian liberation movements to be crushed by military might – but as the would-be champion of whatever an anti-Gaullist party would have to represent, he was more or less obliged to be in favour of withdrawal, and there were many in France who were murderously opposed to any politician who even hinted at Algerian independence. Only three days before, Paris-Presse had reported that a pro-French-Algeria hit squad had crossed the Spanish border and was operating somewhere in France.
He accelerated gently along the Rue de Seine, which turns into the Rue de Tournon. Up ahead, he could see the dome of the Senate. A right turn would take him to the corner of the Rue Guynemer, where he lived. But when he glanced in the rear-view mirror, the other car was still there, and so, instead of heading for home, he turned left, as he later explained, ‘in order to give myself time to think’. The Boulevard Saint-Michel lay ahead; the railings of the Luxembourg were to his right, the silent bookshops of the Rue de Médicis to his left.
By his own account, the following sequence of events, from start to finish, must have taken little more than two minutes. On the Square Médicis, the dark car surged alongside and tried to run him off the road. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. He jammed the accelerator to the floor; the 403 responded almost instantly and shot along the boulevard. In the rear-view mirror, he saw the other car fall behind. At the first turn – the dimly lit Rue Auguste-Comte, which runs between the Luxembourg and the Observatoire – he flung the car to the right, pulled over to the left and opened the door. He vaulted the metal railings, took four or five strides across the grass and flattened himself on the ground.
As he lay face down on the damp grass, he heard the sound of skidding tyres and a rattle of shots from an automatic weapon. It would have been an ironic end for a man who had escaped six times from prisoner-of-war camps to be gunned down in a Paris park. In 1940, when he had been wounded near Stenay on the Meuse, the stretcher party had had to leave him in the open, exposed to the strafing of a German fighter plane. Perhaps it was that experience that gave him the sangfroid to stand up, run across the lawn and jump over the hedge that borders the Avenue de l’Observatoire. He squeezed himself into the corner of the entrance of no. 5, and rang the bell. As he did so, he heard the assassins’ car roar off into the night.
By now, the whole quartier was awake. The police were on the scene in no time at all, closely followed by journalists. Television cameras were set up and flash-bulbs blazed. The seriousness of the incident was plain to see: seven bullet holes in the front and rear doors of the 403. The senator showed exemplary calm but was obviously shaken.
It was now just after one o’clock. After taking down the details – the chase along the boulevard, a small car containing two, maybe three armed men – the reporters dashed to all-night bars to telephone their news-rooms or raced back across the river to offices in the second arrondissement. They were just in time for the night editors to insert brief reports: ‘Senator In Foiled Assassination Attempt’. Next day (Saturday, 17 October), it was front-page news in all the papers. For once, the political news was as thrilling as a crime novel, and the sub-editors had an easy job:
DEATH CHASE IN THE OBSERVATORY GARDENS!
TWO HEADLIGHTS IN THE NIGHT…IT WAS THE KILLERS!
There were maps and diagrams, with dotted lines and arrows showing exactly where the senator had jumped the hedge on the Avenue de l’Observatoire and where he had been standing when the killers drove away. There were photographs of the bullet holes in the bodywork, and of the garden railings, which appeared to be about four feet high. (The senator was obviously a man who had kept himself in trim.)
Fully aware of the danger, as he continued to drive along, M. François Mitterrand was devising a plan that would give his pursuers the slip…He was able to survive the premeditated assassination attempt thanks to his extraordinary calm under fire, his presence of mind and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Latin Quarter.
The shooting in the Jardins de l’Observatoire rang alarm bells all over France. New security measures were introduced. French-Algeria sympathizers were visited by the police and had their apartments searched. Border controls were tightened. Moderate left-wing politicians and commentators warned of a possible fascist coup d’état and demanded swift and effective reprisals. The Republic was in danger. The crackdown was so sudden and severe that some right-wing politicians claimed that it was all a cunning attempt to justify political repression and to discredit the patriotic cause of French Algeria.
Senator Mitterrand himself showed admirable restraint. Even at the height of his parliamentary career, he had never been so much in demand. He was besieged by news photographers and pestered for interviews. However, in statements to the press, he confined himself to a few careful words: ‘Since feelings are running high at the moment, I do not want to say anything that might inflame the situation, though simple logic would suggest that the explanation for this attack lies in the climate of political passion that has been created by extremist groups.’
For a man who had been sliding down the greasy pole, it was an extraordinary turn of events. From one day to the next, he became the leading champion of the fight against right-wing terrorism. Messages of sympathy and support reached him from all over France. An assassination attempt was scarcely something to celebrate, but a good politician knows how to profit from adversity. François Mitterrand was back where he belonged. De Gaulle would no longer be able to ignore him, and the socialists who had shunned him because of his dubious past would welcome him as a battle-hardened hero in the long struggle against the Gaullists.
