The Life of One Man

The shaking up that the Atlantic Alliance got last month was the work of a single man. And France's claim to dominate Western Europe and to be reckoned with as the leader of a Third Force is also the lengthening extension of that man. Those of his allies who have to deal with le grand Charles sometimes find that their exasperation exceeds their admiration. But any way one looks at it, whether as an ally or as a Frenchman worrying about the chaos that might follow his death, there is a lot riding on the towering man in the Elysee Palace. He is 72, and he has enemies desperate enough to want to kill him.

Last week, as Frenchmen closely followed the news of a trial of would-be assassins of De Gaulle, the government announced a fresh attempt on De Gaulle's life.

Armored Car. The night before De Gaulle was to inspect the Ecole Militaire on the Left Bank near the Eiffel Tower, Paris gendarmes swarmed over the ground, searching the buildings for weapons and interrogating officer students and teachers. De Gaulle showed up next day on schedule, but (in a concession to danger rare for him) cooped up inside an armored Citroen limousine with bulletproof windows. According to the official story from Suiete headquarters on the Rue des Saus-saies, police had discovered a plot on a civilian's tip, in the nick of time. After interrogating the five suspects, the police indicated that the triggerman was Navy Captain Robert Poinard, 37, who was held for questioning along with his blonde young wife. According to the police supposition, Captain Poinard was to use a carbine with a telescopic sight to kill De Gaulle while he was inspecting the honor guard in the cobbled Ecole Militaire courtyard. Two other officers were also in custody, but the oddest of the suspects was the alleged ringleader, Mme. Paule Rousselot de Liffiac, 55, a pipe-smoking, low-salaried English translator at the school, the mother of six children, who was picked up at her 15-room 18th century chateau in a town south of Lyon. The Ecole Militaire, where Napoleon learned to soldier, is the top academy for the French military, and a hotbed of anti-Gaullism among the veterans of Algeria who think he let them down.

Shrewd Delay. Algeria was a word much spoken also in a courtroom in suburban Vincennes, where nine would-be assassins were on trial for having tried to kill De Gaulle last August in an ambuscade at Petit-Clamart, a Paris suburb. As has so often happened in France since the Dreyfus case of the 1890s, the trial was not confined to pertinent evidence but blossomed into a national political affair. Very few Frenchmen had much sympathy for the defendants, but many had grave doubts about how they were being tried.

De Gaulle's chosen instrument for the trial was the special Court of Military Justice, from whose verdict there is no appeal, which was set up last year and was to end its existence on Feb. 25. The defendants' attorneys shrewdly tried to delay proceedings until that date so that the case would have to start all over again in a regular court, from which appeals could be taken. But De Gaulle moved to fit the law to his needs. His Cabinet swiftly approved a bill extending the life of the special Court of Military Justice, and the bill was passed by De Gaulle's Assembly 271-170 (the Senate last week stubbornly voted the bill down but, like Britain's House of Lords, is powerless to overturn decisions of the lower house).

The defendants at Vincennes were an odd. and oddly frightening, lot. Most of them were slack-jawed youths who seemed equally lacking in confidence and intelligence. One was an army lieutenant with the old, aristocratic Breton name of Bougrenet de la Tocnaye, and a head reeling with heroic memories of his family's feats of arms dating back to the Crusades. The leader, Lieut. Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, 35, who had graduated from the famed Polytechnique and served as a brilliant air force engineer, revealed himself as a man who put great industry, intelligence and logic to work within a framework of mad zeal.

All Nonsense. Though refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, Bastien-Thiry agreed to answer questions, "because it is necessary for the French people to know why we have acted and how we have acted.'' His story was fantastic, incredible, and thoroughly French. To begin with, explained Bastien-Thiry, the ambush had not been intended to kill De Gaulle, only to capture him. To this end, the assassins--who were all "crack shots"--had fired at the tires of De Gaulle's car.

As a witness for the prosecution, De Gaulle's son-in-law, Colonel Alain de Boissieu, who was riding beside the chauffeur, testified that he saw a man pouring a stream of bullets at the car, and recalled, "He did not seem to be aiming his submachine gun at the tires, but quite obviously at the passengers.'' To the chauffeur, Boissieu snapped, "Down the middle. Straight ahead!" Then he turned around, begged De Gaulle, who was still sitting upright, to bend down. De Gaulle obliged by leaning forward slightly. Defendant Bastien-Thiry airily dismissed as "technical incidents" the additional evidence that the car windows were shattered by bullets, a motorcycle cop's helmet drilled through, and De Gaulle's head missed only by inches. If they had captured De Gaulle, the conspirators intended to hide him away in a villa "between Paris and Versailles," and planned to prevent his escaping by removing his spectacles and suspenders. After several weeks, De Gaulle would be tried by the National Council of the Resistance (the successor to the Algerian Secret Army Organization), and presumably executed.

With De Gaulle disposed of, the National Council of the Resistance planned to appoint a new head of state: none other than De Gaulle's present Finance Minister, an aristocrat named Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Protesting loudly. Giscard d'Estaing said it was all nonsense, that he had never even met Bastien-Thiry and had no links with either the Secret Army or the Council of the Resistance.

As the trial continued its flamboyant way, the wild rhetoric of the defendants could not conceal the implacable determination to kill. La Gloire summons French men in many directions. Five of the gunmen who took part in the Petit-Clamart ambush are still at large, including the most dangerous of all, Georges Watin, 39. nicknamed Boiteux (The Limper), who the police say was also the brains behind the Ecole Militaire plot. A French Cabinet minister, emerging from a meeting at the Elysee Palace last week, said worriedly to a friend: "Never has De Gaulle's life been in such danger.''

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