France's counterinsurgency culture

France's armed forces, along with their British counterparts, are credited with developing the ‘population-centric’ approach to counterinsurgency. Central to population centric counterinsurgency is the notion that controlling a potentially hostile population and preventing insurgents from interacting with that population is counterinsurgents’ essential mission. France's armed forces gradually developed a distinctive repertoire of counterinsurgency practices beginning in the mid-1830s, when military leaders recognised the limited value of unrestricted violence for pacifying Algeria. Army efforts to apply notions of ‘peaceful penetration’ to conquer the Algerian Sahara however foundered practically and intellectually, leading frustrated field commanders to revert to more punitive methods.Footnote ¹

Much of France's subsequent imperial expansion consequently differed little in its brutality from that of other European states.Footnote ² A cadre of French officers nevertheless persisted that they could pacify territories with less naked force and more recourse to artifices to separate guerrillas from sympathetic populations. France's successive conquests in Indochina, Madagascar, and Morocco then enabled Marshals Joseph-Simon Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey to develop and apply a veritable counterinsurgency doctrine or method.Footnote ³ Later challenges, ranging from combatting the Riff uprising and Great Druze Revolt in the 1920s, to fighting Cold War-era national liberation movements, provided ample scope for successive generations of French officers to further theorise about how to fight insurgencies.

The Cold War-era counter-revolutionary warfare partisans Roger Trinquier and Charles Lacheroy thus drew on this intellectual legacy extending back to earlier theorists of imperial pacification.Footnote ⁴ A uniquely French ‘school’ of counterinsurgency thus gradually extended roots within the French Army. This French variant of population-centric counterinsurgency differs from its British counterpart in its greater emphasis on: militarised civil governance; population controls and psychological warfare; indigenous paramilitary forces; and aggressive elite units.Footnote ⁵

Key to the French approach was a belief that only field commanders can determine the political and military measures that are necessary to defeat an insurgency. French commanders recognised the primacy of political factors over military ones since the late nineteenth century, when Gallieni argued that ‘the best means of pacifying [colonies] … is through the combined impact of [military] force and political action’.Footnote ⁶ Another officer, Lieutenant-Colonel David Galula, building on Gallieni's hypothesis calculated during the Algerian War that ‘A revolutionary war is 20 per cent military and 80 per cent political.’Footnote ⁷ However, rather than holding military force tributary to civil reforms, French theorists stressed the need for military authorities to assume the functions normally performed by civilian agencies.Footnote ⁸

The rationale for military supremacy was that only the armed forces possess the centralised authority and coercive force needed for a comprehensive counterinsurgency effort. As Gallieni argued, ‘Only the military's organization of territories, with its accompanying close surveillance [of populations], is capable of penetrating [society] deeply enough to extirpate all surviving germs of rebellion.’Footnote ⁹ Playing such a large role in civil administration invariably drew officers to assume duties beyond those narrowly associated with military operations. Writing in 1900, Lyautey argued that ‘An army company is not only a military unit but, above all, a reservoir of: foremen, artisans, teachers, gardeners and agronomists.’Footnote ¹⁰ Over half a century later, the French army assumed an even greater range of civilian missions, including education, police duties, and health care.

Besides championing the need for military supremacy, French officers prioritised population control and psychological action. French doctrine held that populations, particularly colonial ones, are fundamentally apolitical and can be compelled through repressive institutions and material incentives to accept any regime's authority. Reflecting this mechanistic view of populations, Galula argued ‘In any case, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists of relying on the favorable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralize or eliminate the hostile minority.’Footnote ¹¹ General André Beaufre expanded on this observation, arguing that counterinsurgencies are won by psychologically ‘provoking a veritable civil war between populations that have rallied, supported by the [French] military, and those that are still dissident’.Footnote ¹² French practitioners recognised, however, that rallying populations is an incremental process whereby counterinsurgents patiently expand pacified zones. Gallieni warned his subordinates against excessive haste by referring to this form of participation as action lente or ‘slow action’.Footnote ¹³

