Petit-Clamart assassination

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Charles de Gaulle

The assassination attempt in Petit-Clamart was an attack on the life of the then French President Charles de Gaulle . It took place on the evening of August 22, 1962 in Petit-Clamart , a district of Clamart , south of Paris . De Gaulle was unharmed; the head of the command, Lieutenant Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry , was caught, sentenced to death and executed . Like many French military officials, Bastien-Thiry categorically rejected the independence of Algeria and disapproved of de Gaulle's recognition of the sovereignty of the Algerian state on March 13, 1962.

The attack formed the basis for Frederick Forsyth's novel The Jackal and its 1973 film adaptation .

prehistory

The historical background is the separation of Algeria from the French state. The country was a settlement colony in 1848 , later a department . After the Second World War , a period of decolonization began worldwide . Due to the high number of French settlers, there was considerable resistance to detachment from the mother country. In the Algerian War (1954–1962) France got into a political and financial crisis, especially since it had just ended the Indochina War (1946–1954). Charles de Gaulle returned to office in 1958 after twelve years of retirement. Contrary to what many had hoped, he conducted negotiations with the leaders of the National Liberation Front (FLN). In the winter of 1960/61 the Organization de l'armée secrète (OAS) was founded to keep Algeria with France and torpedo the negotiations with terrorist attacks. An attempted coup by the OAS in Algiers in April 1961 failed; With the assassination attempt in Pont-sur-Seine in September 1961, de Gaulle only narrowly escaped an OAS bomb attack. According to the Évian treaties of March 18, 1962, around 960,000 so-called pieds-noirs (French for black feet ) left Algeria and tried to start a new life in France.

The course of events

De Gaulle driving in his presidential Citroën DS limousine , the roof of which could also be opened (1963)
Renault Estafette

The attack was carried out by around a dozen men, mostly with military backgrounds. Its code name was Opération Charlotte Corday . This refers to the murder of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday in 1793.

Those involved waited in an ambush for de Gaulle. This left against 19:30 the Elysee Palace in a column consisting of two motorcycles and two non-armored sedans type Citroën DS . He was driving the second vehicle with his wife Yvonne , his son-in-law Colonel Alain de Boissieu and the police officer Francis Marroux. The column was on its way to the Villacoublay military airfield in Vélizy-Villacoublay, about 20 kilometers southwest . A helicopter was waiting there to bring the President to his country house in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises .

At around 8:08 p.m., the presidential convoy on Route nationale 306 was ambushed by the assassins equipped with automatic weapons and explosives. In a yellow Renault Estafette van , five men waited for their leader to give an order to fire, who signaled them with a newspaper. A total of 187 shots were fired; 14 bullets were later counted in the vehicle. Despite the burst front tires, Marroux retained control of the hydropneumatic suspension vehicle and reached the airfield. Once there, de Gaulle commented on the incident with the words: “Cette fois, c'était tangent” (this time it was close).

literature

  • Georges Fleury: Tuez de Gaulle! Histoire de l'attentat du Petit-Clamart. édition Grasset, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-246-47481-7 .
  • Jean-Noël Jeanneney: Un assassination. Petit-Clamart, 22 août 1962 . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-02-130153-3 .
  • Lajos Marton: Il faut tuer de Gaulle. Editions du Rocher, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-268-04366-5 .
  • Frederick Forsyth : The Jackal . Thriller. (Original title: The Day of the Jackal. 1971) German by Tom Knoth, Piper, Munich and Zurich 2004 (first edition: 1972), ISBN 3-492-24109-3 .

Filmography

  • Fred Zinnemann : The Jackal (in the original: The Day of the Jackal (1973)).
  • Jean-Teddy Filippe, Ils voulaient tuer de Gaulle , 2005. (only in French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meeting point Melilla , Der Spiegel 39/1961 of September 20, 1961.
  2. ^ Ernst Weisenfeld: History of France since 1945. 3rd ed., Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-42007-9 , p. 147
  3. ^ Jean Lacouture: Charles de Gaulle - Le souverain 1959-1970 , Vol. III, éd. du Seuil, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-02-009393-6 , p. 276.