1958 French Coup

What if the French military had launched a coup in 1958 over the Algerian crisis? How would the US and the other NATO allies have reacted to a coup in Western Europe? Would this destablize Western Europe?
 
Well, what kind of government would have been installed? If it is some brutal dictatorship or Franco imitation, NATO would have supported the establishment. It likely would have been a war similar to the monarchic coalitions against France in the late 1700's, only this time it would be republican coalitions, a nice bit of irony.
 
What if the French military had launched a coup in 1958 over the Algerian crisis? How would the US and the other NATO allies have reacted to a coup in Western Europe? Would this destablize Western Europe?

Well, I'm guessing it would have distanced the Western nations from France. That might have pushed them into trying to be an independent power, separate from the Western bloc. They might have done something crazy, like, maybe sell nuclear technology to Israel? Seeing as how Damascus is only now becoming inhabitable again, after the IDF bombarded it with arsenic shells in '79, I can only imagine what they might do with nukes.
 
Well, I'm guessing it would have distanced the Western nations from France. That might have pushed them into trying to be an independent power, separate from the Western bloc. They might have done something crazy, like, maybe sell nuclear technology to Israel?

It was already done in OTL as France decided to have a diplomacy independant from the USA and they give a lot of nuclear technology to Israel as France was the main ally of Israel until 1967...
 
It was already done in OTL as France decided to have a diplomacy independant from the USA and they give a lot of nuclear technology to Israel as France was the main ally of Israel until 1967...

True. France (stubbornly) wanted to make itself a third way in the Cold War between the US and USSR, and many of its policies followed this.
 
This is of course true, but then the mindset the Army had adopted prior to 1957 would make France, if the coup succeeded, not only distinct from many (western) continental norms, the pariah of Europe. Not only would the French position be awkward in NATO, but in the entire framework of Europe. One of the founder members of the EEC has just turned more-or-less Fascist; the paratroopers who participated in Resurrection were quite cloistered when it came to viewing Fourth Republic politics, thinking it at best beneath them and at worse a cancer on the French body-politic, so I wouldn't be surprised at a purges occuring eventually. Inevitably there will be an outcry in other European capitals as to the subversion of democracy they've all just witnessed happening in Paris, so perhaps, perhaps the EEC is strangled in its cradle.

My problem is that I just don't see support there for the military. In 1961 75% of France voted to withdraw from Algeria.

This doesn't mean anything, but...
 
My problem is that I just don't see support there for the military. In 1961 75% of France voted to withdraw from Algeria.

This doesn't mean anything, but...

It basically happened IOTL, only a bit more quietly. The military had CDG voted prime minister at gunpoint. Everybody knew there would be a coup if they didn't comply. It's like the "coup by memorandum" in Turkey.
So if they could force a regime change by making a little noise, they could definitely hold the country. At least for some time. Expect a bloody May 68-analog...
 
Opposition would probably be popular and organised. I would predict big demonstrations held in Paris organised by leftist groups (and rightist, although less of them) and the military reaction to be violent. The leaders of any successful coup would doubtless be influenced heavily, both before and afterwards by its most important component: the Paratroop brigades.

Would the rest of the French army go along with those? IIRC France had a conscription army at this time, and I don't know how they'd feel about paratroopers firing on strikers.

A lot of people will be thinking back to Vichy France, after all...
 
...and not few of them with fondness!

I don't know about that. By the 1950s the impression I get is that the French had persuaded themselves that Vichy was a dark time to never be repeated, and pretending it didn't have the widespread support it did in 1940-41. But I could be wrong.

Still, this discussion is vaguely amusing to me, because I can't help but note parallels with OTL's Japan in the 1930s.
 
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