Commentary By
Douglas Blair is a contributor to the Daily Signal and a graduate of Heritage s Young Leaders Program.
“You start out giving your hat, then you give your coat, then your shirt, then your skin and finally your soul.” So said famed French President and World War II hero Charles de Gaulle on the costs of dealing with the Soviet Union.
In de Gaulle’s time, many were content to let the Soviets be and to coexist with what President Ronald Reagan coined “the evil empire.” De Gaulle rightfully distrusted the USSR and fought tooth and nail to keep Soviet influence out of the French Republic.
By Richard Walker
Talk in French homes, and in the streets of Paris, as well as the country’s other major urban centers, is not of the Covid pandemic, but whether the French military would be justified in launching a coup to settle the nation’s growing instability.
The prospect of a military coup is nothing new to the French. Throughout French history, and more lately in 1961, French generals decided that the civilian leadership was incapable of dealing with the country’s most pressing issues. Those issues are now centered around immigration, the daily threat from Islamic extremists, and the lawless- ness in many urban sprawls where Islamic communities refuse to be policed. There is also growing violence and anger on the left and from anarchists and neo-Bolsheviks.
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”.
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