On April 21, 1961, a group of retired generals and serving officers mounted a failed coup against president de Gaulle.
As recently as the spring of 1988, a handful of generals published a letter in the conservative daily
Le Figaro protesting that France would be “in danger” if it re-elected the socialist president François Mitterrand.
The 1988 letter was, purportedly, about cuts in defence spending. The recent “generals’ letter” was quite different in tone and language: the kind of stuff that one can read in a constellation of far right and racist web-sites and pseudo news-sites in France known as the
“Fachosph
re”.