![]() ![]() He leaves a widow and three small daughters. He was an engineer at the Air Ministry with the equivalent rank of lieutenant-colonel. The execution is certainly a grim reminder of the nature of OAS activity and what it leads to.īastien-Thiry was a man with a brilliant future, aged only 35. ![]() 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. Grim reminder This last incident is the more sinister since the precise motive does not yet seem to have come to light. 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. 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. 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. 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. Bullets had undoubtedly entered the car within a few inches of the President’s head. 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. M 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.” “An inevitable sentence to be followed by inevitable acts of pardon” is the commonest comment on the way the trial had ended. 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. 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. His grave, in the part of a neighbouring cemetery reserved for the executed, is heavily guarded by the police today. He was buried immediately after the execution. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesĪfter hearing Mass and taking communion, Bastien-Thiry was driven through the early morning rain under very strong escort to Ivry. He led the attack at Petit-Clamart against General De Gaulle. This was accepted by Colonel Reboul, who was present to represent the Court – the presiding judge, General Gardy, was not.Ī portrait of lieutenant-colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry on 18 September, 1962. Heavily guarded The condemned man’s counsel, Maitre Tixier-Vignancour, Maitre Le Coroller and Maitre 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. He had throughout the trial insisted that his orders had come to him from M Bidault’s Council of National Resistance, though he did not say by what route. 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 M Bidault’s emergence from secrecy at last made it possible to question him. He asked about the fate of his two comrades and was told they were not to die. 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. ![]()
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