I am trying something new here — wanted to write this as a story, as if you were part of it, because of its content, its circumstances, and the fact that it is a factual story that unfolded in real time.
1962France — August 22nd
The night air at Petit-Clamart was thick with August heat and exhaust, the kind that clung to the skin and weighted every breath. Paris lay behind them, glowing faintly, unconcerned, while ahead the road tightened — trees leaning in, walls closing ranks, shadows pooling where streetlights failed.
The black Citroën DS 19 moved through it all with eerie calm, long and low, gliding rather than rolling, as if the road itself were carrying it forward. Inside, President Charles de Gaulle sat tall and straight, his broad frame filling the rear seat, his presence immense even in silence. Beside him, Yvonne de Gaulle adjusted her gloves, the small, human rituals of an evening ending. No sirens. No escort noise. Just another short drive home.
Introduced in 1955, the Citroën DS was unlike anything on European roads. Its name — DS — was a deliberate play on the French word déesse, meaning goddess — a name she spent twenty years earning. The car featured a revolutionary hydropneumatic self-leveling suspension system using pressurized mineral oil and nitrogen-filled spheres rather than conventional springs. This meant each wheel moved independently, the car could raise or lower its own ride height, and — crucially — it could maintain level posture even when tires were destroyed. No other production car of the era could make that claim.
It was also front-wheel drive — rare for a large luxury saloon in 1962. The engine pushed power to the road through the front axle, meaning that even with rear tires gone, the DS could pull itself forward with traction still intact. It was, in automotive terms, a solution to a problem that hadn't been asked yet.
At the wheel, François Marroux breathed evenly. Years of training had taught him how to sit — close enough to feel the car, far enough to command it. His hands rested lightly on the steering wheel, not gripping, listening. He knew this road by muscle memory. He knew this car by instinct. The DS hummed beneath him, hydraulics murmuring softly, suspension rising and falling almost imperceptibly. It felt alive. It felt ready.
Then the night shattered.
The first crack came like a whip snapping beside his ear. Then another. Then dozens. Automatic fire erupted from the shadows, muzzle flashes strobing the darkness. The sound wasn't loud so much as violent — metallic, chaotic, overwhelming. Bullets slammed into the car with sickening force, tearing through steel and glass alike as if it were alive. The rear window exploded inward, a spray of glittering fragments that caught the light for a heartbeat before raining down in a cascade of razor-sharp teeth.
"Marroux's mind flashed — not with panic, but with training. Don't brake. Braking meant death."
Marroux felt it before he heard it — the car dropped hard, a sickening shudder running up the steering column as the tire disintegrated. One tire vanished. Then another. The steering jolted, hard enough to wrench a shout from his throat. Any other car would have betrayed them instantly — collapsed, spun sideways, thrown itself helplessly into the ambush, given up. For a fraction of a second, time slowed. Marroux's mind flashed, not with panic, but with training. Don't brake. Braking meant death. Braking meant losing the car, losing the people behind him, losing history itself. He slammed his foot down on the floor of the car like an explosion.
The naturally aspirated 4-cylinder engine in all its might surged forward, front wheels clawing desperately at the asphalt, each rotation hoping to get the grip that was needed to escape. The steering wheel shook violently, buzzing through his palms, but it stayed in his control. The car didn't dip, didn't collapse, didn't scream. It stayed level. The suspension absorbed the chaos with uncanny composure. Hydraulic fluid surged through hidden channels, nitrogen spheres compressing and rebounding in furious harmony. Each wheel fought alone, correcting, compensating, refusing to let the violence cascade. The chassis held. The car floated through gunfire like it had a will to live — coldly, stubbornly, certain that this was not where it would die.
Bullets punched through the doors, through the trunk, through the roofline like a swarm of bees protecting its hive. The bodywork blossomed with holes, paint shedding away like a snake would shed its own. A headlight burst, the windshield cracked, spiderwebbing across Marroux's field of view — but he, nor the DS, would give up. Not yet. Inside the cabin, the smell of cordite mixed with hot oil and shattered glass. Yvonne gasped, instinctively reaching for her husband's arm. Her fingers trembled, but her grip was firm. De Gaulle did not flinch. He did not duck. He sat rigid, monumental, his jaw set, his eyes forward. If fear came, it did not succumb to it.
