History has fun seeing Jean-Marie Le Pen disappear, who was a committed actor in the French Empire when France undergoes a new diplomatic humiliation in Côte d’Ivoire, signing its irremediable downgrading on the African continent. After Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal and Chad, it is Côte d’Ivoire’s turn to call courteously to do without the French service offer. Only Djibouti and Gabon still resist this cascade of contempt.
The desire to display full and whole sovereignty does not exhaust the reasons for this eviction, which are as much to geopolitical changes as in domestic affairs, sometimes trivial, of which French diplomacy has not been able to take the measure for decades.
It is thus difficult not to see in the refusal of France to lift the legal action educated against the Chadian president on the ill -acquired goods the reason for his sudden eviction. Our pride admits Russia to this fiasco, failing to grasp the spring of a deeper anti -colonial hatred. By lack of interest, Emmanuel Macron, eyeing English Africa, seems little inclined to save this Françafrique from the Old World. In the waiting room, competition is only waiting for our desertion.
The decolonization of black Africa, from 1958, did not end the French “pre -square” on the continent. Until the 1990s, the influence of France was visible by exchanges, the CFA franc, the Francophonie, but especially by an imposing armed contingent. In the midst of the Cold War, the army deploys up to 10,000 soldiers, who stabilize the new regimes while exercising its vigilance in the face of communist expansion.
African leaders have consubstantial ties, with the metropolis having been sometimes ministers – Senghor, Houphouët -Boigny – Sometimes military – Bokassa, Eyadema. Jacques Foccart will embody this policy “Françafrique” until 1974. Algerian humiliation makes all the more important, from de Gaulle to Chirac, this presence to keep the rank of France intact in the world.
If the bonds of Paris with African heads of state seem intangible, a deaf antifrançaise hatred of societies nourished by anti -colonialism
However, it does not take long to be assimilated to an ersatz of “neocolonialism”, which would make Africa a simple stock of raw materials looted by the Western powers. By interposed confrontation, the USSR seeks to replace its own ideological model when the United States experienced its soft power there. The end of the Cold War inaugurates a new era of challenges against Western order and their African “supplies”. The Clinton administration was thus humiliated in Somalia in 1993. If the bonds of Paris with African heads of state seem intangible, a deaf antifrançaise hatred of societies nourished by anti -colonialism.
The speech in 2007 on the entrance of the African man into history by Nicolas Sarkozy rekindled tensions. “France-à-France” is conspired during demonstrations where the tricolor flag is burned and brandished the Chinese, Russian and Turkish pavilions forgetting the brutality of the former Ottoman occupation. But it has been a long time since France does not exercise any real influence in Africa. Trade in the French -speaking area have become residual. The English -speaking states of Nigeria, Angola or South Africa attract the eyes of the Élysée. Significantly, the 2026 “Africa-France” summit will take place in Kenya! But the problem is less economic than political and cultural.
The new threats inspired by clan armed groups cannot be contained by the regular regular peacekeeping forces, which is now obsolete. Putschist governments, in security failure, then have no other choice than to turn to private training to constitute, at low cost, their praetorian guard. But even the Wagner paramilitary solution has shown its limits to Mozambique as in Mali.
However, the French president did not take advantage of it, preferring to settle the African policy of France, buried during his speech in Ouagadougou in 2017. Exporting his “at the same time”, he irritates his partners by his half-measures. Paris thus reduces its workforce, but discreetly, and without closing bases whose utility, formerly obvious to evacuate nationals, is today discussed. Carried by the pan-Africanist renewal, the succession of putschs in 2022-23 then accelerated the release of France from the Sahel.
