On the rainy, dusk-lit evening of August twenty-second, 1962, as French President Charles de Gaulle and his wife Yvonne sped through the southwestern Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart toward Villacoublay military airfield to catch a flight home, their unarmored black Citroen DS 19 sedan drove straight into a military crossfire. Twelve heavily armed gunmen belonging to the Secret Army Organization (OAS) opened fire with submachine guns and light machine guns, riddling the presidential car with fourteen bullet holes at close range, shattering the rear window inches from De Gaulle’s head, and blowing out two tires on the wet cobblestone street. That the sixty-one-year-old hero of Free France walked away without a single scratch was a miracle owed entirely to the nerves of his chauffeur, the obsessive accuracy of a thirty-one-year-old military engineer, and the revolutionary hydro-pneumatic suspension of a French automobile.
The Algerian War and the Treason of the OAS
To understand why elite officers of the French military tried to murder their own president on the streets of Paris, one must look at the bitter climax of the Algerian War (1954 to 1962). When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 during the collapse of the Fourth Republic, French settlers in Algeria—known as the pieds-noirs—and right-wing French army commanders assumed the general would keep Algeria permanently integrated as part of France. Instead, recognizing that colonial rule was no longer sustainable after years of brutal counter-insurgency warfare, De Gaulle opened negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and signed the Evian Accords in March 1962, granting Algeria full independence.
Viewing the abandonment of French Algeria as high treason, a group of rogue French generals, Foreign Legion veterans, and paratroopers formed the Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS). Operating under the motto “Algeria is French and will remain so,” the OAS launched a campaign of bombings and assassinations across both Algeria and mainland France, placing President de Gaulle at the very top of their death list.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry’s Operation Charlotte Corday
The mastermind behind the August twenty-second ambush—codenamed Operation Charlotte Corday after the young woman who assassinated the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in 1793—was not a hardened street mercenary, but a brilliant, devoutly Catholic thirty-four-year-old French Air Force weapons engineer named Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry. A graduate of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and the chief designer of the SS.10 and SS.11 wire-guided anti-tank missiles, Bastien-Thiry convinced himself through medieval theological arguments on tyrannicide that assassinating De Gaulle was a moral duty to save Christian Europe and the French Empire.
Earlier in September 1961 at Pont-sur-Seine, Bastien-Thiry had orchestrated a roadside bomb attack against De Gaulle’s car that failed when damp explosives only partially detonated. For his second attempt in August 1962, he assembled a twelve-man commando unit positioned along the Avenue de la Liberation in Petit-Clamart. Waiting in two parked ambush vehicles—a yellow Renault Estafette van and a Simca sedan—with lookouts stationed near the Elysee Palace communicating via walkie-talkies and flashed headlights, the squad waited as De Gaulle’s two-car motorcade, escorted by just two motorcycle policemen, approached the intersection at seventy miles per hour around eight-twenty in the evening.
187 Bullets in the Rain and the Miracle of the Citroen DS
Because twilight had fallen twenty minutes earlier than in previous weeks, the lookout signaled the ambush team just seconds before De Gaulle’s black Citroen DS 19 reached the kill zone. As the first wave of submachine-gun fire from the yellow van shattered the front left and rear right tires of the presidential car, a lesser automobile would have immediately spun out of control on the wet slick cobblestones and crashed straight into the gunmen’s waiting crossfire.
Instead, two factors saved the President of the Republic. First, seated in the back seat alongside his wife Yvonne, while his son-in-law Colonel Alain de Boissieu sat in the front passenger seat, De Gaulle bent forward when Boissieu shouted at him to get down just as a second gunner named Lazlo Varga leaned out of a pulling-alongside vehicle and emptied an automatic magazine through the rear window. Second, the 1962 Citroen DS 19 was equipped with a revolutionary self-leveling hydro-pneumatic suspension system—powered by pressurized nitrogen spheres and hydraulic fluid—that automatically compensated for the two blown-out tires, keeping the car’s chassis level and steering straight on three rims while police chauffeur Francis Marroux stomped the accelerator to the floor, fishtailing out of the ambush through a hail of one hundred and eighty-seven bullets.
“They Shoot Like Pigs” and the Final Firing Squad in France
Moments later, when the bullet-riddled Citroen screeched to a halt on the tarmac at Villacoublay airfield, Charles de Gaulle stepped calmly out of the car, brushed shards of safety glass from his coat while checking on his unflappable wife Yvonne, and remarked with icy aristocratic disdain that the assassins shot like pigs. Within two weeks, a massive nationwide police dragnet captured nearly every member of the Petit-Clamart commando squad, including Lieutenant-Colonel Bastien-Thiry, who was arrested upon returning from a technical mission to Britain.
The assassination attempt had two profound consequences for modern France. Politically, public outrage over the near-murder of the president allowed De Gaulle to hold an immediate national referendum in October 1962 amending the constitution so that the President of France would henceforth be elected directly by universal popular vote rather than by an electoral college—creating the powerful modern French presidency. Judicially, following a dramatic military trial at the Fort de Vincennes in early 1963, De Gaulle commuted the death sentences of the trigger men who had obeyed orders, but refused clemency to the organizer who had put his wife Yvonne in the line of fire. At dawn on March eleventh, 1963, at the Fort d’Ivry, Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry clutched a rosary and became the very last person in French history ever to be executed by a firing squad—an event later immortalized as the opening chapter of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller novel, The Day of the Jackal.
