Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (42 page)

5. PETIT-CLAMART

(EPILOGUE)

A W
EDNESDAY 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 É lysée 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 É lysée, 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 É lysée 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 É lysée, someone picked up a telephone, dialled the number of an apartment at 2, Avenue Victor-Hugo in Meudon, and said, ‘
It’s number two.
’

S
O 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 É lysée 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 É lysée 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 É lysée Palace.

T
HAT
W
EDNESDAY EVENING
, after leaving the É lysée 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 É lysée, 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.