Ephemeris for September 15 in Paris: Attack on the Publicis drugstore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés

On Sunday, September 15, 1974, a grenade exploded in the Publicis drugstore on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Behind this attack, which left two dead and over thirty wounded, was the Venezuelan Carlos, a figure of anti-imperialist terrorism in the 1970s and 80s.

On the corner of rue de Rennes and boulevard Saint-Germain, the Saint-Germain drugstore opened its doors on October 19, 1965, in the heart of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, 7 years after the successful inauguration of the first drugstore opened by the Publicis group on the Champs-Elysées.

On the site of the Royal Saint-Germain, just a stone's throw from Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp, the Saint-Germain drugstore quickly became a favorite with Parisians, including Jacques Dutronc and Serge Gainsbourg, who was said to have rarely left the drugstore without slipping a 500-franc bill to the salesgirls, and kissing them beforehand.

On Sunday, September 15, 1974, at 5.10pm, a grenade was thrown by a man from the mezzanine restaurant of the drugstore and exploded in the shopping arcade below. The blast left a fifteen-centimetre crater in the floor slab. Thirty-four Parisians were injured , including four children, and two people lost their lives.

Dispatched to the scene, investigators found a defensive grenade release lever in the debris, and took statements from witnesses who gave the terrorist's description: a tall, athletic man aged between twenty-five and thirty, with a square jaw. But the individual, who had in the meantime taken to his heels, was sought but not found.

The investigation soon established that the grenade came from a batch of fragment grenades stolen in 1972 from an American base in Germany and used in other attacks and armed robberies by the Baader Gang, the Red Army Faction and the German Revolutionary Cells. Numerous activists are interrogated to no avail.

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Five years later, on December 13, 1979, while the investigation was stalling, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos, a figure of revolutionary internationalist and pro-Palestinian terrorism in the 70s and 80s, claimed responsibility for the attack in the name of theJapanese Red Army from a journalist friend, who revealed his confidences in the columns of the Lebanese newspaper Al Watan Al-Arabi. A few days later, the interview was reprinted in Le Figaro.

The story takes us back to the time of the far-left terrorist attacks and the beginnings of Carlos's career, a year before the attacks on Israeli El Al planes at Orly airport and the hostage-taking at the Organization of the Petroleum Producing Countries in Vienna.

In 1974, at the time of theSaint-Germain drugstore bombing, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was the leader of the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), responsible for several bombings in London and Paris.

On July 26, 1974, a few days before the Saint-Germain bombing, revolutionary Yoshiaki Yamada, a member of theJapanese Red Army (JRA), a movement close to a branch of the PFLP, was arrested at Orly and imprisoned in Paris. Carlos and Michel Moukharbal decided to organize a hostage-taking operation at the French embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, to secure his release. The action was carried out on September 13, 1974, by the Japanese ARJ.

But the French authorities would not yield to blackmail. So, in order to put pressure on the French government and speed up the release of the Japanese revolutionary and his Japanese accomplices, Carlos carried out theattack on the Saint-Germain drugstore two days later. The French government, fearful of further such actions, relented and finally agreed to send to Holland the Boeing 707 that the hostage-takers wanted to escape, along with the sum of $300,000; Yoshiaki Yamada was freed on September 17, 1974.

After years on the run, Carlos was arrested in a bizarre turn of events on August 15, 1994 in Sudan, where he had taken refuge on a false diplomatic passport. Incarcerated at the Santé prison and then at the Poissy central prison, the Venezuelan terrorist was sentenced three times to life imprisonment for numerous attacks committed on French soil, although he later always denied his involvement in theSaint-Germain drugstore attack. The Saint-Germain drugstore closed in 1996, to be replaced by a ready-to-wear boutique.