Marroux could feel his heartbeat in his throat. His jaw locked. Sweat stung his eyes. The front tires were dying, shredding themselves apart — but they were still pulling. Front-wheel drive: a quiet, uncelebrated decision made years earlier by engineers who would never have thought about this night. While a rear-wheel limousine would have fishtailed, spun, surrendered, the DS dragged itself forward, hauling the wounded rear like dead weight. Movement was to live and acceleration was survival. The road ahead blurred into a tunnel of smoke, flashes, and instinct. Bullets whined past. Sparks flew as rims kissed asphalt. The ambush lasted only seconds — but in Marroux's mind it stretched into minutes, into something eternal, a narrow corridor between existence and oblivion.
The Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS) was a clandestine far-right paramilitary organization composed primarily of French military officers and settlers who bitterly opposed de Gaulle's decision to grant independence to Algeria. Between 1961 and 1962 they carried out hundreds of bombings and assassinations across France and Algeria. The Petit-Clamart ambush — known as Operation Charlotte Corday — was their most audacious attempt on de Gaulle's life. Fourteen gunmen positioned across the road and surrounding buildings fired over 140 rounds in a coordinated ambush. The operation was planned by Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, who watched from a distance and was to give a signal when the cars arrived. He misjudged the speed of the motorcade. The signal came a fraction of a second too late. Bastien-Thiry was later tried, convicted of high treason, and executed by firing squad on March 11, 1963 — the last person to be executed by that method in France.
Then, just as abruptly as the gunfire started, it faded. The flashes fell behind them, swallowed by distance and darkness. The DS screamed onward, wounded but defiant, suspension still working, still correcting, still refusing to let go. Only when the road opened and the silence held did Marroux ease his foot off the accelerator. His hands were shaking now — he hadn't noticed until the danger was in the rearview mirror. The car slowed, shuddering, and finally rolled to safety, battered and scarred, like a fighter plane limping home with half a wing missing. Glass crunched underfoot when Marroux stepped out. He turned, heart hammering, expecting — almost fearing — to see blood and the death of the President and his wife riddled with bullet holes.
There was none.
De Gaulle emerged composed, straightening his coat, brushing off some glass shards like dust — as if stepping out of a theater, rather than an execution attempt. Yvonne followed, pale, uncertain, but steady, her hand still linked with his. Around them, the DS bore the evidence: more than a hundred bullet holes, tires reduced to ruins, metal torn open. Investigators would later conclude over 140 bullets and two tires destroyed instantly. Any conventional suspension would have collapsed onto bare rims, wrenched the steering away, spun the car into the kill zone. Any ordinary limousine would have ended the story right there and then. But the Citroën DS — in its quirkiness and its self-leveling suspension — kept it upright when physics demanded collapse. Independent wheel response prevented catastrophe from compounding. Front-wheel drive kept traction where it mattered most. Engineering didn't merely assist the driver. It stood shoulder to shoulder with him.
Marroux would say later, quietly, without embellishment, that the car had saved their lives. The attackers — members of the OAS, desperate, furious, convinced history owed them victory — would be tracked down and arrested. Their planning had been meticulous, their firepower overwhelming, the odds in their favour. Their only fatal error was underestimating a strange, futuristic French automobile, and the man who trusted it. Either they did no research on the car itself, or they felt they had no need to.
"They shoot like pigs." — Charles de Gaulle, upon learning how close death had come
That night, riddled with holes and riding on shredded tires, a Citroën DS carried the President of France straight through death and out the other side — on a cushion of oil, gas, nerve, and unyielding French defiance.
