There were more than a dozen such attempts, some involving SDECE, some not, some involving WWII veterans, others les paras who had learned in Algeria and Indo-China what compromising with the Communists would get you.
When General Massu and the 2er Paras revolted in April 1961, it was feared they'd airdrop into Paris and sieze the offices of government. In 1961 my dad was a petroleum/refining engineer for the overseas arm of Texaco, Caltex, and we were in Paris; I recall the half-dozen Sherman tanks parked on the steps of the Chamber of Deputies. Per Wikipedia: The coup was to come in two phases: an assertion of control in French Algeria's major cities Algiers, Oran and Constantine, followed by the seizure of Paris. The first half went off pretty much as planned; only one French soldier died during the takeover. On 22 April the Army was ordered to resist a para airdrop, and the Legion, which by tradition is not to be used inside the metropole of France or against French citizens, stayed neutral, asie from those units making up the Zone Sud Oranais security force for Paris.
The Para Revolt took place two days after the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, so if Allen Dulles and the CIA were involved, it's almost a dead certainty that the German BND intelligence service created and run by Dulles was also involved, either in the planning for the putsch itself or the assassinations of DeGaulle and military leaders loyal to him- including General assassinated by the OAS in retaliation for his support of DeGaulle. On 25 April, the French authorities in Paris ordered the explosion of the atomic bomb Gerboise Verte [green jerboa] in the Sahara as part of a scheduled testing program. Gerboise Verte exploded at 6:05 AM. While the test and test site were already prepped as part of the French national nuclear program, the test timeline appears to have been accelerated to ensure that the security of the device was not compromised; the thought of an atomic weapon in the hands of the coup planners was not a happy one, and the paracommandos were at least capable of the possibility of making a try for it.
The Foreign Legion's 1er Regiment etranger de parachutistes [1er REP], and the Army's 10th Parachute Division and 25th Parachute Division were disbanded and dissolved after the unsuccessful revolt. As les paras of the 1er REP were marching out of their barracks in Zeralda, Algeria final disbandment parade, they broke into the unit's traditional marching song, not the Legion's Le Boudin but Edith Piaf's, Non, je ne regrette rien.
Approximately, in English: No, I ain't got no regrets....
