Are the French armed forces lining up with France’s Far Right?

The publication this week in a Paris political magazine of a second letter threatening intervention by the French military to prevent civil war by ending the “scourge” of Islamism and restoring order in the streets has caused consternation across Europe. But in France itself, only Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, appears to be taking the threat seriously.

At any rate, this is what we are being asked to believe.

The national press has mostly downplayed the letter, pointing out that there are no names attached and that there is no way of knowing how many serving officers may be involved or what they might actually be prepared to do. 

The Government has repeated its vow to prosecute and discipline any members of the armed forces who step out of line and into the political arena. Gérald Darmanin, President Macron’s interior minister, described the letter – which affects to represent the views of serving soldiers – as a “crude manoeuvre” and accused its anonymous signatories of lacking “courage”. 

He may be right, and Marine Le Pen, looking ahead to next year’s presidential elections, may be overly optimistic in assuming that she can safely up the rhetoric on the subject of Islamist violence and the “abandonment” of the mostly Muslim banlieues. But a recent analysis of voting patterns across France shows that 60 per cent of the 204,000-strong armed forces are likely to vote for the National Rally, including most of those currently serving in Mali, Chad and other Sahel countries facing Islamist insurgency. 

It is also worth bearing in mind that the French Army, unlike its British or American counterparts, has a history within living memory of taking the law into its own hands. 

It was Frederick Forsyth who conferred literary immortality on a group of French Army conspirators who in the late 1950s and early 1960s sought, with varying degrees of un-success, to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. 

Forsyth’s masterpiece, The Day of the Jackal, provides an engrossing and entirely plausible account of how a cadre of embittered colonels, obsessed with maintaining Algeria as a French possession, talked itself into insurrection, believing that de Gaulle had betrayed their cause and that the only solution was to kill him and restore patriotism and order to the heart of the Republic. 

There was, as it happens, no Jackal. The charismatic killer, suavely played by Edward Fox in the film version of Forsyth’s novel, was pure invention, hired to achieve what in real life had proved impossible. In reality, the cadré of disgruntled ex-colonels and others who organised an attempt on de Gaulle’s life on 22 August 1962 were old-school, ready to sacrifice their lives for the cause. Their devout wish was that le Grand Charles should die in a hail of bullets discharged by as many as 12 of their loyal confederates. 

De Gaulle was saved by the strength and power of his Citroën DS limousine, known as La Déesse (the Goddess), allied to the quick thinking of his chauffeur, Francis Marroux, who during the Second World War had fought the Germans as a member of the Maquis. But it was a close-run thing. A number of sub-machine bullets managed to penetrate the car, one of which, it was calculated, had narrowly missed the President. 

Seven months later, on 11 March 1963, as dawn broke in the courtyard of the Fort d’Ivry, in Paris’s southern suburbs, the leader of the failed coup, 35-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, was shot by firing-squad. De Gaulle had commuted the death sentences of other members of Thirry’s équipe but felt that someone had to pay the ultimate penalty. “The French need martyrs,” he told his ministers. “I gave them Bastien-Thiry. They’ll be able to make a martyr of him. He deserves it.” 

The firing squad – the last such in France – brought to an end five years of military disaffection over Algeria that had threatened not only the President, but the Fifth Republic itself. De Gaulle’s attitude to coups was necessarily ambiguous. He had established the Free French in 1940 in defiance of Marshal Pétain’s accomodation with Hitler, thus making himself an outlaw, and 18 years later it was a putsch by his supporters in the Army that restored him to power after his wilderness years in Colombey-les-Deux Églises. 

The Algiers putsch, known as Operation Resurrection, which began in the spring of 1958, was led by a group of three generals and an admiral under the direction of France’s most decorated soldier, General Raoul Salan. A veteran of the Normandy landings and the conflict in Vietnam, Salan had retired from his most recent post, commanding French forces in Algeria, to found the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) as part of a doomed bid to prevent the granting of independence to France’s war-torn North African territory. 

The conspirators borrowed from the Revolution by setting up a Committee of Public Safety in Algiers, backed by the Army, and soon after fired off a demand that De Gaulle be made head of a government of national unity. To underline that they weren’t kidding, Salan sent in paratroopers to seize control of Corsica and let it be known that troops loyal to him stood ready to enter the capital. 

Salan had reckoned, correctly, that De Gaulle supported the OAS’s goal of Algerie française and was pleased, but hardly surprised, when René Coty, one of France’s least convincing heads of state and a dyed-in-the-wool Pétainist, crumbled overnight, inviting his wartime adversary, as “the most illustrious of Frenchmen,” to take back the reins of power. 

Did De Gaulle know about the putsch? Was he in fact part of it? All that can be said with any certainty is that he was expecting the call and was impatient to get on with the business in hand. When Salan, almost overwhelmed by the success of his enterprise, called out “Vive De Gaulle!” at a subsequent rally in Algiers, the issue was settled. The Army was satisifed, not realising that De Gaulle was about to cut the rug from under them having decided that there was no way out of the Algerian imbroglio that did not end in a French withdrawal.  

Sixty-three years later, it seems improbable that similar plans are being hatched within the still-serving top brass to detain or assassinate Emmanuel Macron. But it is impossible to be sure. France’s men and women in uniform, like their counterparts in civilian life, view the murder of French citizens by Muslim extremists – which shows no sign of abating – with a mixture of dismay and anger, while the generals are clearly fretting over the general lawlessness that has affected Paris and other big cities in recent years. 

My guess, while acknowledging the examples from the similarly febrile post-war period, is that wiser counsels will prevail. But, at the very least, the second letter, claiming to represent thinking within all levels of the military, is a boost to the Right, and to Le Pen in particular. 

Most EU leaders, echoing French public opinion, would say that Macron has taken a tough, frequently courageous, line on the Islamist threat even as they continue to wonder if his strategy will achieve its desired result of bringing Muslims in from the cold. The same leaders will now be watching and waiting to see how events unfold between now and the spring of 2022. The idea that Le Pen, backed by the military, could be given the chance that she has always sought to purify France in the manner of her hero, Joan of Arc, is already sending shivers down their spines.