French officers gradually developed institutions of mass surveillance and propaganda to expedite this process. The Army's colonial intelligence services and bureaux arabes, indeed, achieved such a degree of sophistication that French colonies arguably already constituted ‘intelligence states’ prior to the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁴ The failed Indochina War of 1945–54, however, exposed officers to Marxist and Maoist techniques of indoctrination and population control.Footnote ¹⁵ France's new generation of theorists incorporated these totalitarian practices into their existing repertoire, developing a ‘technical-organizational approach … close to systems analysis’ for dominating populations.Footnote ¹⁶ Propaganda campaigns rooted in crowd psychology and measures to encourage inhabitants to inform on one another were foundational to this revised approach. These techniques were institutionalised in the Centre for Training and Preparation in Counter-Guerrilla Warfare (CIPCG), the Urban Protection Dispositive (DPU), and psychological warfare organisations (the cinquièmes bureaux).Footnote ¹⁷

French theorists extolled indigenous paramilitaries’ value at the same time as they developed practices for separating populations from insurgents. Over time, France's military employed large numbers of auxiliaries, including: spahis, goums, moghazenis, harkis, partisans, militias, garde civile, and GMPRs.Footnote ¹⁸ This propensity for indigenous forces has two explanations. One lies in auxiliaries’ superior ability to track guerillas because of their ‘more rustic and lighter’ nature compared with regular forces.Footnote ¹⁹ The second rationale lies in France's tactic of quadrillage (‘gridding’), which employs large static forces to control population centres and transportation arteries. French counterinsurgency theorists from Gallieni to Beaufre argued that the incremental deployment of quadrillage across a territory constitutes a necessary precondition for French forces to ‘rally’ populations.Footnote ²⁰ Paramilitaries became essential because France's metropole never provided enough forces for these tasks.Footnote ²¹

In addition to large numbers of mediocre quadrillage troops, French theorists argued that they needed elite infantry to pursue and destroy rebel bands. A veritable French obsession with guerrilla-hunting units can indeed be traced back to the early stages of France's conquest of Algeria. Unable to catch insurgents, Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud formed fast-marching columns of ‘picked’ volunteers, supported by rugged pack mules and lightweight artillery, beginning in 1836.Footnote ²² Bugeaud argued that only such units could employ his ‘system of mobile and incessant warfare’ to triumph over guerrillas.Footnote ²³ Gallieni later theorised that rapid columns of this sort perform the action vive or ‘energetic actions’, such as destroying rebel bands, needed to complement the progressive pacification of territories through action lente.Footnote ²⁴

The task of pursuing and defeating mobile guerrillas across rugged terrain remains highly challenging for military organisations. Bugeaud's lightly equipped forces sought to achieve this by out-marching and outmaneuvering insurgents. Lyautey, however, argued that elite units must also harness emerging technologies.Footnote ²⁵ French elite forces thus inaugurated a tradition of capitalising on the most modern means of transportation to better come to grips with guerrillas, including gunboats in Tonkin, armored cars in Morocco, and helicopters in Algeria. Over time, the elite units and their novel technologies acquired a mythic status within France's Army. General Marcel Bigeard lyrically described the physical and moral characteristics of an elite airmobile unit of his day in the following terms: ‘An agile, light, feline and maneuverable battalion that possesses an unshakeable faith.’Footnote ²⁶

France's counterinsurgency practices’ long development ensured that they enjoyed widespread support within the military establishment. This does not signify, however, that all French field commanders embraced this ‘French school’ of population centric counterinsurgency. Marshall Philippe-Henri Pétain during the Riff War (1925–7) and General René Cogny in Indochina (1950–4), for example, sought to force their opponents to fight conventional combined-arms battles. Louis Archinard, meanwhile, employed a punitive and brutalising approach in Mali, executing hostages and displacing populations.Footnote ²⁷ Archinard, furthermore, imbibed his subordinates with this philosophy, ultimately inspiring Captain Paul Voulet's and Lieutenant Jules Chanoine's murderous romp across the Sahel in 1898–9.Footnote ²⁸

