On the night of December 6 to 7, 2025, around a hundred Beninese soldiers, supported by armored vehicles, left their camp to overthrow President Patrice Talon, a few months before a presidential election which was already to see him leave power. They kidnapped several senior officers, stormed the residence of the head of state in Cotonou and proclaimed on television the fall of the regime. The putsch, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Pascal Tigri, relied everything on the element of surprise. It will fail in less than 24 hours.
Above the city, a French intelligence plane circles for several hours. On the ground, commandos dispatched from Abidjan support the loyalists, once the Beninese army goes back on the offensive. Requested by Talon, in conjunction with ECOWAS and neighboring Nigeria, Paris will only recognize support “in surveillance, observation and logistical support”. The French reinforcement to its Beninese ally nevertheless proved decisive that day, and augurs the new relationship between France and its African partners: speed, efficiency, discretion and freedom of action.
The Beninese episode contrasts with the decade that preceded it. For sixty years, France held its former African empire with its garrisons, intervening at will from Chad to the Ivory Coast. In ten years, this system gradually disintegrated, then collapsed. In Mali, Operation Barkhane ended in November 2022, after months of demonstrations where Russian flags flew and anti-France slogans were chanted. Burkina Faso denounced its agreements at the beginning of 2023 and expelled the French special forces; Niger followed after the July putsch, dismissing the ambassador and 1,500 soldiers before the end of the same year. Chad and Senegal in turn lock their barracks at the end of 2024: the Adji Kossei base is surrendered on January 30, 2025, the Geille camp in Dakar on July 17, after sixty-five years of presence. In the Central African Republic, Bangui had already relied on Wagner. Everywhere, the same mechanism: hostile crowds, substitutes from Moscow, juntas making the rejection of the former colonizer a political glue.
Just three years ago, more than 5,000 men were serving in the Sahel, and several thousand more on bases on the continent. There remains only one in full force, Djibouti and its 1,450 soldiers, and a few hundred men in Gabon and Ivory Coast. On this ebb, the French general staff rebuilt its system: a single command, based in Paris, and support on demand rather than troops on the ground.
Created in the summer of 2024, the Africa Command merged the four headquarters formerly located in Dakar, Abidjan, Libreville and N’Djamena into a single entity. It does not have any troops of its own and is content to coordinate, piecemeal, planned resources on demand. Change is not just about the organization. France has renounced first intervention, this reflex which saw it move to the front line as in the Sahel; it only acts in support, when a State requests it, and lets local armies lead the fight.
France only acts in support, when a State requests it
The calculation is as much military as political. In the general staffs, we ended up seeing the permanent base as an anachronism: too visible for opinions won over to sovereignism, it exposed France and dragged it, despite itself, into internal quarrels. The Niamey putsch in the summer of 2023 served as an electric shock. For the stationed troops, Paris has therefore replaced a targeted offer, concentrated on the niches where it remains one step ahead: intelligence, drones and anti-drone fighting, neutralization of explosive devices, information warfare. The method has opened previously closed doors, particularly in English-speaking Africa: Ghana is calling on France to combat illegal gold mining, Nigeria for intelligence and the fight against homemade bombs. According to our information, Chad itself, which slammed the door at the end of 2024, is making eyes at Paris to resume military cooperation.
Foreign appetites
This lightness, however, has a downside, rarely assumed. Without bases or stocks from which to draw, France must project everything from afar, from Djibouti, its last base, or the metropolis; excluding the 1,450 men in the Horn of Africa, its footprint is reduced to a few hundred soldiers. However, the land it deserts whets predatory appetites: Russia pushes its mercenaries there, China advances ports and debts there, Turkey multiplies drones, mosques and contracts. It is now up to Paris to think about what its link with Africa will be for the coming century.