3. CLOT
AT THAT TIME, there was, realistically, only one man who could be entrusted with the delicate and potentially dangerous job of tracking down the terrorists. Only one man commanded the respect of politicians, criminals and the media, and had sufficient public prestige to ensure that the investigation would be seen as exhaustive and fair.
Commissioner Georges Clot, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was an affable and modest man, who found his own dazzling reputation something of an embarrassment. He had been featured in so many crime magazines, under titles such as ‘Commissioner Clot Against Dédé la Gabardine’, that some people believed him to be a fictional character. A year before the attempted assassination of Senator Mitterrand, Clot had appeared on a television programme devoted to Simenon, the creator of Maigret, and had tried to explain exactly how the adventures of Inspector Maigret differed from the unexciting drudgery of real detective work. But since Clot himself was one of the models for Maigret, he had failed, despite the convincingly dreary setting of metal file cabinets and plastic chairs, to dampen the romance.
It was precisely because Clot had known the allure of criminal investigation that he was such an effective policeman. He came from a large family in the heart of the remote Aveyron. His father, a village postman, had destined Georges for the teaching profession, but one day, a cousin had arrived from Paris with a friend who worked for the Sûreté. Young Clot had listened to the man’s tales of impenetrable enigmas and brilliant, retrospectively obvious solutions, and discovered his true vocation.
A long time passed before he was able to get his teeth into a genuine mystery. It was four or five years before the Second World War. He was a junior detective in the Grandes-Carrières precinct in the north of Paris when the sort of case he had always dreamt of finally landed on his desk. A concierge in the Rue de Damrémont had reported the mysterious death of an old Russian officer. The body was lying on the bed, dressed in the uniform of a hussar. When his dolman was unbuttoned, the man was found to have died from a deep stab-wound. A blood-smeared sabre, which matched the wound, had been hidden in a cupboard. Strangely, there was no damage to the dolman. Its gold braid was intact and nothing had pierced the cloth.
That night, Clot examined the puzzle with mounting excitement. A shadowy tale began to form in his mind: a murder disguised as a natural death; a murderer who simultaneously covered his tracks and left incriminating evidence. Perhaps the murder in the Rue de Damrémont was the obscure dénouement of a drama that had its roots in the darkest days of Czarist Russia…
Next morning, a letter arrived at the police station. It had been written and posted the day before by the dead man. Having decided to kill himself, he had administered the fatal blow and used the last seconds of his waning life to replace the sabre in the cupboard and to button up the splendid uniform in which he wished to be buried. For Clot, this was a huge disappointment but a salutary lesson: nine times out of ten, ingenious reasoning was a complete waste of time.
Then came the war, which saw Clot digging a tunnel for six months in a Moravian prisoner-of-war camp only to be caught a few yards before the end. He was repatriated, and spent the rest of the war as a policeman in Paris, pretending to root out members of the Résistance but in fact supplying them with false passports. After the war, he accepted the nightmarish task of arresting and interviewing policemen who had collaborated too closely with the Nazis, and showed an admirable determination to distinguish force of circumstance from malice.
Since then, Clot had run the Brigade Criminelle too efficiently for any Sherlock-Holmesian excitement. He was happily married to his job and immune to the allure of mystery. He did however allow himself an occasional furtive expedition to Montmartre and the Marché aux Puces. By posing as an art-collector, he uncovered hundreds of forged paintings – mostly Picassos and Utrillos. When the canvasses began to clutter up the corridors, he hung them on his walls and lent them to his colleagues. After five years of undercover bargain-hunting, the offices on the Quai des Orfèvres housed the world’s largest collection of bogus masterpieces. No doubt, among those objects of beauty and desire lurked some genuine, priceless originals that should have been sent across the river to the Louvre. But since experts and even the painters themselves could not always tell the difference, there was little sense in troubling the art world with futile mysteries.
WHEN NEWS OF the shooting in the Jardins de l’Observatoire reached him that night in October 1959, Georges Clot felt the old stirrings of detective fever. Not only was this a matter of national importance, it also promised to be a satisfyingly tricky hunt for professional killers who must have covered their tracks in interesting ways. The police car raced along the boulevard and stopped where some people were listening to a man in a dark overcoat. The man was pale and trembling but evidently able to keep an audience hanging on his every word.
Commissioner Clot greeted his former boss (he had known the senator as Minister of Justice), and took his statement. The details supplied by Mitterrand were understandably sketchy, but there were peculiarities about the case that – experience told him – would soon resolve themselves into definite leads. In fact (perhaps it was the late hour or the eminence of the victim), it had the slightly skewed, dreamlike quality of the most seductively enigmatic cases. Even before he had sent his best men to interview the waiters at the Lipp and the inhabitants of the quartier, a thousand questions were taunting his mind with tantalizing ambiguities.
