“We sought to mobilize the population and the army for a new coup,” he said, according to an English translation of an interview he gave in 2008 to the French journalist François Malye. “To convince them that this time we can succeed, we must appear in the eyes of all as an army of fighters, a revolutionary party capable — there are precedents — to change the course of history.”

Skinny and fair-haired, Mr. Susini was described by a United Press International correspondent as having “little time for things physical,” adding, “He has managed to maintain a sickly pallor in a country where everyone has a tan.”

Independence finally came to Algeria in 1962, but Mr. Susini was nonetheless involved in plotting to kill de Gaulle later that year and again in 1964. Details of the first attempt — in which de Gaulle’s Citroën was raked by machine gun fire outside Paris but he was unharmed — were used by the novelist Frederick Forsyth to open his 1971 thriller, “The Day of the Jackal.” The film adapted from the novel two years later opened the same way, with de Gaulle and his motorcade attacked by gunmen.

Asked by Mr. Malye why he tried to assassinate de Gaulle even after the war in Algeria had ended, Mr. Susini said it was to hold him responsible for the massacre of people “slaughtered like rabbits” and for the exodus of one million European Algerians. Mr. Susini had separately said that the Secret Army first began plotting de Gaulle’s murder in late 1961.

De Gaulle pardoned him in 1968, sparing him the death sentence.

Asked if he had regrets, Mr. Susini cited an attack in 1962 on the townhouse in Paris where the novelist André Malraux lived. Mr. Malraux, who was France’s minister of cultural affairs at the time, was not at home, but the bomb blast maimed a 4-year-old girl who also lived in the building. The Secret Army was believed to have detonated other bombs in Paris that day, injuring several other people. “The rise of anxiety,” Mr. Susini told Mr. Malye, “nourished the most radical decisions.”

Jean-Jacques Susini was born in Algiers on July 30, 1933, to Corsican parents. According to various accounts, his father was a Communist railway worker. Mr. Susini was very close to his maternal grandmother — whose political leanings rested with the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Mr. Susini studied medicine at schools in Lyon and Strasbourg, France, but returned to Algeria to attend the University of Algiers, where he became a student activist.

Well after Algeria became independent, Mr. Susini took up permanent residence in France. He served prison sentences in the 1970s for robbery and kidnapping. He ran unsuccessfully for office in Marseille on the right-wing National Front ticket in 1997. Among those who praised him after his death was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front.

“An affectionate thought for the death of our comrade,” Mr. Le Pen said in a Twitter post.

Mr. Susini’s second wife, Micheline Susini, also a pied noir, wrote a novel, “Of Sun and Tears” (1982), about her participation in the Algerian war. Complete information on survivors was not available.