Aside from these exceptions, however, the French military's counterinsurgency culture remains widespread and deeply rooted. Scholars, indeed, trace a continuous intellectual tradition from Bugeaud's 1836 arrival in Algeria to Galula's writings after Algeria's independence in 1962. This tradition, moreover, embraced many of the French Army's leading lights throughout this period, including Antoine Huré, Georges Catroux and Jean-Jacques Mordacq, in addition to the Gallieni and Lyautey.Footnote ²⁹ Perhaps it is unsurprising under these circumstances that most French officers blamed the defeats in Indochina (1945–54) and Algeria (1954–62) on either the poor execution of tactics or political leaders’ miscalculations rather than any inherent flaws with French counterinsurgency practices. Military leaders therefore continue to conceptualise counterinsurgencies in terms of this doctrinal repertoire of: militarising civil governance; population controls and psychological warfare; raising indigenous paramilitary forces; and aggressive attacks by elite units.

France's counterinsurgency ‘school’ not only remains popular in France, but disproportionately impacts Anglo-American debates as well. Jean Gottmann's chapter in Edward Mead's 1943 Makers of Modern Strategy set French practices apart as uniquely worthy of study.Footnote ³⁰ Translations of Jean Larteguy's novels then provided subsequent generations with a romanticised vision of anti-guerrilla operations. While Larteguy's fiction reached masses, didactic works spoke to more specialised readerships. Consequently, Trinquier's translated La Guerre Moderne exposed readers to France's population control measures and Galula's publication of Counterinsurgency Warfare in English provided a distillation of French counterinsurgency thought.Footnote ³¹ Publication in English set Galula and Trinquier up to re-emerge as the only non-British or American authors referenced in the 2006 U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.Footnote ³²

Counterinsurgencies and civil-military crises

Although France's distinctive counterinsurgency practices enjoyed widespread support within the military establishment, the Fifth Republic's political leaders considered these same practices inimical to civilian control of the nation's armed forces. Campaigns of colonial pacification all too often escaped the control of France's democratically elected leaders, saddling them with unwanted conquests and military commitments. The French military's further evolution of counterinsurgency doctrine later contributed to civil-military crises during France's wars of decolonisation.

Experts have long recognised that expeditionary counterinsurgency operations are corrosive to good civil-military relations and have advanced three arguments explaining why. The problem lies, for principle-agent theory's proponents, in the difficulty that political ‘principals’ face in controlling their military ‘agents’ when the latter conduct complex counterinsurgency operations abroad.Footnote ³³ According to a second group of scholars, counterinsurgencies tempt armed forces to substitute their authority for that of their civilian masters by gradually eroding clear distinctions between military and civilian roles.Footnote ³⁴ A third group contends that ‘internal security’ doctrines prompt military interventions in politics by redefining the armed forces’ missions to include such intangible goals as defending a nation's moral health.Footnote ³⁵ Civil-military scholars thus agree that counterinsurgencies undermine civilian leaders’ control over their armed forces although they differ on exactly why this occurs.

However, as will be shown, French armed forces’ distinctive practices aggravated the civil-military tensions that counterinsurgencies produce. For example, while civilian leaders invariably have trouble evaluating counterinsurgency operations because of the absence of clear metrics for measuring success, this quandary was accentuated in France by the armed forces’ insistence that autonomous commanders should wield supreme authority over all of counterinsurgencies’ military and civilian components. Expressing this normative belief, Lyautey asserted that, ‘The first act of any commanding general operating at 3,000 leagues [from the homeland] should be to cut the telegraph wire to free himself from the metropole's harassing instructions.’Footnote ³⁶