For instance, it was well known that French-Algeria activists planned their operations with military precision, for the excellent reason that most of them were high-ranking officers in the French army. Why, then, had they – or their hired assassins – used a vehicle that was unable to keep up with a 403, which was hardly a gazelle among motor cars? Assuming the information to be correct, the whole thing had taken an inordinate amount of time: at least ten minutes to drive 1.6 kilometres. It would have been the slowest car chase in history. Perhaps the senator had lingered in the vicinity of the Lipp, or perhaps the assassins had waited – but why? – before riddling the 403 with bullets.
Discrepancies like these were often explained as the investigation proceeded. Even a man with Mitterrand’s self-possession was likely to misremember things that immediately preceded such a shocking event. Apart from his vagueness about the time, it was impossible not to be struck by the fact that he had mentioned a Square Médicis, which, strictly speaking, did not exist, at least not under that name. Insignificant details, no doubt, but details that established the possible unreliability of the victim’s own testimony.
The forensic team raised a new set of questions. They festooned the senator’s car with metal rods that made it look like a wounded boar – one rod for each bullet hole. There were seven in all, poking out of the front and rear doors of the passenger side in a neat arc. One thing was immediately obvious: all the rods were at right angles to the doors, which meant that, when the shots were fired, the assassins’ car had not been moving.
He was, in short, dealing with professional killers who had had the self-assurance to stop their car and shoot a man whom they presumed to be lying flat across the front seats or cowering on the floor. One of the bullets had in fact punctured the driver’s seat. But these were also professional killers who had failed, twice, to run their target off the road and then almost lost him on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. And if they were such confident and cold-blooded killers, why had they not taken the obvious precaution of peering into the car and then looking to see whether their target was lying on the ground a few yards away or – stupidly, it had to be said – standing up, running across the grass and jumping over a hedge?
Then there was the matter of the seven bullet holes. According to the forensic team, the killers had used a Sten gun, probably left over from the war. Four years of Nazi occupation had filled the cellars and tool sheds of France with illicit weapons and produced a generation of men who considered illegal activity an expression of personal freedom. It was an odd choice of weapon all the same: Sten guns were notoriously unreliable. But even a Sten could fire thirty rounds in three seconds. Why, then, had only seven shots been fired? (There was no sign that any bullets had missed the car.) Was this the work of some previously unknown and under-rehearsed group of poorly funded terrorists? Was it intended simply as a warning? (But there were easier and safer ways to intimidate a politician.) Or was it – Clot dreaded to think – a covert operation carried out by French intelligence agents with the aim of influencing public opinion?
All in all, it was a captivating case. Phone taps and searches of suspects’ homes turned up nothing; the hit squad from Spain gave no sign of life; there were witnesses who had heard the shooting, but no one had actually seen it happen. And yet, as the days passed, Clot felt a strange reluctance to pursue the investigation. It looked increasingly like the sort of case that would be solved by the sudden appearance of a piece of evidence that no amount of ingenuity could have produced. The more he saw of it, the less enticing it became. It is entirely to Georges Clot’s credit as a policeman that the anticipated joy of discovery had already begun to fade when, on 22 October, he stuffed the files into his metal cabinet and slammed the drawer shut with a bang that had the fake Picassos and Utrillos dancing on their hooks.
4. POSTE RESTANTE
THE MÉDICIS POST OFFICE stands opposite the Senate on the Rue de Vaugirard, at a point where the wind always seems to be blowing up a storm, probably because of the inordinate length of the street (the Rue de Vaugirard is the longest in Paris), which funnels the south-westerlies into the heart of the Left Bank.
Just after lunch, the ladies who sat behind the counters saw the doors swing open and a posse of men burst into the building as though blown in by a gust of wind. One was a lawyer, dressed in his robes; another – who seemed to be the focus of attention – looked too silly and fidgety to be genuinely important. This, and the presence of several cameramen, convinced some of the postières that a film was being made, and they reached for their combs and powder compacts.
Few would have suspected that the weaselly little man in the disreputable-looking raincoat had ever sat on the benches of the Assemblée Nationale. On the other hand, the smirk on his face and his curiously flinching gait made it easy to imagine him creeping into the parliamentary toilets with a bomb. He stubbed out his cigarette, walked up to the counter labelled ‘Poste restante’, and asked for any mail addressed to M. Robert Pesquet. An envelope was produced, which he left lying on the counter. Then he turned around and said, like a bad actor, ‘Maître Dreyer-Durfer, kindly take this letter, which I have not touched, place it in your briefcase and deposit it in a safe for the examining magistrate.’
