Jean Bastien-Thiry

Fearing a plot to free Bastien-Thiry, the authorities devised what was probably the biggest security operation in French judicial history in order to take him from his cell to the place of execution. 2000 policemen were posted along the route and 35 vehicles were used. There was indeed such a plot, headed by Jean Cantelaube, one of de Gaulle's former security officers, but it had been abandoned. Cantelaube was later identified as the intelligence agent who provided information to Bastien-Thiry's organization.

Though the assassination attempt almost claimed de Gaulle's life, the President and his entire entourage escaped injury. The event is depicted in Frederick Forsyth's novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and also in the film adaptation of the same name (1973), in which Bastien-Thiry was portrayed by actor Jean Sorel.

Thanks to intelligence gained by the authorities from the interrogation of Antoine Argoud, Bastien-Thiry was arrested when he came back from a mission in the United Kingdom. He was brought to trial before a military tribunal presided over by General Roger Gardet, which ran from 28 January to 4 March 1963. He was defended by a legal team consisting of attorneys Jacques Isorni, Richard Dupuy, Bernard Le Coroller, and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour who was later a candidate for the presidency in 1965. While claiming that the death of de Gaulle would have been justified by the "genocide" of the European population of newly independent Algeria (a reference mainly to the Oran massacre of 1962) and the killing of several tens or hundreds of thousands of mostly pro-French Muslims (harkis) by the FLN, he claimed that while the other conspirators might admittedly have been trying to kill the head of state, he had only been attempting to capture de Gaulle so as to deliver him to a panel of sympathetic judges. Bastien-Thiry, who had been certified as "normal" by psychiatrists in spite of a history of clinical depression (caused by a period of overwork), was convicted and sentenced to death, as were two of his accomplices: Lt. de la Tocnaye and Prevost (a former volunteer in Korea and in Vietnam). The only would-be assassin to escape was OAS member Georges Watin (also known as "The Lame Woman" or "The Limp" due to an old war wound), who died in February 1994 at age 71.

The execution took place only one week after the trial, which was unusually swift. Moreover, an appeal was about to be heard by the Conseil d'État (French supreme public court) which might have overturned the sentence. Nonetheless, Bastien-Thiry, having refused a blindfold and clutching a rosary, was executed by firing squad at Fort d'Ivry on 11 March 1963. He was 35 years old. That very evening, President de Gaulle offered a dinner party to the presidents of the special courts, including the one who sent Bastien-Thiry to his death.

Bastien-Thiry led the most prominent of several assassination attempts on de Gaulle. He and his group of three shooters (Lt. Alain de La Tocnaye, Jacques Prevost, and Georges Watin) made preparations in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart. On 22 August 1962, while Bastien-Thiry functioned as a lookout, de Gaulle's car (a Citroën DS) and some nearby shops were raked with machine-gun fire. De Gaulle and his wife and entourage escaped, uninjured. After the attempt, holes from fourteen bullets were found in the president's vehicle, one of which barely missed the president's head; another twenty were found to have struck the nearby Café Trianon; and an additional 187 spent shell casings were found on the pavement. De Gaulle was said to have credited the unusual resilience of the Citroën DS with saving his life: even though the shots had punctured two of the armoured tyres, the car escaped at full speed.

Bastien-Thiry was born to a family of Catholic military officers in Lunéville, Meurthe-et-Moselle. His father had known de Gaulle in the 1930s and was a member of the Gaullist RPF. He attended the École polytechnique, followed by the École nationale supérieure de l'Aéronautique, then entered the French Air Force where he specialized in the design of air-to-air missiles. In 1957, he was promoted to principal military air engineer. He was married to Geneviève Lamirand whose father, Georges Lamirand (1899–1994), had been General Secretary of Youth from September 1940 to March 1943 in the government of Vichy France although the rest of the family was Free French. Together they had three daughters.

Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry (French pronunciation: ​[ʒɑ̃ maʁi bastjɛ̃ tiʁi]; 19 October 1927 – 11 March 1963) was a French Air Force lieutenant-colonel and military air-weaponry engineer. He was the creator of the Nord SS.10/SS.11 missiles. He attempted to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle on 22 August 1962, following de Gaulle's decision to accept Algerian independence. The attack made international headlines. Bastien-Thiry was the last person to be executed by firing squad in France.

Since 1848, the French state had considered French Algeria as part of Metropolitan France, an integral part of the French nation, as opposed to other French colonies. This did not extend to granting voting rights to its Muslim population. French Algeria also had a large population of Algerian-born Europeans known as pied-noirs, who largely controlled its politics and it economy. After returning to power with the stated intention of maintaining the French Départements of Algeria, in September 1959, de Gaulle reversed his policy and supported the independence of Algeria. Until this time, Bastien-Thiry had been a Gaullist; now he became an opponent. Due to this new policy, two referendums on self-determination were held, the first in 1961 and the second in 1962 (the French Évian Accords referendum).