Did The Day of the Jackal shift gears from reality? Here's what we think 

English author Frederick Forsyth's 1971 political thriller The Day of the Jackal earned him literary success and was adapted into a 1973 film starring Edward Fox.

In 2024, Sky Atlantic and Peacock decided to bring this classic political tale to the small screen for the young generation and the novel was adapted into a 10-episode TV series, starring Eddie Redmayne.

While the TV series deviates from the source material, even giving a personal life to the titular character, Forsyth's novel is actually rooted deep in reality, which is based on the alleged assassination attempt of the French President Charles de Gaulle.

Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal follows the failed assassination of de Gaulle by Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry in August 1962. While the source material is based on OAS's activities in 1963 and their attempt to prevent Algeria from gaining independence, the subsequent plot about the foreign assassin (Jackal) is purely fictional.

More on this in our story.

Exploring the historical background of The Day of the Jackal

Forsyth deliberately set his The Day of the Jackal in the summer of 1963, when rumors and conspiracy theories around France's then-President Charles de Gaulle’s assassination were making the rounds.

The Algerian self-determination group of diehard army officers set up a terrorist group, called the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, which was rumoured to be plotting de Gaulle's assassination in 1963. This French dissident paramilitary group wanted to prevent Algeria's independence from French colonial rule and carried out many acts of torture and assassinations during the 1930s.

Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal is loosely based on OAS activities during that time and is a fictional plot of de Gaulle's assassination, which was never carried out by a British assassin.

In light of OAS's efforts to prevent Algeria from gaining independence, The Day of the Jackal reimagines that one of the OAS leaders plots against the President and hires a foreign killer to take him out.

Since Forsyth's novel explored a very real and historical event, the author had difficulty in getting his book published, Editors believed that the book's plot about the OAS hiring a British assassin to kill de Gaulle would be highly unbelievable, given that the President was never been shot and even well and alive when the book was written.

How accurate is The Day of the Jackal series to Forsyth's novel?

While Fred Zinnemann's 1973 movie was very similar to Forsyth's novel, the 2024 Sky Atlantic series was a contemporary spin on the tale, which did not use a real-life political figure as Jackal's target.

The Day of the Jackal TV series is set in the present day and the titular character is given a fictional target, unlike President de Gaulle in the original work. Discussing this change in the setting, Redmayne said to Yahoo UK:

"When I read the first three scripts, not only is it updated so it's contemporary, which feels like a completely different world, but it retains some of the DNA of that old school spy craft''

He added:

''And I loved the old school cat-and-mouse-ness of it, and in those first three episodes I just thought that Bianca was such a knotty, complicated figure that — rather than in the original film, it's good and evil — it's like both characters have serious moral dubiousness."

While the TV series brilliantly captured the central character's abilities and the spy element of Forsyth's novel, it avoided the real-life connotations and connections found in the original book.

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