The lawyer slid the letter off the counter, held it up between thumb and forefinger, and addressed the post office at large: ‘I am taking this letter, M. Pesquet, untouched by yourself, which I shall place in a safe, as you have just requested, in which it shall remain at the disposal of the examining magistrate.’ Then, turning to the flustered clerk, he said, in the same stentorian voice, ‘I, Maître Dreyer-Durfer, request that you make a note of all that has just occurred.’
‘Yes, sir,’ stammered the woman, ‘Do you want me to make a note of the words, too?’
A look of inexhaustible patience appeared on the lawyer’s face. ‘The words above all, my good lady, if you please.’
With that, Maître Dreyer-Durfer led the way out of the post office, followed by his smirking client, who quickly lit another cigarette in the lee of his black robe.
ROBERT PESQUET, former carpenter, former député, stool-pigeon of the far right and member of several thuggish ‘patriot’ groups, had single-handedly solved the mystery of the assassination attempt. Two days before, a group of journalists had heard him make his astonishing claim in his lawyer’s chambers in the Rue de la Pompe. Naturally, Senator Mitterrand had denied everything. But now, Pesquet had played his trump card: a letter written and posted to himself forty-eight hours before the events.
The letter was read out to the lawyers and their two clients in the chambers of Judge Braunschweig at the Palais de Justice. ‘I shall describe in exact detail the bogus assassination attempt of the Jardins de l’Observatoire that will take place on the night of 15–16 October according to the plan devised by M. Mitterrand…’
According to Pesquet’s letter, Mitterrand had come to him with a scheme that would save them both from political obscurity. The letter went on to describe everything, in the future tense, exactly as it had occurred, from the Brasserie Lipp to the Jardins de l’Observatoire. Pesquet had followed in his Simca with a dim but playful peasant who worked on his estate at Beuvron-en-Auge. The Sten gun had been borrowed from a friend. The only changes Pesquet had to point out to the judge concerned the few minutes during which Mitterrand had been lying on the wet grass, waiting to be assassinated. First, two lovers had been kissing under the trees; then a taxi had dropped off a fare. After driving around the block several times, the Simca had stopped alongside the 403, and Pesquet had heard a voice coming from the darkness: ‘Shoot, for God’s sake! What the hell are you doing?’ Everything else had gone according to plan: the Sten gun sputtered and banged; Pesquet drove on to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, parked the car and returned on foot in time to admire Mitterrand’s suave performance in front of the cameras.
The judge laid down the letter and looked up to see the unusual spectacle of half a dozen speechless lawyers. For the first and only time, François Mitterrand appeared to lose his self-control. He turned pale and made a sound that might have been a sob. He could hear the cackling of his enemies and the hysterical laughter of twenty-six million voters. His career was in ruins. Whether or not Pesquet was telling the truth, this was the kind of humiliation from which no politician ever recovered.
Even in this, his darkest hour, ‘the Fox’ remembered the lessons he had learned in the war. A man who had escaped six times from prisoner-of-war camps was not so easily defeated. It was unfortunate, of course, that Pesquet had accused him of faking the assassination attempt before revealing the letter, and that Mitterrand had accused Pesquet of slander. It was also unfortunate that he had allowed himself to bask in all the praise and sympathy. After Pesquet’s poste restante trick, he could hardly claim to be entirely innocent. And yet, there was one possible explanation that just might be accepted as the truth…
This was the version of events that Mitterrand gave to Judge Braunschweig and the nation. He confessed that he had indeed met Pesquet once or twice before the shooting. Pesquet had come to him with a terrible tale: his old French-Algeria friends, to whom he owed a great deal of money, had ordered him to assassinate Mitterrand. If Pesquet refused, he would certainly be killed, and so he had begged Mitterrand to help him out. A faked assassination attempt would let Pesquet off the hook and make it less likely that anyone else would try to kill Mitterrand. In a spirit of Christian charity, Mitterrand had agreed to play along. Their last meeting was to have taken place at the Brasserie Lipp. Though Pesquet had not shown up, the rest of the operation had gone as planned. It was only when Pesquet had accused him publicly of organizing the whole charade that Mitterrand realized what had happened: he was the victim of a right-wing plot to destroy his political career.
Though not entirely convincing, this would at least present him in a slightly better light. The newspapers were unimpressed. No one expected politicians to obey the law, but they were supposed to retain a certain dignity and savoir-faire. One of the least insulting headlines appeared in L’Aurore: ‘To think that this booby used to be Minister of the Interior!’
JUDGE BRAUNSCHWEIG made the best of a bad job. Somehow, the guilty had to be punished, but without causing further damage to the international standing of the French Republic. The world must know that Paris was not Shanghai or Casablanca. Pesquet and his sidekick were charged with possession of an illegal weapon, while Mitterrand, having wasted the time of Commissioner Clot with a pointless investigation, was charged with contempt of court. These were comparatively minor charges, which would probably be dropped in any case.
