Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  All in all, it was a captivating case. Phone taps and searches of suspects’ homes turned up nothing; the hit squad from Spain gave no sign of life; there were witnesses who had heard the shooting, but no one had actually seen it happen. And yet, as the days passed, Clot felt a strange reluctance to pursue the investigation. It looked increasingly like the sort of case that would be solved by the sudden appearance of a piece of evidence that no amount of ingenuity could have produced. The more he saw of it, the less enticing it became. It is entirely to Georges Clot’s credit as a policeman that the anticipated joy of discovery had already begun to fade when, on 22 October, he stuffed the files into his metal cabinet and slammed the drawer shut with a bang that had the fake Picassos and Utrillos dancing on their hooks.

  4. POSTE RESTANTE

  THE MÉDICIS POST OFFICE stands opposite the Senate on the Rue de Vaugirard, at a point where the wind always seems to be blowing up a storm, probably because of the inordinate length of the street (the Rue de Vaugirard is the longest in Paris), which funnels the south-westerlies into the heart of the Left Bank.

  Just after lunch, the ladies who sat behind the counters saw the doors swing open and a posse of men burst into the building as though blown in by a gust of wind. One was a lawyer, dressed in his robes; another–who seemed to be the focus of attention–looked too silly and fidgety to be genuinely important. This, and the presence of several cameramen, convinced some of the postières that a film was being made, and they reached for their combs and powder compacts.

  Few would have suspected that the weaselly little man in the disreputable-looking raincoat had ever sat on the benches of the Assemblée Nationale. On the other hand, the smirk on his face and his curiously flinching gait made it easy to imagine him creeping into the parliamentary toilets with a bomb. He stubbed out his cigarette, walked up to the counter labelled ‘Poste restante’, and asked for any mail addressed to M. Robert Pesquet. An envelope was produced, which he left lying on the counter. Then he turned around and said, like a bad actor, ‘Maître Dreyer-Durfer, kindly take this letter, which I have not touched, place it in your briefcase and deposit it in a safe for the examining magistrate.’

  The lawyer slid the letter off the counter, held it up between thumb and forefinger, and addressed the post office at large: ‘I am taking this letter, M. Pesquet, untouched by yourself, which I shall place in a safe, as you have just requested, in which it shall remain at the disposal of the examining magistrate.’ Then, turning to the flustered clerk, he said, in the same stentorian voice, ‘I, Maître Dreyer-Durfer, request that you make a note of all that has just occurred.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ stammered the woman, ‘Do you want me to make a note of the words, too?’

  A look of inexhaustible patience appeared on the lawyer’s face. ‘The words above all, my good lady, if you please.’

  With that, Maître Dreyer-Durfer led the way out of the post office, followed by his smirking client, who quickly lit another cigarette in the lee of his black robe.

  ROBERT PESQUET, former carpenter, former député, stool-pigeon of the far right and member of several thuggish ‘patriot’ groups, had single-handedly solved the mystery of the assassination attempt. Two days before, a group of journalists had heard him make his astonishing claim in his lawyer’s chambers in the Rue de la Pompe. Naturally, Senator Mitterrand had denied everything. But now, Pesquet had played his trump card: a letter written and posted to himself forty-eight hours before the events.

  The letter was read out to the lawyers and their two clients in the chambers of Judge Braunschweig at the Palais de Justice. ‘I shall describe in exact detail the bogus assassination attempt of the Jardins de l’Observatoire that will take place on the night of 15–16 October according to the plan devised by M. Mitterrand…’

  According to Pesquet’s letter, Mitterrand had come to him with a scheme that would save them both from political obscurity. The letter went on to describe everything, in the future tense, exactly as it had occurred, from the Brasserie Lipp to the Jardins de l’Observatoire. Pesquet had followed in his Simca with a dim but playful peasant who worked on his estate at Beuvron-en-Auge. The Sten gun had been borrowed from a friend. The only changes Pesquet had to point out to the judge concerned the few minutes during which Mitterrand had been lying on the wet grass, waiting to be assassinated. First, two lovers had been kissing under the trees; then a taxi had dropped off a fare. After driving around the block several times, the Simca had stopped alongside the 403, and Pesquet had heard a voice coming from the darkness: ‘Shoot, for God’s sake! What the hell are you doing?’ Everything else had gone according to plan: the Sten gun sputtered and banged; Pesquet drove on to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, parked the car and returned on foot in time to admire Mitterrand’s suave performance in front of the cameras.

  The judge laid down the letter and looked up to see the unusual spectacle of half a dozen speechless lawyers. For the first and only time, François Mitterrand appeared to lose his self-control. He turned pale and made a sound that might have been a sob. He could hear the cackling of his enemies and the hysterical laughter of twenty-six million voters. His career was in ruins. Whether or not Pesquet was telling the truth, this was the kind of humiliation from which no politician ever recovered.

