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Dramatic Assassination Plots from History and Their Outcomes

Khalid Elhassan October 29, 2020 34 min

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand - Austria-Hungary — The arrest of Gavrilo Princip after his shooting of Franz Ferdinand and his wife. BBC

22. Darlan’s Assassin Went Before a Firing Squad Thinking it Was Going to be a Sham Execution

Darlan and Eisenhower in Algiers in 1942. Alamy

Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle was not too perturbed by his death sentence. He was confident that he would get a stay of execution, or at worst, that there would be a sham “execution” in which the firing squad would be issued blanks instead of real bullets. As it turned out, La Chapelle did end up getting pardoned and rehabilitated by an appellate court, which ruled that his assassination of Darlan had been justifiable because it was done “in the interest of the liberation of France“.

However, that ruling was handed down in December of 1945, three years too late for La Chapelle, who was executed by a firing squad that used real bullets on December 26^th, 1942, one day after he was sentenced to death. Ever since, there has been plenty of speculation that Darlan’s assassination had been engineered by Allied intelligence. The theory is that they got a patsy to pull the trigger, promising him a pardon, then swiftly executed him to silence him for good.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.