Surprisingly, the Senate voted to strip Mitterrand of his senatorial immunity, but by then the case had entered the boundless, foggy realm of judicial procedure whose decaying files are occasionally washed away by a tide of indifference and secret negotiations. Biographers and historians who have gone in search of the unrecognizable fragments of truth have seen various oily personalities emerge from the mist: Prime Minister Debré, who had been accused of ordering an illegal execution in Algeria; Pesquet’s lawyer, Tixier-Vignancour, who defended right-wing terrorists and stood as a presidential candidate; and Tixier-Vignancour’s bullish campaign manager, Jean-Marie Le Pen. These were some of the men whom Mitterrand suspected of plotting his downfall. None of them ever confessed to any involvement in the affair.
Pesquet himself was forced to leave the country and has since invented so many different versions of the incident that even if he now made an honest confession, it would be worthless. In a letter published by Le Monde in 1965, he unexpectedly lent support to Mitterrand’s presidential campaign by confessing that Mitterrand had organized the fake assassination attempt in good faith. Later, however, he retracted his statement, claiming that friends of Mitterrand had paid him forty thousand francs to write the letter. The retraction itself earned him a few more francs when he published it in a book titled My Genuine-Fake Assassination Attempt on Mitterrand: The Truth at Last.
The ‘Affaire de l’Observatoire’ reached its practical conclusion that winter, when, in a seemingly needless reconstruction arranged by Commissioner Clot, Senator Mitterrand’s Peugeot 403 was taken to a quiet avenue in the Bois de Vincennes, peppered with bullets and crashed into a tree. The original shooting had left it relatively unscathed. After the ‘reconstruction’, all that remained was a tangled, windowless wreck.
‘The Fox’ now entered the period that came to be known as his ‘crossing of the desert’. Having first demanded that Mitterrand be prosecuted, President de Gaulle changed his mind and decided that the incident should never again be mentioned, and that his own party would never try to profit from it. Some said that he was trying to protect his Prime Minister, Michel Debré, from any embarrassing revelations that Mitterrand might make about his role in the murder of a general in Algeria. Others, close to de Gaulle, said that he wanted to uphold the dignity of the office, since – incredible as it seemed at the time – Mitterrand might one day be President. Of course, de Gaulle knew full well that Mitterrand would never be allowed to forget. For years afterwards, though the députés of the Assemblée Nationale maintained a courteous silence on the subject, it was extraordinary how often the word ‘Observatoire’ cropped up in their speeches.
5. PETIT-CLAMART (EPILOGUE)
A WEDNESDAY EVENING in late August 1962: it was the time of year when a parking space, a taxi or an empty telephone box were easy to find. Cafés were filled with stacks of chairs and barricaded with pinball machines. Traffic was at such a low ebb that the obelisk in the centre of the Place de la Concorde could be reached on foot. In the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the usual group of white-gloved policemen stood around the pillared entrance of no. 55, making it possible for tourists to identify it as the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the President of the French Republic.
A man holding a motorcycle helmet who had been examining the window display of a Russian antiques shop on the other side of the street looked through the iron gates and saw General de Gaulle walk down the steps of the palace. (It was the General, not the man who sometimes impersonated him.) He watched de Gaulle usher his wife into a black Citroën DS before joining her in the back seat. The officer who climbed in next to the chauffeur was the de Gaulles’ son-in-law, Alain de Boissieu. Behind them, in another DS, were four ‘gorillas’ or ‘super-cops’. Their names, too, were known to the man who was watching from the street.
The meeting of the Council of Ministers had just ended. The entire meeting had been devoted to the question of Algeria. In June, the Évian Accords had been approved by a referendum, and Algeria was now an independent state, but some of the Algerian-born Frenchmen who were incensed at de Gaulle’s betrayal of the pieds noirs had vowed to continue the struggle. There had been a spate of bank robberies that bore the mark of the right-wing commando group, the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète. A high-ranking OAS official, André ‘the Monocle’ Canal, had been arrested in Paris by undercover policemen pretending to clean the facade of his building. He was carrying a letter in which the treasurer of the OAS was asked to make available a sum of one million francs; evidently, a big operation was being planned.
Faced with this army of embittered patriots and mercenaries, the government was trying to come up with a convincing package of anti-terrorist measures and to decide what to do with the thousands of disgruntled refugees who were flooding into Marseille. The meeting had ended only when glazed eyes and rumbling stomachs made further discussion pointless. Several ministers had rushed away immediately to go on holiday before the next emergency. Despite the late hour, the President, his wife and son-in-law were to be driven to the aerodrome at Villacoublay, sixteen kilometres to the south-west. From there, they would be flown to their home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.