French field commanders often abused the autonomy conferred upon them to pursue agendas at variance with their orders. A. S. Kanya-Forstner, for example, demonstrates how careerism and pro-colonial ideologies drove nineteenth-century commanders to overstep their mandates and conquer territories that were neither profitable nor desired by France's government.Footnote ³⁷ Lyautey, likewise, sparked an international crisis that nearly led to a European war with his unauthorised occupation of Moroccan territory.Footnote ³⁸ These abuses, grave as they are, pale in comparison with commanders’ actions during the 1954–62 Algerian War. Field commanders twice sabotaged government efforts to negotiate an end of the war, first by intercepting the aircraft carrying rebel leaders to peace negotiations in 1956 and, second, by bombing a village in Tunisia in 1958.Footnote ³⁹ France's commander in Algeria, Raoul Salan, exploited the domestic upheaval following the latter incident to overthrow France's Fourth Republic.

The French military's population control and psychological warfare practices provided officers with both a rationale and tools for further intervening in politics. To counter insurgents’ calls to fight for independence, military propagandists promised to fully integrate Muslim Algerians into French political life and dramatically raise their standard of living. Successive governments’ unwillingness to commit themselves to this objective – or indeed offer an unambiguous vision of the future – prompted officers to impose their preferences on the government.Footnote ⁴⁰ Their counterinsurgency techniques, meanwhile, widened the range of tools they possess for shaping public opinion and governance.Footnote ⁴¹ The officers who plotted the May 1958 coup, for example, merely turned the techniques and institutions of psychological action against France's elected government. In one example, Trinquier employed the DPU, originally developed for ferreting out terrorists, to mobilise Algeria's population against its elected leaders.Footnote ⁴² Afterwards, proponents of psychological action and population control, such as colonels Antoine Argoud, Charles Lacherory, and Yves Godard, directed the 1961 coup attempt against Charles de Gaulle and then led the Organisation Armée Secrète's terror campaign.Footnote ⁴³

Even France's heavy use of paramilitary forces contributed to its civil-military problems. Officers developed deep emotional ties with the local paramilitaries they led and felt personally responsible for their well-being. Such bonds generated conflicting loyalties whenever French governments adopted policies prejudicial to auxiliaries’ interests.Footnote ⁴⁴ Officers who served with local auxilliaries, for example, were more likely to participate in the 1958 and 1961 putsches in Algeria than those who did not.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hélie de Saint Marc, one of the 1961 putsch's participants, expressed this sentiment when he wrote, ‘When General Challe spoke to me [about joining the putsch], I remembered … the day in 1948 when I agreed to lead partisans from Talung [in Indochina] and again felt my disgrace [about abandoning them] … A man who consciously betrays other men is a criminal.’Footnote ⁴⁶

The elite paratroop and Foreign Legion units that played prominent roles in France's counterinsurgency doctrine also spearheaded the military's interventions into politics. These units’ continuous engagement in mobile anti-guerrilla operations severed their contact with civil society. The Foreign Legion's professional nature and its soldiers’ cosmopolitan backgrounds exacerbated this problem further, rendering soldiers liable to uncritically follow officers into political adventures.Footnote ⁴⁷ French elite soldiers therefore developed belief systems that elevated military considerations over obedience to political leaders and transformed France's elite into the praetorian ‘lost soldiers’ that overthrew the Fourth Republic and nearly did likewise to its successor.Footnote ⁴⁸

In sum, France's distinctive counterinsurgency practices undermined civilian leaders’ control of the armed forces. Military commanders consequently pursued private objectives at the expense of the government's foreign policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ campaigns of imperial pacification. These same counterinsurgency practices later turned parts of the armed forces into a danger to French democracy during the Algeria War. In short, although counterinsurgencies frequently strain civil-military relations, France's practices were particularly deleterious and provoked the most serious civil-military crises experienced by an advanced modern democracy.

