In Dakar, the French military presence that had shaped daily life for decades came to an end in July 2025, when Senegal forced France to withdraw from its last two bases in the capital. The man behind that demand, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, had been elected in 2024 on a platform centred on sovereignty. Yet Senegal did not close the door entirely. It left room for economic cooperation, and for Christophe Boisbouvier, the RFI Africa specialist, that balance offers a glimpse of what a relationship between France and Africa could look like: partnership without soldiers.
Boisbouvier makes that case in a new book, Françafrique Is Dead, Long Live Africa-France, which examines the breakdown of the old model that governed France’s ties with the continent. “Too arrogant, too sure of itself, France failed to see the anti-French wave coming,” he says. His argument, as reported by RFI in an interview conducted in French by Arnaud Pontus, is that France can still build a partnership of equals, based on respect rather than arrogance or domination.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20261023-too-arrogant-too-sure-of-itself-france-confronts-its-legacy-in-africa.
The system he describes, known as Françafrique, took shape in the decades after African countries gained independence. Paris maintained privileged relationships with friendly leaders and worked to protect its strategic interests, sometimes through military intervention. Over time, the term became synonymous with a neo-colonial pattern of French influence and patronage. That model has now visibly collapsed. French troops have been pushed out of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where military governments have turned away from Paris and towards Moscow. France has also ended permanent deployments in Chad, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, in those cases through negotiation.
Some of the damage, Boisbouvier argues, traces back to a single speech. In 2007, in Dakar, then president Nicolas Sarkozy told his audience that Africans had “not sufficiently entered history”. “That phrase did a great deal of damage to Franco-African relations, because many Africans saw in it, a terrible word, ‘arrogance’,” Boisbouvier says. Even President Emmanuel Macron, in his view, has sometimes shown “an attitude of superiority that African countries have not understood” and increasingly refuse to accept.
Meanwhile, the wider balance of power is shifting beneath all of this. Africa’s combined economy is set to become larger than France’s this year, with gross domestic product of around €3 trillion, what Boisbouvier calls a “historic economic milestone”. “That’s a historic date which shows that France can no longer be in a dominant position,” he says. He points to the Africa-France summit in Nairobi in May as evidence of what renewed economic cooperation could look like, including with major African investors such as the Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote.
The book also revisits moments when French intervention worked, quietly, in defence of African institutions. In September 2015, after the overthrow of Blaise Compaoré in Burkina Faso, supporters of the former president attempted a military coup against the transitional authorities led by Michel Kafando. French forces, under then president François Hollande, provided rapid assistance that helped thwart the putsch. “It was very precise assistance. It lasted a few minutes, but it was enough to make the coup fail,” Boisbouvier says. That episode had remained secret until now, and he suggests Burkinabe officials at the time may have asked France to keep it under wraps.
Intervention, however, has a darker side. In 2019, a French air strike against rebel forces advancing in northern Chad drew criticism at home. Macron, fearful of being accused of neo-colonialism, came to regret it and decided France should no longer intervene in African political crises. For Boisbouvier, that decision had grave consequences: two years later, Chadian president Idriss Déby was killed while visiting troops fighting rebels.
Macron appeared unequivocal in June 2025, when asked in a televised interview whether the post-colonial system endured. “It stopped several years ago… Many people who claim that France is in decline are effectively saying, ‘You should stage coups or put a stop to them when they happen’, but we don’t do that sort of thing any more,” he said. Six months later, he did the opposite. In December 2025, Benin’s army attempted to overthrow the country’s president, Patrice Talon. France provided intelligence and logistical support, while Nigeria supplied military assistance, including air strikes and ground troops, at Benin’s request. “It was a French counter-subversion operation, involving French aircraft and Nigerian Super Tucano planes, alongside the decisive intervention of forces loyal to Talon,” Boisbouvier says. For him, the operation showed that Paris had not abandoned military involvement in Africa, but was prepared to act when it believed a partner government faced a threat, particularly one that risked strengthening Russian influence.
The apparent reversal, he argues, reflects a president still searching for a coherent policy, caught between a determination to distance himself from France’s colonial past and a desire to retain influence when a friendly government is threatened. The book extends that scrutiny to Gabon, where General Brice Oligui Nguema seized power in August 2023, ousting Ali Bongo and ending the Bongo family’s 56-year dynasty. Boisbouvier claims France was connected to the coup, pointing to tensions over a possible Chinese naval base in Libreville, which Bongo supported but Macron and then US president Joe Biden opposed. While there is no proof of explicit French involvement in organising or supporting the coup, “everything suggests that the French intelligence services were aware of the preparations for General Oligui Nguema’s coup”, he says.
By contrast with a full retreat, France is not withdrawing from the continent altogether, Boisbouvier insists. He sees opportunities for cooperation with emerging powers such as Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. But competition is fierce. Russia has capitalised on anti-French sentiment, particularly in the Sahel, deploying paramilitaries now known as Africa Corps to present itself as better able to protect against jihadist threats than the former colonial power. With no colonial past, Moscow initially benefited from what Boisbouvier calls a kind of “historical virginity”, and proved adept at using social media to promote its influence and spread disinformation, something France was slow to recognise. Yet he believes those advantages are fading, pointing to allegations of abuses by Russian forces and their partners in Mali, including the killing of hundreds of civilians in Moura in 2022.
Just days before the Russia-Africa summit on 28-29 October, Boisbouvier says France’s strongest argument is now political rather than military. “What France and the other European countries offer is nothing less than democracy and human rights.” Whether that argument can win ground against Moscow’s inroads across the Sahel remains the open question hanging over the summit.