The usual precautions had been taken, which is to say, not as many as de Gaulle’s security officers would have liked. The longest-serving police commissioner attached to the Élysée, Jacques Cantelaube, had recently handed in his resignation in protest at de Gaulle’s abandonment of the colony. There were fears that too many people knew the routes that the motorcade usually took. Sometimes, de Gaulle managed to slip out of the Élysée with his chauffeur and had himself driven through the city with the presidential pennant flapping in the breeze for the convenience of any madman with a rifle. Even when he was in a cooperative mood, he accepted only the lightest protection: two outriders in front, another DS behind, with two policemen on motorbikes bringing up the rear. This was the small convoy that scrunched across the gravel and swerved smoothly out into the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré that Wednesday evening at 7.55 p.m.
The man who had been watching from the other side of the street walked towards his motorbike, which was parked outside a café. At the same moment, inside the Élysée, someone picked up a telephone, dialled the number of an apartment at 2, Avenue Victor-Hugo in Meudon, and said, ‘It’s number two.’
SO MANY ATTEMPTS had been made on de Gaulle’s life that he was beginning to look like a fantastically lucky character who happens to move just when the chimney falls from the roof or who bends to tie his shoelace when the custard pie is launched. In September 1961, the presidential motorcade had been heading for Colombey-les-Deux-Églises along route nationale 19. It had passed Pont-sur-Seine at 110 kph and was descending towards the village of Crancey through a landscape of open fields and small woods. Road-menders had left a large pile of sand by the side of the road. Inside the sand was a propane cylinder packed with forty-three kilograms of plastic explosive and a fuel can containing twenty kilograms of petrol, oil and soap flakes. A man was watching through binoculars. He pressed the button on his remote-control unit. A storm of sand and gravel engulfed the DS. De Gaulle shouted, ‘Marchez! Marchez!’, and the driver accelerated through a wall of flames. No one was hurt. For some reason, the detonator had become separated from the plastic explosive and only the fuel can had ignited. With this arrangement, the forensic expert explained, ‘it was like trying to set fire to a tree trunk with a sheet of paper’.
Since then, the attacks had become more frequent. Though there was no longer any hope of changing the political situation, the OAS was bent on revenge. Even in the heart of Paris, de Gaulle was being hunted like a rabbit. It seemed to be only a matter of time before he was shot or blown up. A whole division of the Brigade Criminelle was working night and day to find the faceless enemy. They scanned the fiches that were filled in by hotel guests. They photographed suspects using periscopes poking through the roof vents of tradesmen’s vans – an idea they had borrowed from the OAS. They analysed mysterious acronyms and other political graffiti that appeared in the corridors of the Métro. As the ministers had just been told, the intelligence services were drowning in data and had to spend most of their time eliminating useless information.
The OAS, meanwhile, had some excellent sources of its own – a cleaning lady at the Élysée Palace and (it later transpired) Commissioner Jacques Cantelaube. They knew the different routes that were taken by the motorcade. They knew that sometimes the black car was a decoy and that de Gaulle was riding in the yellow or the blue DS. Even if the informer in the Élysée failed to ascertain the route, they had simply to post someone in the street outside or at the Villacoublay aerodrome with access to a telephone. Fortunately, so far, something had always gone wrong.
Earlier that year, the killers’ van – a Renault estafette – had managed to pull alongside the presidential DS as it approached the Pont de Grenelle along the Quai Louis Blériot. They were winding down the windows when a little 4CV slipped in between the two vehicles and the DS was lost in traffic. On another occasion, the OAS commandos known as ‘the Limp’, ‘the Pipe’, ‘Angel-Face’ (a Hungarian mercenary) and ‘Didier’ (Lieutenant-Colonel Bastien-Thiry) had been waiting for the tip-off in the cafés that surround the Porte d’Orléans Métro station, unaware that a postal strike had put the phone system out of action. Even the multi-pronged operation that was planned for de Gaulle’s visit to eastern France (involving a booby-trapped level-crossing and trained dogs carrying remote-controlled explosives) had been comprehensively wrecked. As ‘Didier’ later confessed before his execution, ‘All along, we had the impression of coming up against what you’d have to say was sheer bad luck. It dogged us to the very end.’