Civil-military control institutions

French leaders considered the armed force's counterinsurgency practices a threat from the Fifth Republic's foundation in 1958. It was in the name of counterinsurgency doctrine, indeed, that some of France's most decorated officers and premier units overthrew the Fourth Republic, attempted to overthrow the Fifth, and waged a terrorist campaign against the state. De Gaulle's new government ensured itself against any recurrence of France's civil-military crises by developing institutions to curtail the armed forces’ autonomy and by subjecting them to an unprecedented degree of political control.

De Gaulle personally believed that the key to viable civil-military relations lay in reorienting France's army from population-centred counterinsurgency to conventional military operations. De Gaulle told close collaborators towards the Algerian War's conclusion that, ‘That's enough with colonial wars. We are having all the problems in the world extricating ourselves from the one in Algeria [1954–62] and I do not want to engage in a new one.’Footnote ⁴⁹ He therefore enjoined officers to shift their intellectual focus from counterinsurgency to the combined arms manoeuvres and tactical nuclear strikes needed to defend against the Soviet Union. De Gaulle told colleagues repeatedly that he would ‘return the army to the Rhine’ and ‘end the [army's] focus on Algeria’.Footnote ⁵⁰ De Gaulle, therefore, reconfigured most of the Army for high-intensity warfare and promoted atomic strategists, such as Charles Ailleret and Paul Stehlin, at the expense of counterinsurgency specialists.Footnote ⁵¹

French foreign policy, however, precluded an exclusive focus on the Soviet threat. De Gaulle's desire to preserve France's African sphere of influence – codified in military cooperation agreements concluded with all of France's sub-Saharan ex-colonies except Guinea – obliged France to intervene in more African conflicts than any other power.Footnote ⁵² France's 1972 Defense White Paper articulated France's intervention doctrine, by defining French overseas interests in Africa as the ‘third circle’ of French security, whose defence would be guaranteed by military units permanently deployed to African bases.Footnote ⁵³ This policy ensured, however, that France's armed forces would again fight insurgents far away from France's metropole since intra-state conflicts pose the primary threat to this third circle.Footnote ⁵⁴

De Gaulle and his colleagues recognised how detrimental prior counterinsurgencies had been to French civil-military relations and wanted to avoid any recurrence of past problems. They therefore developed four institutional strategies for better controlling the armed forces during interventions. These include: (1) the creation of a powerful civilian Secretariat in Paris; (2) the appointment of special ambassadors to oversee interventions; (3) civilianising interventions’ non-combat functions; and (4) creating parallel military staffs to maximise civilian leaders’ options.

The first strategy involved designating civilian, rather than military leaders, to oversee military interventions’ political and military facets. De Gaulle inaugurated this policy during the Algerian War in 1958 by appointing civilian fonctionnaire Paul Delouvrier to replace General Salan as France's proconsul in Algeria.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although de Gaulle viewed Delouvrier's appointment as a temporary expedient, he also developed more permanent structures to ensure a similar level of oversight over future interventions in sub-Saharan Africa.

To this end, he established a General Secretariat for African and Malagasy Affairs staffed by 150 personnel.Footnote ⁵⁶ Institutionally, de Gaulle's creation of this Secretariat set France's Africa policy apart from its policies towards other continents by subordinating the former directly to France's Presidency while the Foreign Ministry oversaw the latter. De Gaulle reinforced the Secretariat's importance by appointing one of his closest collaborators, Jacques Foccart, to oversee it in 1960.Footnote ⁵⁷ Foccart's discretion and loyalty earned him unrivalled access to de Gaulle, including daily meetings, after de Gaulle's ascension to the Presidency. Foccart's stature thus ensured that the position of the French President's General Secretary for African and Malagasy Affairs, otherwise known as the President's ‘Monsieur Afrique’, would remain powerful under his successors.

