France declared two agents of Iran's embassy persona non grata on 18 August, the formal notice that a diplomat is no longer welcome and must leave. Foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot invoked Article 9 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which lets a state declare another state's diplomat unwelcome without giving a reason. Iran's ambassador was summoned to the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, to be told. No deadline was set and no names were published 1.
Paris gave its cause as a 19 July incident in Tehran, in which it says Iranian security services carried out a premeditated and deliberate assault on two staff of the French embassy.
That description has sharpened over four weeks. A French press briefing on 23 July said only that two French agents had been held for more than four hours and that one of them was struck 2. The 18 August statement recasts the same events as premeditated and deliberate. Governments seldom harden the language about their own staff without either new evidence or a decision to spend the relationship.
Iran's Ministry of Intelligence had described the same pair of diplomats in opposite terms on 15 August, accusing France of running a wartime infiltration scheme . The French version inverts every role inside that account, casting its people as the injured party rather than the operators. Article 9 asks for no justification, so Paris can act on whatever assessment it holds without publishing a word of it, and Tehran can neither test the evidence nor force it into daylight.
