The Real-Life Political Scandal That Inspired Jean-Patrick Manchette’s First Thriller

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In late October 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka, an exiled Moroccan politician, was hustled into a Peugeot by two French vice cops outside the Brasserie Lipp in Paris. He had no reason to mistrust the French police. These police were off the clock, however. He was never seen again, alive or dead.

At the time of his abduction, Ben Barka was organizing the Tricontinental Conference of newly decolonized nations, scheduled for January 1966 in Havana. He was a key figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, a colleague of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Amílcar Cabral. In Morocco he had been sentenced to death in absentia, with eleven other politicians, for his putative role in a plot against King Hassan II, which had been uncovered, or more likely invented, by Mohammed Oufkir, the Moroccan interior minister.

The murk surrounding the Ben Barka affair has never fully dissipated. It’s widely believed that Hassan II ordered the abduction, and that its planning and execution was carried out by Oufkir and Ahmed Dlimi, a factotum from the Moroccan army. By many accounts Oufkir did the actual killing, in a drunken rage, with either a stiletto or a gun. According to a recent book by Ronen Bergman about the Israeli Mossad, Ben Barka “died . . . from asphyxiation, after repeatedly being submerged in a bath of filthy water.” The plot that produced this event involved so many witting and unwitting participants, and such improbable moving parts, that multiple versions of what happened appeared during the ensuing years. Claims surfaced that Ben Barka’s body was smuggled to Morocco and dissolved in a vat of acid; that he was buried first in one place, then exhumed and reburied in another; that his headless corpse was liquefied with quick- lime during a heavy rain; that the head was spirited to Casablanca, or is possibly buried under the present-day Louis Vuitton Foundation building in Paris.

In that faraway time of less than instant information, eleven days passed before the world learned of Ben Barka’s disappearance. At the time it produced a political shock akin to that of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018. The brazen obliteration of a public figure—“in broad daylight,” so to speak—violated some basic sense of the line between civilization and savagery.

A fair lot of evidence implicates the Mossad—which owed Hassan II a favor—in the provision of fake passports, cars, safe houses, and a villa near Orly Airport belonging to Georges Boucheseiche, a gangster, where Ben Barka presumably met his end, and in the disposal of the body; the CIA, eager to prevent Ben Barka’s appearance at the Havana conference, was almost certainly involved (it was the golden age of CIA assassinations) through pliable figures in Charles de Gaulle’s government, such as Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, Interior Minister Roger Frey, and de Gaulle’s go-to covert officer, the MP Pierre Lemarchand. In the underwater realm where politics and crime seamlessly blend, the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS)—a paramilitary terrorist group originally formed to counter the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and latterly to revenge itself on President de Gaulle for permitting Algeria’s independence—routinely skirmished with pro-Gaullist intelligence operatives known as the Barbouzes (“bearded ones”) in the streets of Paris and other cities. In some accounts, both of these clandestine groups played minor roles in the Ben Barka drama.

De Gaulle was blindsided by the whole affair. Or acted as if he had been. After the French defeat in Algeria, de Gaulle took a calculating interest in Third World politics and supported the Tricontinental Conference, hoping the Non-Aligned Movement would thwart America’s designs on the former colonies of France, Spain, and Portugal. De Gaulle saw himself as a check on American and Soviet imperialism, encouraging a third force in international relations.

After Ben Barka’s disappearance and its attendant publicity storm, de Gaulle purged his intelligence services and prosecuted various conspirators, including Oufkir (who was out of reach), and even broke off diplomatic relations when Morocco refused to extradite implicated spies. At the same time, he publicly disparaged the affair as “vulgar and subordinate,” whatever that meant. There was always more to the story than met the eye: bleary personages like Mohammed Miloued (“Chtouki”), who worked for Oufkir in Paris; Paul Lopez, an informant for the French counterespionage service, thought to be the third man in the kidnap car with the two dirty cops; and Philippe Bernier, a middleman of grimy repute who dealt art in Geneva. In the years following the Ben Barka abduction, thirty-seven people connected to the case died in suspicious circumstances or disappeared.

The first to go, arguably the most perplexing figure in the whole affair, was a small-time hood named Georges Figon. Trained as a chemist, Figon hustled on the fringes of several worlds; at various times, he had been involved in arms trafficking, pimping, and both left- and right-wing street violence, but also nominally respectable ventures in political journalism and film distribution. The Ben Barka conspirators found an extremely useful idiot in Figon, hiring him to produce a documentary on decolonization, with Ben Barka as a historical consultant. Figon managed to persuade Georges Franju to direct and Marguerite Duras to write the script; on the strength of these gold-plated names, he was able to draw Ben Barka to Paris for a meeting with Franju—at Le Drugstore, next door to the Brasserie Lipp.