  Even in this, his darkest hour, ‘the Fox’ remembered the lessons he had learned in the war. A man who had escaped six times from prisoner-of-war camps was not so easily defeated. It was unfortunate, of course, that Pesquet had accused him of faking the assassination attempt before revealing the letter, and that Mitterrand had accused Pesquet of slander. It was also unfortunate that he had allowed himself to bask in all the praise and sympathy. After Pesquet’s poste restante trick, he could hardly claim to be entirely innocent. And yet, there was one possible explanation that just might be accepted as the truth…

  This was the version of events that Mitterrand gave to Judge Braunschweig and the nation. He confessed that he had indeed met Pesquet once or twice before the shooting. Pesquet had come to him with a terrible tale: his old French-Algeria friends, to whom he owed a great deal of money, had ordered him to assassinate Mitterrand. If Pesquet refused, he would certainly be killed, and so he had begged Mitterrand to help him out. A faked assassination attempt would let Pesquet off the hook and make it less likely that anyone else would try to kill Mitterrand. In a spirit of Christian charity, Mitterrand had agreed to play along. Their last meeting was to have taken place at the Brasserie Lipp. Though Pesquet had not shown up, the rest of the operation had gone as planned. It was only when Pesquet had accused him publicly of organizing the whole charade that Mitterrand realized what had happened: he was the victim of a right-wing plot to destroy his political career.

  Though not entirely convincing, this would at least present him in a slightly better light. The newspapers were unimpressed. No one expected politicians to obey the law, but they were supposed to retain a certain dignity and savoir-faire. One of the least insulting headlines appeared in L’Aurore: ‘To think that this booby used to be Minister of the Interior!’

  JUDGE BRAUNSCHWEIG made the best of a bad job. Somehow, the guilty had to be punished, but without causing further damage to the international standing of the French Republic. The world must know that Paris was not Shanghai or Casablanca. Pesquet and his sidekick were charged with possession of an illegal weapon, while Mitterrand, having wasted the time of Commissioner Clot with a pointless investigation, was charged with contempt of court. These were comparatively minor charges, which would probably be dropped in any case.

  Surprisingly, the Senate voted to strip Mitterrand of his senatorial immunity, but by then the case had entered the boundless, foggy realm of judicial procedure whose decaying files are occasionally washed away by a tide of indifference and secret negotiations. Biographers and historians who have gone in search of the unrecognizable fragments of truth have seen various oily personalities emerge from the mist: Prime Minister Debré, who had been accused of
ordering an illegal execution in Algeria; Pesquet’s lawyer, Tixier-Vignancour, who defended right-wing terrorists and stood as a presidential candidate; and Tixier-Vignancour’s bullish campaign manager, Jean-Marie Le Pen. These were some of the men whom Mitterrand suspected of plotting his downfall. None of them ever confessed to any involvement in the affair.

  Pesquet himself was forced to leave the country and has since invented so many different versions of the incident that even if he now made an honest confession, it would be worthless. In a letter published by Le Monde in 1965, he unexpectedly lent support to Mitterrand’s presidential campaign by confessing that Mitterrand had organized the fake assassination attempt in good faith. Later, however, he retracted his statement, claiming that friends of Mitterrand had paid him forty thousand francs to write the letter. The retraction itself earned him a few more francs when he published it in a book titled My Genuine-Fake Assassination Attempt on Mitterrand: The Truth at Last.

  The ‘Affaire de l’Observatoire’ reached its practical conclusion that winter, when, in a seemingly needless reconstruction arranged by Commissioner Clot, Senator Mitterrand’s Peugeot 403 was taken to a quiet avenue in the Bois de Vincennes, peppered with bullets and crashed into a tree. The original shooting had left it relatively unscathed. After the ‘reconstruction’, all that remained was a tangled, windowless wreck.

  ‘The Fox’ now entered the period that came to be known as his ‘crossing of the desert’. Having first demanded that Mitterrand be prosecuted, President de Gaulle changed his mind and decided that the incident should never again be mentioned, and that his own party would never try to profit from it. Some said that he was trying to protect his Prime Minister, Michel Debré, from any embarrassing revelations that Mitterrand might make about his role in the murder of a general in Algeria. Others, close to de Gaulle, said that he wanted to uphold the dignity of the office, since–incredible as it seemed at the time–Mitterrand might one day be President. Of course, de Gaulle knew full well that Mitterrand would never be allowed to forget. For years afterwards, though the députés of the Assemblée Nationale maintained a courteous silence on the subject, it was extraordinary how often the word ‘Observatoire’ cropped up in their speeches.

  5. PETIT-CLAMART

  (EPILOGUE)

  A WEDNESDAY 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.’

  SO 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.’