Day of the Jackal: Real story behind new TV big money remake
7 November 2024, 12:39
Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch's highly-anticipated new thriller series The Day Of The Jackal premiered on Sky this week.
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Reportedly the broadcasters 'most expensive series ever,' with a £100million budget, the series is based on the iconic 1973 thriller and original novel by Frederick Forsyth.
In the remake The Jackal (Eddie Redmayne), a notorious hitman, encounters MI6 agent Bianca (Lashana Lynch) and a thrilling cart-and-mouse chase ensues after he successfully assassinates a high-profile political figure.
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However, most fans won't know the partially true story behind the nail-biting reboot, based on the classic book and the real life 'battle for the soul' of France at the centre of the events. .
As the narrator of the original film tells us, ‘August 1962 was a stormy time for France’. The book's original author Frederick Forsyth was a struggling journalist seeking an inspiration.
Algeria was home to one million people of European ancestry and had been a French colony for 130 years so President Charles de Gaulle's decision to grant the nation independence sparked fury back home.
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 u-turn came about 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.
France was not spared from the violence. A now all-but forgotten terrorist group the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS formed.
They 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.
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 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.
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.
