Early in March Louis Joxe had heard disquieting rumours in Paris and had passed these on to Jean Morin in Algiers. Snippets of information had flowed into French Intelligence from a variety of sources. These included François Coulet, Morin's political adviser and de Gaulle's private listening-post in Algiers; Herr Blankenhorn, the West German Ambassador in Paris; and Lucien Bitterlin, leader of the Mouvement pour la Communauté in Algeria (whose informant was found floating in a river a few days later). The G.P.R.A. itself allegedly filtered back to the French Ministry of the Interior the names of the four generals as well as the precise date of the expected putsch. But, as so often happens, virtually nothing seems to have been done to act on the information received.

QUESTION: Why did French authorities fail to act despite receiving the conspirators' names and the date? Institutional complacency or deliberate inaction?

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1361