Figon panicked when he realized what he’d been used for. It feels necessary to add here that had he known what was really going on, Figon would simply have demanded more money. Desperate for cash, he gave an interview to L’Express, touted on a shock-horror cover as I SAW BEN BARKA GET KILLED. He hadn’t seen any such thing; the authenticity of the interview was later questioned. Figon did, reputedly, tape-record an account of his oblivious role in the plot, but nobody knows what happened to the tape. Three months after the abduction, Figon was found shot dead in his Paris apartment, a “suicide.”

While none of Manchette’s other fiction derives so directly from real events, N’Gustro’s relation to the Ben Barka case is decidedly Brechtian and oblique.

The N’Gustro Affair, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s first novel, repurposes the above history as a smartly inverted roman policier. While none of Manchette’s other fiction derives so directly from real events, N’Gustro’s relation to the Ben Barka case is decidedly Brechtian and oblique. It takes place in one location, over a single night. The narrative durée alternates a teasingly sinister “real time,” related in the third person, with a years-spanning recitative by a dead man, uttered hours earlier into a tape recorder.

N’Gustro is a distant but legible cousin of such novels as William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms and Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies. (Manchette and Bowles share a rare inability to write a dull sentence and an infectious sense of absurdity.) Its brisk pace and intensely visual, clipped prose owe something to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but even more to cinema: the 1940s noir films told in flashbacks (Laura, Out of the Past, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), the rapid-fire montage of later nouvelle vague gangster movies.

With scattered exceptions like Léo Malet, postwar French crime novelists specialized in crypto-Maigret detectives who policed an inviolable social order whenever its sleep was disturbed. Manchette changed everything. In 1971, he “exploded on the scene,” as the expression goes, with The N’Gustro Affair and Corpses in the Sun (co-written with Jean-Pierre Bastid), novels that attacked the intolerable reality of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic—its technocratic dehumanization, its commodity fetishism, its sub-rosa violence. Every character in Manchette’s work is a symptom of a sick world, viewed in close-up as if through a telescope or binoculars. In N’Gustro, Manchette’s propulsive fusion of cool detachment and tactile immediacy is already in full flower.

The unfinished crime that N’Gustro suspends until the final, horrifying paragraph generates foreboding and urgency, yet it, and N’Gustro himself, play almost spectral roles in the book’s dual narratives. N’Gustro works as a pastiche of the source material, but Manchette was at pains to distinguish it from a roman à clef. What inspired him was not the actual incident but the sensational accounts of it in the media: the spectacle of it all. While N’Gustro’s characters resemble real-life players in the globally reported drama (“Henri Butron” for Figon, “Marshal George Clemenceau Oufiri” for Oufkir, “Colonel Jumbo” for Ahmed Dlimi), Manchette freely shapes them into creatures of his own frenetic imagination, enlarging the smudgier features of their public images. Figon’s famously missing tape becomes Butron’s eleventh-hour bid to heroicize (and presumably market) his parasitic existence, starting with virgin felonies in the ninth grade. The recording, stippled with lies and grotesque arias of self-regard, plays in the fatal villa’s library, where Marshal Oufiri listens to it intermittently, while he drinks anis, smokes hash, fools with various weapons, and prepares himself to address the “package” hanging by its feet in the basement.

Avoiding documentary reality, Manchette fashions a more durable and provoking fantasia of brutality and violence than a news story destined to be forgotten. N’Gustro is less concerned with the exact political significance of its eponymous (and largely absent) central character than with the pathology of the people who’ve brought him down: Oufiri, whose intoxicated, time-killing ruminations over several hours are chronicled in close detail, and Butron, whose generally insensible life story unspools as a flashy series of wrong moves.

Both protagonists, if one can call them that, operate outside the law; Oufiri, as justice minister of the “Zimbabwanite Republic,” is buffered by layers of officialdom, while Butron, in his early criminal career, enjoys certain protections of class through his physician father. Even his father’s death works in his favor vis-à-vis an early pardon for a jail sentence. He inherits a splendid house in Rouen and a lot of money, but these blandishments are scarcely enough for his dreams of grandeur. They eventually coalesce in a fainthearted ambition to produce movies (all of Butron’s ambitions tend to be fainthearted, following the path of least exertion), which brings him, quite unconsciously, into the orbit of the N’Gustro conspirators.

