T to all but a tiny minority, the events of I3 May I958 and the subsequent threat of a French army coup came as an immense surprise. I would like to try to explain why the French army came to behave as it did then, and, on rather riskier ground, to predict the way in which it appears to be moving today. My purpose is not to trace the course of the Algerian war itself-although that will, naturally, come in to the picturebut the mentality of the French army as a whole. On such a vast subj ect, it is tempting to go back very far in history, almost to the Napoleonic wars. Here I can only attempt to go back just far enough to explain why the French army has over the last hundred years been far more concerned with politics than its British counterpart. In the first place, throughout the nineteenth century the French army was used, far more frequently than the British army, as an 'internal security force' against revolutionaries and other groups. From being despised and belittled after the disastrous end of the Napoleonic era, it came to occupy an important place in the French social order. Stendhal, in Lucien Loezwei, had painted a grim picture of the army's aimless, sordid provincial garrison existence and its intellectual barrenness. But, in I854, the army had become something quite different: a widely read pamphlet (quoted by Raoul Girardet, La societe' militaire dans la France contemporaine, T8I51939) 1 described it as the bulwark of 'not only the banks and the palaces, but the preserver of the arts, the museums, the churches, the lives of men and the honour of women'. 'Society', the pamphlet went on, 'can only exist and sleep in peace because the soldier is watching over us.' In addition, a series of minor wars brought the French army back into repute after the I8I5 eclipse: there was the conquest of Algeria, and the series of campaigns, after I830, to put down the subsequent rebellions there; there were the Crimean and Italian campaigns, the expeditions in Mexico and the Far East. Finally, there was the disastrous I87o FrancoPrussian war which-paradoxically-turned France into a militaryminded nation as no victory could have done. After I870, all shades of national opinion combined to make the recovery of France's lost provinces the country's most important aim; this in turn led to a militaristic brand of republicanism whose best exponents were probably Gambetta and Jules