After the Plot

Two days after his narrow escape from death, Charles de Gaulle went to Mass near his country home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. Then, on his way back to Paris, just like hundreds of other Frenchmen, he stopped to gawk at the site of the attempted assassination. Full of scorn for the bungled job, which police still attribute to the right-wing Secret Army Organization (S.A.O.), De Gaulle cracked: "You know, those birds of the S.A.O. are as stupid as the fellows who guard me."

The rest of the country, less calm, was still asking questions ranging from technical details about the plot to the future of the De Gaulle regime itself.

A Blonde with Parrots. Experts pored over the empty butane-gas cylinder wrapped with 22 Ibs. of explosive that burned but did not bang, examined the site a half mile away where an accomplice had flashed his auto headlights to warn of the approach of the President's speeding caravan. Police guessed that the charge had been buried for days, failed to go off because rain had dampened its mechanism. Implicated in the plot was a ragtag crowd that included an insurance salesman from Sevres, a buxom, blonde vaudeville magician who lived with a houseful of cats, dogs and parrots, a 45-year-old woman who sold string, and a thin, nervous onetime radio announcer, Martial de Villemandy, who was quickly arrested at a village bistro not far from the scene of the crime.

These were small fry--an improbable bunch to mastermind a plot against the life of the President of France's Fifth Republic. The real responsibility, most Frenchmen suspected, must lie elsewhere. For its part, the S.A.O. haughtily denied complicity. Paris newspaper offices received a crude mimeographed declaration headed, "September 12, Somewhere in France"; it insisted that the attempt was "not ordered by our headquarters for the sole reason that our organization is not in readiness to take power in Metropolitan France." But few doubted that it was the intention of the S.A.O.'s thou sands of bitter extremist members to destroy Charles de Gaulle, making way for a leader who would defend France's hold on Algeria forever.

Whistles & Boos. With true Gallic instinct for the wrong moment, the National Assembly last week thrust its own challenge at De Gaulle--almost as if to show that it was not moved by the assassination attempt. Since last April, the Assembly had chafed under the constitution's Article 16, which gave De Gaulle power to brush aside the debates of the Deputies as "Fourth Republic games" and run France as he pleased. To protest against De Gaulle's emergency powers, the Assembly chose a purely technical issue. De Gaulle's Premier Michel Debre bluntly refused a special session's demand to vote new farm legislation, insisting that it must wait for the regular Assembly session in October. Indignantly, the Deputies began to whistle and boo. The Socialists tabled a motion of censure against the government. Then every Deputy in the hall, except the members of the Gaullist U.N.R. Party, walked out.

Whatever went on among the Assembly's politicians, millions of Frenchmen drew their own lesson from the bomb plot, shuddered at the thought of France without De Gaulle. The alternatives were grim indeed: a rightist Putsch by the military diehards; perhaps a struggle for power by the Communist Party, eager to avail itself of the weakness of a nation in chaos; a civilian who might, with disastrous results, take on De Gaulle's sweeping presidential powers.

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