Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
On 15 October 1959, then senator and future president François Mitterrand was involved
in a staged assassination attempt on his own life, now known as the infamous Observat-
ory Affair.
Charles de Gaulle & the Fifth Republic
The Fifth Republic was rocked in 1961 by an attempted coup staged in Algiers by a group
of right-wing military officers. When it failed, the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS) -
a group of French
colons
(colonists) and sympathisers opposed to Algerian independence -
turned to terrorism, trying several times to assassinate de Gaulle and nearly succeeding in
August 1962 in the town of Clamart just southwest of Paris.
In 1962, after more than 12,000 had died as a result of this 'civil war', de Gaulle negoti-
ated an end to the war in Algeria. Some 750,000
pied-noir
(black feet), as Algerian-born
French people are known in France, came to France and the capital. Meanwhile, almost all
of the other French colonies and protectorates in Africa had demanded and achieved inde-
pendence. Shrewdly, the French government began a program of economic and military aid
to its former colonies to bolster France's waning importance internationally and to create a
bloc of French-speaking nations -
la francophonie -
in the developing world.
Paris retained its position as a creative and intellectual centre, particularly in philosophy
and film-making, and the 1960s saw large parts of the Marais beautifully restored.
In 1923 French women obtained the right to - wait for it - open their own mail. The right
to vote didn't come until 1945, and a woman still needed her husband's permission to
open a bank account or get a passport until 1964.
The topic and film The Day of the Jackalportrays a fictional account of the attempts by
the OAS (a renegade paramilitary group who fought against Algerian independence) to
take de Gaulle's life.
A Pivotal Year
The year 1968 was a watershed. In March a large demonstration in Paris against the war in
Vietnam gave impetus to the student movement, and protests by students of the University
of Paris peppered the capital for most of spring. In May police broke up yet another demon-
stration, prompting angry students to occupy the Sorbonne and erect barricades in the Latin
Quarter. Workers joined in very quickly, with six million people across France participating
