Failed political assassination attempts are nothing new. In the aftermath of the gunshot that grazed President Donald Trump’s ear, it’s pertinent to remember that, far from July’s incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, being the harbinger of a new world disorder, the past century is littered with stories of lone gunmen lurking on rooftops with the intent to slaughter heads of state or prospective leaders.

Only one of these real-world events, however, has been used by a novelist as the starting point for an entirely fictional second effort at claiming the life of a President. Frederick Forsyth, a then struggling journalist, used the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle in 1962 as inspiration for an invented tale of a lone assassin using resourceful methods to get within firing shot, again, of the French leader.

Adapted into a movie starring Edward Fox in 1973, The Day of the Jackal has now been rebooted into a small-screen series starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Yet the fictional tale of the never-identified Jackal that Forsyth wrote about so masterfully has obscured the real-life near miss that Charles de Gaulle survived at the hands of the now all-but-forgotten Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS; a terrorist organisation that didn’t just want the French head of state dead, but wanted to turn back the clock, by whatever means, on the process of decolonisation.

As the narrator of the original film tells us, ‘August 1962 was a stormy time for France’. It is, if anything, an understatement. A battle for the very soul of the nation was taking place. The reason for the internal feuding was the independence that de Gaulle had recently granted Algeria. The vast, north African nation, today the largest on the continent, was home to at least one million pieds-noirs (Europeans of French ancestry), who had lived or settled there over the 130 years in which France had occupied the country as colonial rulers.

Considered by many French people to be not merely an overseas territory but a de facto department of France itself, right-wingers believed that de Gaulle had sold them out by proclaiming, at first, that France should keep Algeria as a French possession, before later declaring that Algeria’s future should be decided by Algerians.

This volte-face came after 500,000 French soldiers were deployed to Algeria in the late 1950s to stop an insurrection by pro-independence groups such as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) who, tired of their lower economic standing, fought a vicious war against their colonial rulers.

The scale of violence was suppressed from the eyes and ears of French citizens by state censorship of the media. Yet, such was the intensity of the fighting, that even some of the most vocal pro-independence campaigners voiced their doubts about the methods being used. Algerian-born Albert Camus, author of The Outsider and, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the many public intellectuals who initially sided with the FLN, wrote: ‘at this moment bombs are being planted in the trams in Algiers. My mother could be on one of those trams. If that is justice, I prefer my mother.’

Camus would not see independence realised, dying in a car crash in 1960. Worn down by war and with no realistic likelihood of French victory, de Gaulle’s decision was considered a devastating betrayal by the OAS, a secret army of paramilitaries, which included many former collaborators with the German Nazi occupation. They planned to assassinate Algerian agents and sympathisers, up to and including de Gaulle himself.

While the French Army combated the insurgency on the ground in Algeria, a vicious secret war of deception and violence played out between factions of the Secret Service and newly-founded paramilitary rebels in France itself.

Charles de Gaulle stands in a car during the ceremony to mark the 14th anniversary of victory in Europe in World War II, 10 May 1959

German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle accompanied by a motorcycle escort on Avenue de L’opera, Paris, 2 July 1962

Peaceful demonstrators were not spared the violence. Paris witnessed a massacre in 1961 when French riot police laid in wait for Algerian protesters at the entrances to a Métro station after a march supporting Algerian independence. Using truncheons, several dozen protesters participating in the demo were beaten to death, while others were taken away in police vans or, it has been reported, thrown into the River Seine.

On 22 August 1962, five months after signing the Evian Accord that granted independence to Algeria, de Gaulle and his wife, Yvonne, left the Elysee Palace to be driven, in a black Citreon DS, eight miles through the Paris suburbs to catch a flight from Villacoublay military airport to their country house in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.

Despite being tailed by an escort vehicle and two motorcycle police officers, there was no intelligence to suggest that a team of gunmen was waiting for the car to pass through the Parisian suburb of Petit-Clamart. An astonishing 187 bullets were fired at the vehicle, all of which miraculously missed de Gaulle and his wife, who both escaped unharmed.

The 45-second inferno of gunfire resulted in nothing more than damage to the car. This would be the closest and, as it would transpire, last attempt the OAS would make on the President’s life. The group’s motto, L’Algérie est française et le restera (Algeria is French and will remain so), was to prove a falsehood as the chief plotter of the attack, Jean Bastian-Thiry, became the last man in French history to be executed by firing squad.

As would become clear only after his death, Bastien-Thiry, a former lieutenant colonel in the French Air Force, was not a full member of the OAS but a sympathetic follower. Two of the men who actually fired at de Gaulle were also sentenced to death, but later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

It is at this point in Forsyth’s novel that factual elements give way to fiction. There never was an anonymous English ‘hitman for hire’ that the remaining OAS leadership employed to take another shot at the French President. After the attack on his car, de Gaulle proved himself as steely as any would-be assassin with designs on his life.

Stepping out of the bullet-ridden car, the 71-year-old shook fragments of glass from his lapel before exclaiming: ‘‘they can’t shoot straight”. He and his wife then continued on their way to their holiday home.

The Day of the Jackal launches 7 November on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV.

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