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
Article 49 of the French Constitution of the President of the Republic by direct suffrage. The circumstances of that vote are quite specific, it occurred at the end of the Algerian crisis, which affected the first years of the Fifth Republic, a kind of transitional phase in its history. The vote took place during the first legislature of the Fifth Republic, and put an ends to it. The parliamentary elections of 1958 had not resulted in a clear majority, but the president and the Debré government could work with the assembly without a secured majority, because the priority was to resolve the Algerian crisis. In the