Jacques Foccart - The Decolonization

The Decolonization

Foccart was an initiator of what would become known as the Françafrique, a term borrowed from Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of Côte d'Ivoire, by François-Xavier Verschave. This expression would survive until François Mitterrand's 1981 election and the first socialist government of the Fifth Republic (founded in 1958), in particular with Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, nicknamed "Papamadi" ("Papa-told-me").

According to the US conservative review National Interest, Jacques Foccart played "an essential role" in the negotiation of the Cooperation accords with the newly independent African states, former members of the French Community created in 1958. These accords involved the sectors of finance and economy, culture and education, and the military. There were initially eleven countries involved: Mauritania, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Dahomey (now Benin), Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, Chad, Gabon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and Madagascar. Togo and Cameroon, former UN Trust Territories, as well as, later on, Mali and the former Belgian territories (Ruanda-Urundi, now Rwanda and Burundi, and Congo-Kinshasa), together with some of the ex-Portuguese territories, and Comoros and Djibouti, which had also been under French rule for many years but became independent in the 1970s, were also later included.

The whole ensemble was put under a new Ministry of Cooperation, created in 1961, separate from the Ministry for Overseas Departments and Territories (known as the DOM-TOM) that had previously run them all. The National Interest review asserts that this "Cooperation Ministry, focal point of the new evolving French system in Africa, regarded Foccart both as their "guarantor" and their advocate with de Gaulle. If the General had conceived the apparatus (though in fact some of it simply happened by improvisation), Foccart was the machine minder."

Close to Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, he was, in 1967, an important actor in the French support of the Biafran secession, through the use of mercenaries.

National Interest 's review of his biography goes on with Foccart's admission that the French secret services eliminated the Cameroonian Marxist leader Félix-Roland Moumié in 1960. Furthermore, it quotes "some reports" which "suggested that Foccart and Houphouët spoke on the phone every Wednesday, and there is no doubt that he considered the Ivoirian leader the African centerpiece of his network. They operated together on a number of issues. Interventions such as that in Gabon in 1964 and Chad in 1969 were encouraged by the Foccart-Houphouet tandem. The most significant collaboration between Foccart and Houphouet was the way they tried to persuade de Gaulle to back the Biafran secession from Nigeria in 1967. Despite the pressures they exerted, however, de Gaulle refused to recognize Biafra, and, in retrospect, so guarded and elliptical are some of Foccart's statements that one cannot be sure what he really wanted or expected from de Gaulle at the time."

Jacques Foccart remained in service under Georges Pompidou's presidency (1969–1974). In 1972, Mongo Beti's Cruel hand on Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonization was censored upon its publication by François Maspero by the Ministry of the Interior Raymond Marcellin on the request, brought forward by Jacques Foccart, of the Cameroon government, represented in Paris by the ambassador Ferdinand Oyono.

Foccart was then replaced by president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1974–81) with René Journiac, whom he had trained himself. According to National Interest, he was critical of two special operations carried on under Giscard d'Estaing: the fiasco of the mercenary landing in Benin in January 1977 (with which he denies having had any connection, and would not have supported because it was badly conceived and executed); and "Operation Barracuda", the military intervention that deposed Emperor Bokassa in September 1979.

Foccart was then rehabilitated in 1986 by new Premier Chirac as an adviser on African affairs for the two years of the "cohabitation". When Chirac finally made it to the presidency in 1995, Foccart was brought back to the Elysée at the age of eighty-one, in the main because he still had remarkable contacts with African leaders such as President Omar Bongo of Gabon. He would criticize the devaluation of the CFA franc in January 1994 under Balladur's government, a month after Houphouët-Boigny's death.