Unveiling

Abstract

Throughout the period from early 1956 to early 1958 putschist forces had been gathering strength both within the army and among rightwing settler organisations and these eventually coalesced on 13 May 1958 when crowds gathered in the Forum and stormed the General Government buildings. The military rapidly used the crisis to effect a bloodless coup and to install a temporary 'revolutionary' authority headed by a Committee of Public Safety (Comité de salut public or CSP) under Generals Massu and Salan. There then followed a tense standoff between the army in Algeria and the new Paris government headed by Pierre Pfl imlin, a three-week period during which civil war was a real possibility, until de Gaulle agreed to assume, once again, the role of 'saviour of the nation', and was voted into power by the National Assembly on 1 June. 1 '13 May' was one of the great turning points in modern French history, not only because it marked a key stage in the Algerian War, but more signifi cantly the collapse of the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle's return to power, and the beginnings of the new constitutional regime of the Fifth Republic. The planning of the coup and its implementation was extraordinarily complex-the Bromberger brothers in Les 13 Complots du 13 mai counted thirteen strands 2-but basically two antagonistic political formations reached agreement to rally to the call for de Gaulle's return to power. On the one hand there was a secret plot by Gaullists, most notably Michel Debré (soon to become Prime Minister), Jacques Soustelle, Léon Delbecque and Jacques Chaban-Delmas (acting Minister of Defence), to engineer the return of the General so as to resolve the political crisis of the 'system', the dead hand of the party system of the Fourth Republic, which they viewed as destroying the grandeur of France. The second trend was composed of various extreme-right-wing plotters, mainly from the pieds-noirs community, neo-fascists, poujadists, die-hard colonialists and army offi cers who shared the Gaullist fear of national degeneration, but who were even more concerned about a