Read Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 for Free Online Page A

monarchist, Second Lieutenant Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, assassinated Admiral Darlan with a .38 Colt automatic issued to him by Colonel Douglas Dodds-Parker of the SOE (the Special Operations Executive).
    The overall organizer of the operation was Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, brother of Emmanuel, the leader of the Libération Resistance movement. Henri d’Astier, an officer in military intelligence, was part of a royalist group in close touch with the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the throne of France. In fact he was a monarcho-Gaullist, a combination which was less paradoxical then than it might appear. De Gaulle was seen as a regent who might bring about a restoration of the French royal family.
    The knowledge and involvement of de Gaulle’s officers, and presumably therefore of the General himself, are hard to doubt. A third Astier brother, General François d’Astier, who had recently rallied to de Gaulle, was found to have left Bonnier’s group with $2,000 during a brief mission to Algiers. The notes were traced to a British transfer of secret funds to de Gaulle’s Comité National in London. De Gaulle’s rather Delphic disclaimer of involvement was most unconvincing, especially when everyone knew that Darlan’s death had revived his political hopes.
    General Eisenhower was deeply shaken when woken with the news.He summoned a meeting at Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers on Christmas morning. The fact that Bonnier had used an SOE pistol prompted Eisenhower to threaten to resign if any British involvement in the assassination was discovered. Dodds-Parker submitted a report exonerating SOE and this was accepted. Curiously, the French autopsy, perhaps for complicated political reasons, later described the bullet as of 7.65mm calibre and of French manufacture.
    The Shakespearian drama of Darlan’s death, with all the elements of treachery and rival ambitions, has long exerted a strong fascination. Conspiracy theories abound, with minutiae disputed. But present evidence strongly suggests, as another SOE officer then in North Africa put it, that it was ‘a Gaullist and royalist plot with a measure of British collusion’. It is the size of that ‘measure’ which cannot yet be defined. According to the same officer, Dodds-Parker – entirely on his own initiative – had approached the chief of SOE’s naval section just before the assassination to see whether he could shelter a certain individual on board his ship, the
Mutin
.
    Suggestions that Churchill back in London had received the message that ‘we’ve got somebody here who’s going to have a crack at Darlan’ are almost certainly wrong. But whispers of the forthcoming attempt had clearly reached London, even if SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street was taken by surprise. (That apparently did not stop several people from calling for champagne when the news arrived.) The American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) office in London, however, knew in advance and applauded the project. Most OSS officers were exasperated by their own president’s tolerance of Vichy. Yet Roosevelt himself now shrugged off the death of his erstwhile protégé in a most unattractive way. He referred to Darlan as a ‘skunk’, and at a New Year’s Eve dinner at the White House, he dismissed him as a ‘sonofabitch’, shocking a number of his guests.
    The only replacement for Darlan acceptable to Roosevelt was the honourable, but infinitely less clever, General Giraud. De Gaulle said little on the subject. He must have sensed that ‘the tin soldier’, if handled properly, could soon be pushed to the sidelines. De Gaulle never acknowledged that, whatever its motives, Roosevelt’s policy may have worked in his own best interests. American support for Darlan and then Giraud had provided two stepping stones from Vichy to Free France, thus averting the danger of civil war in French North Africa.
    The German invasion of the unoccupied zone had changed things in other