Foccart and his Secretariat drew on a repertoire of institutions and procedures for managing interventions. The Secretariat benefited from its outset from a close partnership with the French intelligence service's section specialising in African affairs (Sector ‘N’ of the SDECE).Footnote ⁵⁸ Through both Sector N and his own personal networks, Foccart orchestrated clandestine activities, ranging from coups to mercenary operations, without calling upon France's regular military. Foccart and his successors also appointed handpicked ‘special’ ambassadors for states whenever the local political situation deteriorated beyond a certain threshold.Footnote ⁵⁹ French governments could then give these ambassadors pro-consular authority over military forces in the eventuality of French interventions.Footnote ⁶⁰

French leaders’ third institutional strategy for controlling future military interventions was narrowly circumscribing the armed forces’ role. Whereas soldiers hitherto undertook many functions normally performed by civilian bodies, France's government now ‘civilianised’ counterinsurgencies’ non-combat components. To this end, they administratively separated counterinsurgencies’ military and political aspects, and entrusted the latter to civil service personnel.Footnote ⁶¹ This role differentiation limited the armed forces’ responsibility for interventions’ outcomes and their contact with local populations.

The government's fourth new mechanism was a ‘divide and rule’ system embodied in parallel inter-service military staffs that maximise political leaders’ ability to control interventions from Paris. In addition to the armed forces’ Joint Staff (EMA), France's president controls his private military staff (EMP), the prime minister seeks military advice from his general secretariat for national defence (SGDN) and the minister of defence solicits options from his military cabinet. Thus, rather than dealing with a monolithic military hierarchy, rival inter-service staffs generate multiple recommendations and enable political leaders to select those options most consonant with their preferences.Footnote ⁶²

There are powerful reasons for anticipating that the enhanced civilian control that these institutions were designed to achieve would also alter the French interventions’ fundamental character. A long tradition of social science research demonstrates that civilian policymakers possess preferences different from those of military commanders on how to employ force.Footnote ⁶³ In contrast to military leaders’ preference for employing maximum force to achieve decisive victories, political decision-makers are rarely willing to spend more economic or military capital than needed to obtain a high probability of success. As one scholar observed, military commanders prefer to optimise the probability of victory through overwhelming force, while civilian leaders tend to ‘satisfice’ by reducing commitments to the minimal levels needed to attain their goals.Footnote ⁶⁴ The type of war that states wage thus depends on whose preferences – political leaders’ or military commanders’ – prevail when it comes to designing a campaign.

As Deborah Avant demonstrates, variations between states’ political institutions shape politicians’ ability to impose their preferences.Footnote ⁶⁵ De Gaulle's development of sweeping civil-military control institutions, within this context, should logically result in operations reflecting their desiderata to an exceptional degree. As a result, rather than seeking victory, national leaders are likely to limit their aims to advancing narrowly defined interests. Since intervening states can frequently achieve objectives such as reassuring allies and deterring rivals without winning decisively, the Fifth Republic's leaders can be expected to minimise the resources they commit and to guard against open-ended engagements. Political leaders’ propensity for strategic satisficing leads them to intersperse military operations with diplomatic negotiations because continuous communication is a prerequisite for resolving conflicts in the absence of military victory.Footnote ⁶⁶

In sum, the Fifth Republic's founding leaders developed institutions to enhance civilian control over military operations. They attempted this by: appointing civilian proconsuls to oversee interventions, civilianising counterinsurgencies’ non-military components, and exploiting rivalries between parallel inter-service staffs. These institutions will, if successful at their original objective, likely alter the fundamental nature of French counterinsurgencies. Operations would, in theory, be characterised by civilian proconsuls overseeing the combined use of diplomacy and minimal force to achieve limited objectives. However, the question remains as to whether French military culture or policymaking institutions exercise a greater impact on the Fifth Republic's counterinsurgencies since the military establishment's existing practices clash with the Fifth Republic's civil-military dynamics.