As for the Ondine and the Rouen house, they were losing their luster. I wanted a yacht, fine hotels, supremely idle hours, and distinguished admirers. In view of my misdeeds there was only one route to satisfaction for me: to catapult myself to the very top of the money tree.

Butron’s self-portrait is N’Gustro’s key achievement: an exuberant, rancid spillage, propelled by his hatred of everything. Butron’s confession is contrived for maximum irritation, like the whine of a car alarm, and would probably become unbearable absent our knowledge that the source of the irritant is already dead—this lends a mortuary pathos to his improvised alliances, car thefts, violent assaults with bicycle chains and ax handles, and mildewy “conquests” of women, primarily one called Anne and, at different times, her mother, Jacquie. Butron is like a photographic negative of anarchists in the Bonnot Gang or the bomb-thrower Ravachol, lacking their world-improving raison d’être but similarly energized by social revulsion. “I could’ve been brilliant had I cared to be, but I didn’t,” he avows, a questionable notion that suggests the easy segue less than brilliant people undergo from intolerant leftist certitude to bigoted right-wing odiousness.

Butron is odious from the jump, really, but the thought that he could have turned out differently arises at stray moments in his ipsissima verba. In recounting his “misdeeds,” Butron reveals a life governed by vicious impulses and a breathtaking lack of conscience. Little about him elicits sympathy, but his bravado has a morbid fascination. He’s a conundrum, a “man of action” who, as someone remarks, is fundamentally passive, discovering a certain pleasure in being beaten by police; a highly conscious person who mentions Lévi-Strauss in passing, then gleefully farts at his mother’s funeral; a racist, an anti-Semite, a nightmare boyfriend, an egotist whose self-involvement ultimately blinds him to the surveillance he’s under and the plot he’s sucked into. You could readily picture him as one of the pinball addicts, high- school truants, and would-be gangsters hanging out in early Godard and Truffaut movies, the rebellious dross of the 1960s affluent middle class—with the salient difference that Butron’s sentiments are utterly conventional and right-wing. Underneath the skinhead act, Butron is a complete bourgeois.

With Butron, Manchette mints a thoroughly modern behavioral archetype: the patsy, in the Lee Oswald sense of patsy, peripheral but also pivotal in conspiracy dramas. Oufiri and Butron are imaginatively inflated in the manner of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Butron insists at one point that he’s ordinary, a notion his car thefts and street brawling initially seem to belie. His obsessive interest in money and indifference to other people, though, are quite ordinary, inflamed beyond quotidian avarice and sociopathy, but jarringly familiar. Butron is the school bully who beats up smaller kids for their lunch money, grown into adulthood with an unchanged, adolescent grasp of power relations. He has the will to dominate (women, mostly), but to no real purpose, with no animating convictions—and thus gets used by a series of ambiguously linked political actors, his fond- ness for violence an end in itself.

Like Manchette’s later novels, N’Gustro is “political” in a derisory way. It illustrates an extreme situation that arises from contradictions and antagonisms in the social order. Manchette proposes no remedy for the general condition of things. His impatience with ideology, his disillusioned clarity about the chances of structural change suffuse this book with a kind of strangled longing. The claustrophobic world of N’Gustro is sealed off from any positive outcomes. The novel’s structural quiddity causes us to hear Butron’s posthumous monologue partly through Oufiri’s ears, and thus to consider what a French street punk who served in Algeria sounds like to a former colonial subject who fills the vacancy left by the vanished colonizer and practices the same brutality.

This isn’t the primary concern of The N’Gustro Affair but one piquant thread among many. Manchette is neither “for” nor “against” anyone, however appalling, but fed up with the entire political world where disruptions are incessantly produced as distracting spectacles, and instantly packaged as objects of consumption. N’Gustro himself materializes in less than appetizing terms as a politician who makes boiler- plate revolutionary speeches and improvises awful poetry. Had he come to power, this book implies, he would have ended up as just more lipstick on a pig. Manchette burrows beneath the hoopla to show how the sausage gets made.

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Excerpted from Gary Indiana’s introduction to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The N’Gustro Affair. Copyright ©2021 by Gary Indiana. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, the New York Review of Books. 

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