Possibly the true hero of that first stupefying day in France was Roger Frey, de Gaulle's Minister of the Interior. Acting with speed and vigour, he swooped to arrest the sporting General Faure and several other conspirators in flagrante, thereby nipping in the bud an attempt to march on the capital. For this purpose, on the evening of the 22nd some 1,800 lightly equipped paras were waiting in the Forest of Orléans, and another four hundred in the Forest of Rambouillet. Joining up with tank units from Rambouillet, they were to move in three columns on Paris, seizing the Élysée and other key points of the administration. But, organised by Godard, the whole venture had a strongly amateurish note about it, with some of the waiting putschists apparently unaware even of the codeword Arnat (a simple elision of Armée and Nationale). Once they were rendered leaderless by Faure's arrest, no orders came through until a detachment of gendarmes appeared in the forest and gave a brusque order to disperse, with which the powerful body of paras sheepishly complied.

DEFINE: Arnat is explained as an elision of Armée and Nationale, the codeword for the putsch.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1384