Case selection

France's armed forces’ ingrained counterinsurgency practices and the Fifth Republic's civil-military institutions yield very different predictions about how France's Fifth Republic conducts counterinsurgencies. Perhaps nowhere are these distinctions starker than on the twin questions of who – civilian or military leaders – controls interventions and whether they will conduct brief or protracted campaigns. If military culture is the most important factor, then recent French counterinsurgencies should strongly resemble preceding ones, with military proconsuls progressively pacifying rebellious territories. If the Fifth Republics civil-military institutions are predominant, then different dynamics of political micromanagement and strategic satisficing should prevail.

Besides differing on counterinsurgencies’ direction and duration, military culture and civil-military institutions suggest different mechanisms for France to achieve its objectives. De Gaulle designed the Fifth Republic's civil-military institutions to facilitate the closely coupled application of diplomacy and military force. Policymakers can be expected, under these circumstances, to employ careful doses of limited forces to reassure allies and coerce enemies into negotiating. The French militaries’ counterinsurgency culture, contrarily, privileges the gradual, yet inexorable application of action lente to pacify populations and action vive to annihilate recalcitrant guerrilla bands. The military, within this context, achieves victory by spreading a network of quadrillage forces across a territory and then subjecting inhabitants to population control and psychological warfare campaigns.

French scholars themselves disagree about whether civil-military institutions or military culture plays a greater role. Vincent Joly and Raphaël Granvaud emphasise continuities between earlier counterinsurgencies and France's recent African interventions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Samy Cohen and Jean Guisnel, contrarily, contend that the Fifth Republic's institutions promote civilian micromanagement of military operations.Footnote ⁶⁸

Answering this question about how France conducts counterinsurgencies has powerful implications for scholars and policymakers alike. France has, by any measure, conducted more military interventions than any state, besides the United States, since the Second World War. The most authoritative list chronicles 309 distinct French military operations conducted abroad since 1945.Footnote ⁶⁹ Many of these operations were small, ranging from disaster relief to evacuating French citizens from conflict zones. France is nonetheless remarkably militarily proactive, even taking into account the large numbers of small operations.

French interventionism is particularly significant for sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 44 per cent of France's interventions.Footnote ⁷⁰ France's propensity for African interventions and other states hesitancy to engage in Africa makes France sub-Saharan Africa's most important external security actor. French forces, indeed, played a key role at many critical junctures, from suppressing a 1977–8 uprising threatening Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko to driving al-Qaeda from Timbuktu in 2013. Table 1 below illustrates the 14 African counterinsurgency operations France conducted under the Fifth Republic.Footnote ⁷¹

Table 1. Fifth Republic interventions in African civil wars.

Note: *Signifies that statistics include only ground forces.

The frequency and effectiveness of France's interventions lead many to regard France as Africa's de facto gendarme.Footnote ⁷² Understanding how a medium-sized country like France intervenes militarily so often at so little political or economic cost to itself is thus of a more general interest to International Relations scholars.

Evaluating the relative impact of military culture and civil-military institutions on France's African interventions is, however, unavoidably complex because of the need to ascertain both the nature of what France did as well as the policymaking process that resulted in those actions. Accomplishing this within an article's confines privileges a single case study rather than addressing multiple cases in insufficient detail. Arguably, France's 1969–72 intervention in Chad stands out as an ideal case study for this endeavour because of its unique combination of representativeness, salience, and available sources.

In terms of representativeness, the 2,851 personnel committed to this intervention place it exceptionally close to the mean (2,831 personnel) for the African counterinsurgencies involving combat by French ground forces.Footnote ⁷³ This intervention is also particularly salient today because of France's rediscovery of it as a ‘successful’ counterinsurgency. Colonel Michel Goya, indeed, argues in official publications and popular magazines alike that France conducted an ‘exemplary counterinsurgency’ and won a ‘forgotten victory’ in Chad.Footnote ⁷⁴

France's 1969–72 Chad intervention offers additional advantages as a case study in terms of the range of primary sources accessible. Triangulation among different categories of documents is invaluable when it comes to penetrating civil-military planning processes that are rarely articulated in memoirs. Declassifications, within this context, enable me draw on four categories of documents, including: military documents accessed at France's Service Historique de la Défense (SHD); the military's internal study, Les Interventions Militaires Françaises au Tchad (IMFT); French diplomatic documents from Documents Diplomatiques Français (DDF); and external British assessments from The National Archives (TNA). I further draw on published Chadian and French journals and interviews conducted with France's former ambassador to Chad to provide the most comprehensive account yet of this intervention.

