At the Palais d'Été de Gaulle's Minister of Public Works, Robert Buron, was asleep in his bed, having come to Algiers on a twenty-four-hour visit to attend a Chamber of Commerce banquet in the Hôtel Saint-George. There was an agitated knock on his door, and a polite voice said: "Excuse me, Monsieur le Ministre, and please don't laugh. The palace has been seized by parachutists. Monsieur Morin thinks that you would prefer to receive them dressed, rather than in your bed. I assure you, it's not a joke…." Hastily dressing, Buron thought to himself: "What a mess!…I was only with Frey and Messmer [Ministers of the Interior and Defence respectively] yesterday afternoon; why didn't they know something was being prepared?" Buron found Morin and his staff under arrest, also by German-speaking Legionnaires who had "no precise orders and seemed not to know what to do with us". With remarkable incompetence, the putschists had also neglected to cut all the telephone lines from the Palais d'Été, so that Morin had managed to call Paris and many of the key command centres.

XREF: Connects to the larger history of the Algerian War and the French army's insurgency against de Gaulle — the generals' putsch of April 1961.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1370