French Fifth Republic of the election on 9 January 1959. The new president began his office on that date, appointing Michel Debré as Prime Minister. The 1958 constitution also replaced the French Union with the French Community, which allowed fourteen member territories (these did not include Algeria) to assert their independence. 1960 became known as the "Year of Africa" because of this wave of newly independent states. Algeria became independent on 5 July 1962. The president was initially elected by an electoral college, but in 1962 de Gaulle proposed that the president be directly elected by the citizens, and held a referendum on
French Second Republic French Second Republic The French Second Republic was a short-lived republican government of France under President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. It lasted from the 1848 Revolution to the 1851 coup by which the president made himself Emperor Napoleon III and initiated the Second Empire. It officially adopted the motto of the First Republic, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité". The Second Republic witnessed the tension between the "Social and Democratic Republic" () and a liberal form of republicanism, which exploded during the June Days uprising of 1848. The 1848 Revolution in France, sometimes known as the February Revolution, was one of a wave of revolutions