1963 | De Gaulle assassination plot leader executed at dawn

12 March 1963: Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry attempted to assassinate General De Gaulle following the president’s decision to accept Algerian independence from France

From the Guardian archive

Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, the leader of the conspiracy against President de Gaulle on August 22, was executed by a firing squad at 6:42 this morning at Fort d’Ivry, where military executions usually take place.

The sentences on the other two men who were condemned to death, Alain Bougrenet de la Tocnaye and Jacques Prevost have been commuted by President de Gaulle to life imprisonment.

Bastien-Thiry was roused a little before five this morning and told for the first time that his petition to the President to commute his sentence had been rejected, and that the execution was to take place at dawn. He asked about the fate of his two comrades and was told they were not to die.

He wanted to hear Mass before his execution and also made two new legal objections which he recorded in writing, first that he had again raised the question of the Council of State’s opinion of the legality of the court that judged him, and secondly, that Mr. Bidault’s emergence from secrecy at last made it possible to question him. He had throughout the trial insisted that his orders had come to him from Mr. Bidault’s Council of National Resistance, though he did not say by what route.

Heavily guarded

The condemned man’s counsel, Maître Tixier-Vignancour, Maître Le Coroller and Maître Dupuy, who were all present, did their best to press these hopeless arguments but after a short consultation, 

General Gerthoffer, the military prosecutor, insisted that the execution must go forward. This was accepted by Colonel Reboul, who was present to represent the Court – the presiding judge, General Gardy, was not.

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After hearing Mass and taking communion, Bastien-Thiry was driven through the early morning rain under very strong escort to Ivry. He refused to have his eyes bandaged. He was buried immediately after the execution. His grave, in the part of a neighbouring cemetery reserved for the executed, is heavily guarded by the police today.

The execution of Bastien-Thiry only six days after he was sentenced has come as a shock to French opinion, accustomed to a much more deliberate pace of justice. In fact after the example of ex-General Jouhaud, whose death sentence was commuted months after the trial, every day’s delay would have been taken as strengthening the hypothesis that there would be no execution. “An inevitable sentence to be followed by inevitable acts of pardon” is the commonest comment on the way the trial had ended. 

Mr. François Mauriac, one of the great supporters of the regime, had written: “The fact is that the death penalty has been abolished in the minds and hearts of modern Frenchmen.”

There was no disputing of the validity of the verdict, or question that the trial was essentially fair, whatever objections could be raised in theory to the nature of the Court. 

The plot was irrefutably established. Bullets had undoubtedly entered the car within a few inches of the President’s head. 

The court’s anxiety to let every extenuating factor be argued and testified as the days passed had seemed almost pathological, due, no doubt, to the fact that there was no appeal from the military tribunal’s judgment.

The President’s decision to let the sentence be carried out surprises first of all because, in spite of the OAS’s abominable record of murder, so few of its members have been executed – only three in fact, ex-Captain Degueldre, organiser of a killer commando, and two of his subordinates, deserters from the Foreign Legion.

Not only did Salan save his head, thanks to his judges, but in the case of the only other attempt on the President’s life that actually got as far as action, the chief conspirator was let off with a 20-year sentence by the jury, though he had undoubtedly tried to blow up the Chief-of-State and his wife.

This lack of severity hitherto may well be one of the President’s principal reasons for severity now, especially after the discovery of yet another conspiracy to remove him by violence (the Ecole Militaire affair), and the still mysterious execution of the banker, M. Henri Lafond.

Grim reminder

This last incident is the more sinister since the precise motive does not yet seem to have come to light. 

It is possible, too, that Mr. Bidault may have been a little too successful in his attempt to conceal the OAS under the more elegant and once so honourable title of the National Council of Resistance. 

The execution is certainly a grim reminder of the nature of OAS activity and what it leads to.

Bastien-Thiry was a man with a brilliant future, aged only 35. He was an engineer at the Air Ministry with the equivalent rank of lieutenant-colonel. He leaves a widow and three small daughters. His defence of his action was as much religious as political – to the considerable distress of the Catholic Church in France.

He claimed to have sought precedents in “both ancient and sacred history,” and was undoubtedly a man of great devotion. He does not appear to have joined the OAS until last year after the leadership passed into the hands of Mr. Bidault. 

His speech in his own defence has already appeared as a pamphlet, and was indeed in his hands when the military prosecutor was asking for the death sentence on him.

Source: theguardian.com, Darsie Gillie, March 12, 2020 (Archive)

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde