The sands of time for the Fourth Republic's parliamentary regime seemed to be running out.
At 5 o'clock one morning last week a military airplane from Algiers quietly set down on Corsica, the small Mediterranean island from which Napoleon Bonaparte sallied forth to win an emperor's crown. Out of the plane stepped Corsican-born Pascal Arrighi, a French National Assembly Deputy and passionate adherent of the two-week-old Algerian insurrection. Barely 13 hours later, 36-year-old Pascal Arrighi, at the head of 250 Corsica-based paratroopers and a mob of 10,000, seized control of the island...