1962 attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle
The Petit-Clamart attack, also referred to by its perpetrators as Operation Charlotte Corday after Charlotte Corday, was an assassination attempt organized by Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry with the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) that aimed to kill Charles de Gaulle, president of France at the time. The attack was carried out on 22 August 1962.
No one was killed and one person, who was caught in the crossfire, was injured during the attack, which was followed by an intensive investigation led by French authorities. The manhunt ended with almost all participants being caught within a few months. Bastien-Thiry was brought before a military court where he justified his act by claiming that de Gaulle was a tyrant. Bastien-Thiry was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in the spring of 1963, and remains the last person to be executed by firing squad in France.
Background.
1958–1959.
In May 1958, in Algiers, a coup was carried out jointly by Pierre Lagaillarde, who was the sitting Deputy of Algiers and a reserve paratrooper officer, generals Raoul Salan, Edmond Jouhaud and Jean Gracieux, Admiral Auboyneau, with the support of General Jacques Massu and Jacques Soustelle's allies. Its aim was to allow the return of power to Charles de Gaulle, who was then retired. The supporters of de Gaulle were banking on a radical change in government policy based on maintaining the integrity of the republican territory, and therefore the continuation of the policy of "pacification" in the French departments of Algeria that has been maintained since 1954.
After reassuring a European and Muslim Gaullist crowd fraternizing in Algiers on 4 June 1958, with a historic "I understand you", followed by an unequivocal "Long live French Algeria" in Mostaganem, de Gaulle, once he became President of the Republic in 1959, undertook to complete the decolonization policy that he had initiated in 1943 with Lebanon and Syria during his campaign to rally the colonies to Free France with a view to liberating the metropolitan territory itself occupied by Hitler's Nazi Germany. Later, on 2 October 1958, de Gaulle granted independence to Guinea following its rejection of the new constitution.
On 16 September 1959, de Gaulle used the term "self-determination" for the first time in relation to what was still in the media only "the Algerian affair", certain voices of protest began to arise, which were heard among certain Gaullists in Algeria and in mainland France. The protesters interpreted the policy reversal of the head of state, whom they themselves had helped to bring to power, as a "betrayal".
1960.
On 24 January 1960, extremist defenders of the maintenance of French Algeria carried out a siege in the Algerian capital, then the second largest city in France, in what would become the "week of the barricades", expecting the support of Massu. Following statements from Jacques Massu to the newspaper of West Germany, Massu was immediately transferred to mainland France. It was the dismissal of the man who had allowed the "Gaullist putsch" of 1958 which served as a trigger in what the media described as "the events in Algiers".
1961.
In February 1961, Pierre Lagaillarde and Raoul Salan, who had also gone underground, reached agreement and began the ("Secret Army Organization"), commonly known as OAS.
In April 1961, following the failure of the generals' putsch—this time aimed at overthrowing de Gaulle, who talked with a delegation of separatists, and replacing his authority with a military junta—the OAS increased its clandestine operations. These actions, the most radical of which involved political assassination and terrorism, were carried out both in the French departments of Algeria and in mainland France, the OAS having a "Metro" branch, by the "Commando Delta".
1962.
On 20 May 1962 in Italy, Georges Bidault, former Minister of Foreign Affairs under de Gaulle, then during the Indochina War, was elected president of the National Council of the Resistance (; CNR) by the executive committee, which included Jacques Soustelle and Colonel Antoine Argoud. Bidault had held the position of president of the council following Jean Moulin in 1943. Several analysts criticize the amalgam practiced by the founders of the council of 1962, an amalgam which suggests a possible equivalence between Algeria and Alsace-Lorraine, as well as an identification of de Gaulle to Adolf Hitler.
Attack.
On 22 August 1962, at around 7:45 pm (), two unmarked Citroën DS 19s escorted by two motorcyclists left the Élysée Palace to take de Gaulle and his wife Yvonne to the Villacoublay Air Base, where they took an airplane to Saint-Dizier to then reach Colombey-les-Deux-Églises by road. De Gaulle was returning from a Council of Ministers. In the first car were Charles and Yvonne DeGaulle, as well as Colonel Alain de Boissieu, son-in-law and aide-de-camp of the president, who was seated next to the driver, Gendarme Francis Marroux. In the second car, led by police brigadier René Casselin, were the police commissioner Henri Puissant, bodyguard Henri Djouder, and military doctor Jean-Denis Degos.
Leaving Paris via the Châtillon-Montrouge Station, the procession took Route nationale 306 and headed towards Vélizy-Villacoublay where the presidential plane was waiting. When he arrived, at 8:20 pm, at the crossroads of rue Charles-Debry, RN 306 and rue du Bois, approximately before the Petit Clamart roundabout, the Bastien-Thiry commando was hidden various stopped vehicles, waiting to fire.
The commando was composed of twelve members, including Jean Bastien-Thiry, Alain de La Tocnaye, László Varga, Lajos Marton, and Gyula Sári, all of whom were fiercely anti-communist. The rest of the group was made up of Metropolitians and "pieds-noirs". The latter intended to avenge the abuses committed against their community, in particular the 1962 Isly massacre, which left 80 dead and 200 injured, as well as the loss of French Algeria. The members commando was equipped with automatic weapons, explosives and four vehicles.
Bastien-Thiry was hidden in a Simca 1000 and gave the signal to fire by waving a newspaper. Five men (Buisines, Varga, Sári, Bernier and Marton) were in a yellow Renault Estafette, equipped with machine guns; La Tocnaye was on board a Citroën ID 19, with Georges Watin and Prévost, equipped with submachine guns; the final vehicle was a Peugeot 403 van, from which Condé, Magade and Bertin were hidden from view, also with automatic weapons.
