Speeding through the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart early one evening in August 1962, the French President's black Citroën ran into a barrage of submachine-gun fire. The colonel riding next to the chauffeur yelled to his father-in-law in the back seat: "Father, get down!" The tall, imperial figure budged not an inch. Again the distraught colonel pleaded: "I beg you, Father, get down." This time the President leaned slightly forward. A split second later, a stream of bullets ripped through the limousine. When the firing stopped, Charles de Gaulle flicked fragments of the broken rear window from his coat and declaimed: "What, again?"
The Petit-Clamart ambush—the factual starting point of Frederick Forsyth's otherwise fictional The Day of the Jackal—was De Gaulle's closest brush with assassins. It was, however, neither the first nor the last. According to a new book published in Paris, Objectif de Gaulle, there were at least 31 serious plots against the general's life, and dozens of others that never got beyond the talking stage. Indeed, even as the would-be killers of Petit-Clamart went on trial for their lives, police averted a sniper's attempt to shoot De Gaulle with a telescopically fitted carbine while the President was on an inspection tour of Paris' Ecole Militaire.
All the assassination attempts documented in the book—with the lone exception of one by an embittered seaman who blamed De Gaulle for the World War II destruction of the French fleet by the British—sprang from De Gaulle's decision to grant independence to Algeria. That policy led to the creation of the militant terrorist group known as the Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.), one of whose principal goals was to kill De Gaulle for having betrayed Algérie française. The authors, Pierre Démaret, 31, who once belonged to the O.A.S., and Christian Plume, 48, a journalist, interviewed former O.A.S. leaders and obtained access to the French Interior Ministry's records. The result is an extraordinary tale of mad zeal, abominable planning and incredibly bad luck by what was surely the world's most dedicated and inept gang of assassins.
The O.A.S.'s impressive record of failure was racked up with little help from le grand Charles. "You can't keep De Gaulle under glass," he would declare whenever security got too tight. Fortunately for the French President, many of the assassination attempts sound as if they were concocted by Gordon Liddy. One zany plot called for poisoning the Communion Hosts at the village church in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, where De Gaulle attended Mass. The idea was discarded after the plotters realized that the first person to receive a Host would keel over dead and give the scheme away. And there was no way to guarantee that De Gaulle would be first at the Communion rail.
Equally harebrained was a scheme for a kamikaze pilot to crash a small private plane into the French President's helicopter. While circling over Algeria's Blida Airport in anticipation of De Gaulle's departure, the pilot was dismayed to see that a swarm of helicopters had taken off at once. There was no way of knowing which one De Gaulle was in (French security forces routinely used dummy planes and juggled limousines as a precaution).