Five Who Failed

One dark night last September, Charles de Gaulle's black Citroen was speeding toward his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises when suddenly flames erupted in the car's path. Miraculously, the plastic bomb that had been planted beside the lonely road did not explode. Shaken but unhurt, De Gaulle murmured: "Just a joke in bad taste." Last week the punch line of the joke was delivered in a drab courthouse at Troyes, 90 miles from Paris, where the S.A.O. terrorists who had plotted to assassinate France's President stood trial.

In almost any society the five men in the dock would probably have tangled with the law sooner or later. (A sixth defendant is still at large.) What made the case fascinating in France was that the five were drawn almost inevitably to the S.A.O. and its paranoiac delusions of glory from similarly abject backgrounds: broken homes, army service in Algeria, feckless drifting from job to job. In the dock they seemed almost a composite of the S.A.O. mentality. The lineup:

Henri Manoury, 34, who led the plot, was an academic failure at school, married a pied-noir girl in Algeria.

Martial de Villemandy, 35, bounced around Europe and America with his vaudeville parents before they separated. Previously imprisoned as an army deserter, he helped botch the assassination attempt by crashing the car that was to signal the arrival of the presidential convoy.

Told in court that his brother had called him unstable, De Villemandy shrugged: "With good reason. Your Honor." Bernard Barbance, 27, is the son of a bus driver, was an apprentice florist before going into the army as a paratrooper. Baby-f aced Barbance, explained a court psychiatrist, was motivated by "the desire to achieve virility."

Jean-Marc Rouviere, 25, had a father and mother who were both sentenced to death as collaborators after World War II. He won three military citations in Algeria, built the bomb meant to kill De Gaulle. (It failed to explode only because of faulty soldering.)

Armand Belvisi, 37, is an army deserter and onetime cop who spent four years in jail for stealing $2,800 from a mail truck. Called an inveterate woman chaser in court, he explained placidly to the bench: "Well, I don't smoke or drink."

Defense Attorney Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a foxy ultrarightist who defended S.A.O. Leader Raoul Salan, tried desperately to get the trial postponed. His reason was obvious: the latest S.A.O. ambush,* which almost killed De Gaulle last month, had destroyed any current of sympathy for the defendants.

Tixier's ace card was his claim that the assassination attempt was actually a bidon (phony) plot cooked up by Gaullist officials to scare the President into taking greater security precautions. But Tixier was made to look so ridiculous in trying to prove the charge that he dropped this strategy. Even Tixier's defense witnesses (though mostly staunch advocates of Algerie francaise) had little sympathy for the five. Snapped General Fernand Gam-biez: "It is because of maneuvers of men like them that Algerie francaise was lost."

The prosecution demanded death for Manoury and hefty prison sentences for his accomplices. But Tixier made a brilliant plea. He emphasized that no one had been killed. Why, then, should Manoury die when Salan, who was responsible "for 1,800 murders, 4,700 people wounded, and 12,000 armed attacks," got only life imprisonment? He recalled that France has traditionally been lenient toward political assassins since the public revulsion over the fate of Damiens, Louis XV's valet, who was tortured and killed after grazing his master with a knife during an unsuccessful attempt on his life.

The jury deliberated 77 minutes. Despite the prosecution's plea for stiff sentences to show "that there are still laws in France and still men in Troyes," the verdict was mild: 20 years for Manoury, 15 each for De Villemandy, Rouviere and Belvisi, and ten for Barbance. Said Tixier: "Damiens helped us very much indeed."

* In midtrial, the government rounded up five of the conspirators who had taken part in the second ambush. At week's end, former Premier Georges Bidault, now reportedly leading the anti-Gaullist underground, was also arrested in Italy and, as is common in such cases, taken to "the frontier of his choice."

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