Of the 187 rounds fired by the commando, 14 impacts were identified on the presidential vehicle, including one in the front passenger backrest where de Boissieu was sitting and several at the level of the faces of the de Gaulles. Around the scene of the attack, several stores were riddled with bullet holes. Realizing the failure of the attack, Gérard Buisines tried to ram the presidential car with the Estafette, while Alain de La Tocnaye, beyond the door, tried to shoot at the car with a machine gun.
Upon arrival at Villacoublay Air Base, the general told those greeting them: "" ("This time it was close"). To the surprise of the police supervising them, Yvonne de Gaulle uttered "" ("I hope the chickens didn't get anything"), and in response de Gaulle whispered to her, sitting next to him on the return plane, "" ("You are brave, Yvonne").
During the attack, a Panhard automobile, traveling on the other side of the road with a couple and their three children, came under fire from the shooters. The driver suffered minor injuries.
Investigation.
Manhunt.
An extensive manhunt was launched on the evening of 22 August to find the perpetrators of the attack. The investigation first focused on the yellow Estafette, with several witnesses saying that one of its three occupants was limping. The police thought they recognized engineer Watin, a member of the OAS known as "the Boiteuse", but did not succeed in apprehending him. Two men were arrested by chance at a Tain-l'Hermitage road checkpoint. Among these two men was a deserter who bragged, saying, "I’m from the OAS." Transferred to the Regional Judicial Police Service in Lyon, he admitted to Commissioner Geneston that he was part of the commando. Then, transferred to Paris, he continued his confession, giving Commissioner Bouvier all the names or nicknames of the conspirators that he knew.
After two weeks, around 15 suspects were arrested by the men of Divisional Commissioner Bouvier, while some of them were developing a new operation targeting de Gaulle. The last arrest was that of Bastien-Thiry on 15 September, which was carried out as he left his home in Bourg-la-Reine. Another suspect, OAS commander and retired French Army major Henri Niaux, hanged himself in prison the same day.
Trial.
The trial was held at the Fort of Vincennes. During the first session, nine accused commando members appeared before the Military Court of Justice on 28 January 1963: Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry defended by Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Alain de La Tocnaye, Pascal Bertin, Gérard Buisines, Alphonse Constantin, Étienne Ducasse, Pierre-Henri Magade, Jacques Prévost and László Varga. Six other defendants were tried "in absentia"; those absent, on the run, were Serge Bernier, Louis de Condé, Gyula Sári, Lajos Marton, Jean-Pierre Naudin, and Georges Watin. The latter had fled to Switzerland where he was arrested in January 1964 and was held in solitary confinement to prevent him escaping from French authorities. False papers were provided to him, and he reached South America with those documents. He died in Paraguay in 1994. All of the accused were charged with attempted intentional homicide by ambush and attack against state authority with the use of weapons.
This Military Court of Justice had been declared illegal by the on 19 October 1962, on the grounds that it infringed the general principles of law by the absence of any appeal against its decisions. Despite this, de Gaulle extended the existence of the Court for this case. However, this Court, which was to be replaced by another jurisdiction, the State Security Court, was extended by the law of 26 February 1963.
On 4 March, at the end of the investigation against Bastien-Thiry, the Military Court of Justice found him guilty of orchestrating the attack. Tried as separate perpetrators, the shooters were sentenced to various prison terms and benefited from a presidential pardon in 1968. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, Alain de la Tocnaye and Jacques Prévost, defended by Jacques Isorni, were all sentenced to death. Two of the condemned were pardoned; only Bastien-Thiry was executed, shot by a firing squad at Fort Ivry on 11 March 1963. The five absent accused were sentenced in absentia to death sentences or imprisonment and also benefit from a presidential pardon.
Bastien-Thiry.
On 2 February 1963, following brief statements by the co-defendants present during the trial, the main accused of the Charlotte Corday operation, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry pleaded in a lengthy speech self-defense in defense of himself and his "comrades" and against the "men of power" and in particular against the most powerful of them, the one whom his lawyer and future presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour nicknamed the "Prince".
Constituting the "Bastien-Thiry affair", the declaration, which René Wittmann published in a confidential edition on 20 February 1963 and whose publishing house close to the extreme right, Serp, published a 33-page paper the same year, which began with these words: ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;The action for which we are answering before you today is of an exceptional nature, and we ask you to believe that only reasons of an equally exceptional nature could have induced us to undertake it. We are neither fascists nor factionalists, but national French, French by origin or French at heart. It is the misfortunes of the homeland that have led us to these benches.
— The trial inspired works from the 1960s to the present day, whether it be criticism of the death penalty, French public opinion then being predominantly unfavorable, or testimonies, the condemned man's family has since worked for his rehabilitation. through the "Bastien-Thiry circle," or counter-investigations; in "Bastien-Thiry: to the end of French Algeria by" Jean-Pax Méfret, a senior reporter, asks: "How did a man, endowed with deep Catholic convictions and superior cultural background, could it have come to this?".
In the national press, reactions to the "Bastien-Thiry affair", which led to both the last political execution in France and the last execution by firing squad, were not long in coming. Discussion tended to focus on three points: the virulence of Bastien-Thiry's criticism of de Gaulle's policies regarding Algeria; the fact that the condemned were finally pardoned with the exception of one; and the expeditious nature of the sentence. The day after the execution, in L'Express, journalist Jean Daniel wrote, "In fact, the inhumanity of the