The closest they had come to hitting ‘the Big Target’ was one of the operations code-named ‘Chamois’. (This was the name used by the OAS for any operation requiring a long-range rifle.) On the evening of 20 May, a search of an apartment in one of the new blocks that had been built on the site of the former Vel’ d’Hiv at 13, Rue du Docteur-Finlay turned up a package labelled ‘Algiers – Paris Orly’. It contained a bazooka and three rockets. The secret services knew the target – de Gaulle – but not the place and the time. The OAS had discovered that, between eight and nine o’clock every evening, the old painter who lived above the antiques shop at 86, Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré closed his shutters for the night. The windows of his living room looked directly through the gateway opposite and, in a slightly descending line, at the entrance of the Élysée Palace. On 23 May, de Gaulle was to receive the visit of the President of Mauritania. The protocol for such visits never varied. When the visitor’s car entered the courtyard, de Gaulle emerged from the palace and stood still at the top of the steps for at least ninety seconds. On 21 May, the plot was discovered; on 22 May, the painter closed his shutters and went to bed as usual; and on 23 May, de Gaulle stood on the steps and welcomed the Mauritanian President into the Élysée Palace.
THAT WEDNESDAY EVENING, after leaving the Élysée at 7.55 p.m., the motorcade slid through the August evening traffic, crossed the Pont Alexandre III and headed into the low sun and the south-western suburbs. Seven minutes later, it left the city at the Porte de Châtillon. With an occasional blast of sirens, it would cover the next eight kilometres at over 70 kph before turning sharp right for the aerodrome.
At that moment, seven and a half kilometres down the road, the owner of the Ducretet-Thomson television showroom in Petit-Clamart was winding down his steel security grating before going to collect his car from the garage.
Trapped between the outer suburbs and the girdle of expressways, Petit-Clamart consisted of the jumbled remnants of every phase of its development since the days when it was a zone of quarries and vegetable fields. There were some pebble-dash houses, an Antar station, some shops and vacant lots. Village life – what remained of it – was represented by a few clumps of privet hedge, a pot of geraniums and a birdcage on a sooty windowsill. Petit-Clamart was not a place where anyone stopped on purpose, which is why the owner of the showroom was surprised later on not to have noticed the car that was parked across the road in the Rue du Bois.
The car was a Citroën ID. Two hundred metres up the avenue, in the direction of Paris, a Peugeot 403 was parked on the pavement. On the other side of the road, a yellow estafette faced south-west, its rear windows pointing towards Paris. Together, the three vehicles formed a triangle. The time was 8.08 p.m. A man had just rattled open the sliding door of the estafette and was urinating behind a hedge, his head turned in the direction of Paris. A few cars went past with their wipers on. The light rain made the evening unusually gloomy for August, and some of the cars in the distance coming from Paris had turned on their headlights.
He ran with his trousers still undone, shouting something at the van. ‘Itt vannak!’ He hooked his hand on the edge of the door and swung himself in, still yelling, ‘ITT VANNAK!’, which is Hungarian for ‘They’re here!’
The motorcade was approaching the crossroads at 90 kph, sounding its sirens like an express train. A driver who was heading for Paris pulled over and saw a barrier of tiny flames crackle across the road before he felt his index finger leap off the steering wheel. Alain de Boissieu shouted to his parents-in-law, ‘Get down!’ a split second before the men in the 403 and the estafette opened fire. Television screens exploded in the showroom. In the Trianon café, which was closed for the season, bullets punctured the vinyl seats. For a second or two, the scream of accelerating engines drowned out the racket of four M1s, an MP40 and two FM24/29 machine-guns.
Immobilized by the crossfire, de Gaulle’s DS would be exposed to the direct fire of the gunmen who were waiting at the corner of the Rue du Bois. This was the plan that had been worked out in the apartment at Meudon with toy cars on a table.
Their machine-guns juddering in their hands, they saw the outriders swerve and surge; they saw the flickering imperfections of a scene suddenly sprayed with bullets; they saw the flash of chrome and lacquered fuselage as the DS, driven by the man who had accelerated through the wall of flames near Pont-sur-Seine, shot past with a slur of tyres and roared into the sunset, leaving Petit-Clamart looking even tattier than usual.
Three minutes later, President de Gaulle stepped out of the DS onto the runway at Villacoublay. Little cubes of glass trickled from his suit onto the tarmac. His wife said, ‘I hope the chickens are all right.’ She was thinking of Thursday’s lunch, which was in the boot of the DS, but the policemen thought she was referring to them, since a poulet is a ‘cop’. De Gaulle, who was never effusive, thanked his driver and his son-in-law, and said calmly, ‘It was a close thing this time.’ He seemed more upset by what appeared to be the pitiful ineptitude of the OAS: ‘Ils ont tiré comme des cochons.’ (‘They couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces.’)
