A tale of two colonels

This week, March 11th, marks the 50th anniversary of the shooting by firing squad near Paris of the last person (so far) to be executed by the state for political offences in France. 36-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry, a brilliant young officer of the French Air Force, was a rocket scientist (he invented the SS-10 anti-tank missile) – involved at the highest levels of France’s attempt under President De Gaulle to forge a path independent of US hegemony in developing its own defence capability.

A fervent Catholic and father of three young daughters, Bastien-Thiry was also deeply involved in plotting the violent death of De Gaulle, the autocratic ruler who had come from nowhere in 1940 to save France’s ‘honour’ after its shattering defeat by Hitler’s Germany and the abject peace made by De Gaulle’s old mentor, Marshal Petain – head of the collaborationist Vichy French regime. By the war’s end, by a mix of shady manoeuvring and Prima Donna hissy fits, De Gaulle had wangled himself a place at the Allied top table and a grateful nation, air-brushing its own abject role in the war, turned to him as its saviour.