On April 21, nearly one thousand active service members of the French military joined dozens of retired French generals in signing a letter that stops just short of calling for a coup against the elected government in the name of “putting an end to chaos.” Published in one of France’s leading far-right magazines, Valeurs Actuelles, the letter is a call to arms by right-wing military forces — and has already won the backing of Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen.

The letter begins saying that the “hour is grave, and France is in peril” — threatened by “mortal dangers.” Specifically, this danger is “disintegration,” the loss of the imagined timeless integrity of the France of yesteryear. Who and what do the signatories blame for this disintegration? To the surprise of no one who’s been paying attention to the rise of right-wing nationalism and nativism in the Global North, the culprits identified by the soldiers are anti-racists and people of color — particularly those who practice Islam.

Here, the article sheds any veneer of even the “color-blind” variant of racism so typical in French public discourse, and parrots disgusting white nationalist talking points. It argues that Muslims, rather than being legitimate citizens or residents of France, are a “horde” of foreigners whose ideologies and practices threaten France’s natural identity. The signatories claim that the areas around several major French cities have been transformed by their nonwhite residents into zones of “lawlessness” that shake the foundations of the French Republic. They chide the politicians for their supposed inaction and timidity — decades of police and law enforcement abuse notwithstanding — and argue that the army cannot stand by and allow this to continue. Here, minorities’ very presence is a threat to France’s nationhood.

The article concludes with a warning. As “violence mounts daily,” unless the French government does as the soldiers suggest and cracks down hard on not just crime but on the very existence of nonwhite French residents, they and their “comrades” will be forced to mount an “intervention,” a “perilous mission to protect the values of [French] civilization.” This is the only way to avoid a “civil war” — with politicians held accountable for the resulting death toll.

Such a threat is not without modern precedent in France — indeed, the country’s current constitution originates in a coup d’état attempt that took place in 1958. Amid the colonial war in Algeria, a group of high-ranking officers used military pressure to bring down the parliamentary Fourth Republic and return General Charles de Gaulle to power. Then, on April 21, 1961, with the battle for French Algeria almost lost, a further generals’ conspiracy attempted a coup against De Gaulle. The military rebels seized Algerian cities in the name of their junta and even landed paratroopers in mainland French airports before they were stopped by other French Army forces.

The fact that the signatories of the Valeurs Actuelles article chose to publish their article on the sixtieth anniversary of this event — as well as the similar attachment to anti-Muslim and racist violence — makes their threat of an intervention in French politics all the more real. The fact that these contemporary military leaders are also backed by Le Pen — the leader of the French right and almost certainly Macron’s main opponent in the 2022 presidential election — means their position has a mainstream backing that the generals in 1961 arguably lacked.