Less than an hour later, the estafette was found in the Bois de Meudon. The machine-guns were still inside it, along with a bomb that was supposed to have destroyed the evidence. The fuse had been lit but for some reason had gone out. Most of the conspirators were rounded up within a fortnight and only ‘the Limp’ was never caught. At the crime scene, the investigators found a hundred cartridges scattered about the crossroads. It seemed incredible that only one person had been hurt. (The driver bound for Paris had to have his index finger bandaged.) About ten bullets had hit the car, and most of them had been fired too low to do much damage. Despite the mole in the Élysée, no one had told the killers that the presidential DS was equipped with bullet-proof tyres and hydraulic suspension. Even so, they seem to have suffered almost unbelievable bad luck. Two of the machine-guns had jammed, and ‘the Limp’ had had to change his clip in mid-volley.
Amazed by de Gaulle’s good fortune, and embarrassed by their failure, some members of the OAS came to suspect that this and other attacks had been orchestrated by secret-service agents with the aim of discrediting the OAS and turning the President into ‘a living miracle’. This also appeared to be the view of television commentators, according to Prime Minister Pompidou, who was told of their sarcastic reporting by a friend who owned a television set. How else, the journalists seemed to say, could one explain the rapid capture of the culprits, the self-extinguishing fuse, de Gaulle’s invincibility and all the other minor miracles?
No evidence of secret-service involvement has ever come to light, and even if it had done, it would only have enhanced de Gaulle’s reputation for extraordinary competence and guile. In all the emergencies he had faced in the last twenty years, he had never made a secret of the fact that it was sometimes necessary to deceive the electorate in the interests of the nation. Most of the electorate admired him for saying so. It was commonly believed that without a leader who knew how to fool his enemies, France could never survive in a world of treachery and violence.
FOUR WEEKS AFTER the outrage, on the evening of Thursday, 20 September, the funereal form of the living miracle flickered out at the passing traffic at the crossroads in Petit-Clamart. President de Gaulle had decided that the time had come to deliver an important message to the electorate. The irony was probably not lost on the owner of the recently repaired Ducretet-Thomson television showroom: historic broadcasts like this were always good for business.
President de Gaulle sat in the Salon Doré at the Élysée Palace. A cartoonist might have depicted him as a human lighthouse in a storm. His eyebrows plunged and soared like seagulls; his vast hands reached out as though to salvage that fragile infant, the French Republic. Behind him were massed the silent representatives of French culture in their leather bindings.
Françaises, Français…You and I have lived through so much toil, tears and blood, we have known the same hopes, the same passions and the same triumphs, that there exists between us a unique and special bond. This bond which unites us is the source of the power that is vested in me, and of the responsibility that comes with that power…
In his apartment in the Rue Guynemer, François Mitterrand was listening to the broadcast with a mixture of rancour and admiration. De Gaulle delivered his address with impressive, agonizing slowness. His tone suggested long deliberation rather than a reaction to passing events. A wave of sympathy had followed the outrage, and de Gaulle was now on the highest pinnacle of his career since the Liberation. No one would accuse him of weakness if he decided to retire to the peace of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and to leave the Élysée to a younger, more vigorous man…
…In spite of everything, personal liberty has been preserved. The grave and painful problem of decolonization has been solved. Enormous labours lie ahead of us, for a nation that continues to live continues to progress. But no one seriously believes that progress can occur if we renounce our solid institutions. The nation would be cast into the abyss…
It was perhaps at this point that François Mitterrand found the title of his next book. It would be a searing indictment of Gaullist policies and practice, and of the ‘uncrowned dictator’ himself…
The keystone of our régime is the presidency. It follows that, instead of being chosen by a relatively small constituency of elected representatives, the President must receive his mandate directly from the people…
He would call his book ‘Le Coup d’état permanent’…
I have therefore decided to propose that henceforth the President be elected by universal suffrage…
It was, one had to admit, a master stroke. The Senate and a broad coalition of députés were opposed to the institution of a ‘Bonapartist’ régime. Too much power would be vested in one man…But the voters, oblivious to the long-term consequences, would inevitably turn out to glorify the living miracle, just as their great-grandfathers had rushed to the ballot boxes to ratify the coup d’état of Napoleon III.
A month later, de Gaulle’s proposal was accepted by almost two-thirds of the electorate. The national elections that followed were a triumph for the Gaullists. There were also some small but significant victories for the anti-Gaullist coalition. In the Nièvre département, a man who, only three years before, had – for reasons that remained obscure – prostrated himself on a wet lawn in the Latin Quarter while a Norman peasant fired a machine-gun at his 403, regained his seat in the Assemblée Nationale. He would have to sit out the next few years on the opposition benches, enduring taunts and sly allusions to hired assassins and observatories. But even de Gaulle was not immortal. In five, ten or fifteen years, age would achieve what several thousand guns, bombs and hand-grenades had failed to do. De Gaulle would enter the realm of legend, and the skies over Paris would seem to darken with his death. Then, perhaps, in that twilight, the Fox would finally have his day.