Aftermath
Once Charles de Gaulle and Yvonne were safely behind guarded doors, the Citroën DS was left behind in the harsh glow of floodlights — its black paint torn open, its windows gone, its tires hanging in shreds. The heat of the engine ticked as it cooled, a slow, metallic heartbeat after the violence. The car that had just outrun death now sat still, silent, and scarred.
Authorities moved in quickly. The road was sealed. The DS was taken away under escort — not with ceremony, but with caution. It was no longer just a vehicle. It was evidence. In a secured facility, engineers and investigators gathered around it, tracing bullet paths with chalk. They crouched beside ruined wheels, they ran hands along the suspension arms — still holding the car improbably level despite everything that had been taken from it. This was not only a crime scene. It was a mechanical miracle. And everyone in the room understood it.
The question came almost immediately. Could it be repaired? Should it be repaired? The answer was just as immediate. No. This car would never again carry a head of state. Too much weight clung to it now — political, symbolic, dangerous. It had been at the center of an attempted regicide. To put it back on the road would invite superstition, conspiracy, risk — a target like an aging gunfighter everyone wants a chance at. The DS was officially retired from service. Not because it had failed. Because it had survived too loudly.
And yet, despite its wounds, it was not destroyed. Not right away. Instead, it was preserved. Studied. Taken apart in places with reverence rather than violence. Engineers wanted to know why it had lived. How the suspension had kept its poise when logic said it should have collapsed under the immense barrage. How control had survived chaos. The car was quietly removed from sight, tucked away from the public eye.
France, in the early 1960s, had no appetite for relics of near-disaster — still coming off fresh from WWII. There were no velvet ropes, no museum placards, no dramatic retellings. The nation wanted stability, forward motion. The past, especially one this close to catastrophe, was best kept subdued. And so the DS slipped into uncertainty.
Records fade. Doors close. Stories contradict each other. To this day, there is no definitive public proof of where that Citroën DS rests. Some believe it was dismantled after analysis, its parts separated and dispersed, the car erased to prevent it from becoming a shrine or a symbol for the wrong people. Others believe it still exists — intact, sleeping somewhere in a government or manufacturer archive, unlabeled, unseen, its scars hidden in the dark.
Citroën has displayed DS models tied to de Gaulle. But whether any of them are the car — the one that ran the gauntlet at Petit-Clamart — remains an unanswered question. What is not in doubt is what happened next. Within engineering circles, the story spread fast. Not through advertising or press releases, but through drawings, conversations, late-night debates. The assassination attempt did what no marketing campaign ever could. Overnight, the Citroën DS became legend.
It was no longer just a beautiful, elegant car, no longer a piece of advanced machinery. It was proof. Proof that balance can defeat brute force. That stability can save lives where armor cannot — and that might be a stretch. However, Citroën never boasted or bragged about it. They didn't need to. The world was more than capable of doing that for them. The story traveled on its own, carried by engineers who understood exactly what they had witnessed.
The DS stopped being merely a car. It became a lesson — a reminder that when everything goes wrong, when bullets tear the night apart and physics turns hostile, good decisions made years earlier can still reach forward and pull people out alive. Whether that is entirely true or not, you can't deny that it was the right car, in the right place, at the wrong time.
The Citroën DS was voted the most beautiful car of all time by Classic & Sports Car magazine. It was also, on an August night in 1962, the most capable one. Fourteen gunmen. Over 140 rounds fired. Two tires destroyed instantly at speed. Every physics principle suggesting the car should have spun into the kill zone and ended the Fifth Republic before it had fully begun. Instead, the hydropneumatic suspension kept the chassis level. The front-wheel drive kept pulling. The driver kept his nerve. The President kept his composure. And history kept moving.
No armor plating saved Charles de Gaulle that night. No bulletproof glass, no military escort, no protocol. What saved him was a suspension system designed by engineers in the early 1950s who were thinking about passenger comfort on French country roads. They were not thinking about assassination attempts. They were thinking about ride quality. The two things turned out to be the same.
"That night, riddled with holes and riding on shredded tires, a Citroën DS carried the President of France straight through death and out the other side — on a cushion of oil, gas, nerve, and unyielding French defiance."