In sum, France's 1969–72 Chad intervention constitutes the best case for assessing whether the military's counterinsurgency culture or the Fifth Republic's institutions play a greater role in shaping French interventions in African conflicts. This article tests these hypotheses by successively examining four phases of France's intervention where civilian and military preferences clashed, including: France's initial decision to intervene, how France structured its intervention, how decision-makers integrated diplomatic and military initiatives, and finally how France's government disengaged its forces. A subsequent section then assesses whether conclusions drawn from this case hold true for subsequent interventions despite communications technologies’ development and the French public's increasingly positive opinion of their armed forces.

Choosing to intervene

France's colonial policies and miscalculations by Chad's post-independence leaders sparked an insurgency that engulfed Chad by 1968 and threatened to overthrow the government. Because Chad's borders are the product of competing French, Anglo-Egyptian, and Italian imperialisms, the state encompasses three distinct populations – Christian/animist farmers, Muslim farmers, and Muslim nomads – each of which includes numerous tribes.Footnote ⁷⁵ The colonial state's burdens of compulsory labour and military conscription, however, fell heaviest on the Christian/animist Sara ethnicity of southern Chad.Footnote ⁷⁶ It was one of these Sara, François Tombalbaye, who won the presidential elections France organised as it withdrew and then exploited his newfound power to redistribute resources to his own people.Footnote ⁷⁷

Discriminatory policies and excessive taxation drove Chadian Muslims to revolt in 1965. Chad's 3,000 soldiers responded by burning villages and slaughtering livestock, which only drove more Chadians to join the rebellion.Footnote ⁷⁸ Exiles, foremost among whom was Ibrahim Abatcha, federated this emerging resistance under the aegis of the Front de Liberation Nationale du Tchad (Chad Liberation Front or FROLINAT).Footnote ⁷⁹ The traditional leader of northern Chad's nomadic Tubu ethnic group, the Derdeï meanwhile entered into dissidence in 1966.Footnote ⁸⁰ Foreign support – from North Korea, Egypt, Syria, and Sudan – then fuelled FROLINAT's growth such that only Tombalbaye's ethnic power base in southern Chad remained loyal by mid-1968.Footnote ⁸¹

The process by which France came to intervene in this conflict witnessed the systematic elevation of civilian over military expertise, and the privileging of diplomatic over tactical considerations. French political leaders initially had little desire to intervene because Chad was one of France's poorest ex-colonies and its hostile terrain and warlike inhabitants led many to consider the country a quagmire. Francophone African leaders, however, urged de Gaulle to support Tombalbaye because they viewed Chad as a test of whether France would uphold its commitments to other allies. Madagascar's President Philibert Tsiranana and Niger's Hamani Diori led the way in trying to persuade French leaders that their African allies would lose faith in France's security guarantees if France refused to intervene.Footnote ⁸²

Tombalbaye, for his part, openly courted other partners. After failing to convince the superpowers to provide aid, Tombalbaye found an eager supporter in Israel. Israel provided development assistance from 1964 onwards in exchange for Chadian diplomatic support at the United Nations.Footnote ⁸³ Israeli leaders later expanded their aid programme to win Tombalbaye's support for efforts to destabilize its enemies by supplying arms to Sudan's Anya-Nya rebels and sponsoring Prince Abdallah al-Abid al-Senoussi's plan to invade Muammar Gaddafi's anti-Zionist regime.Footnote ⁸⁴ Israel thus progressed from organising Tombalbaye's youth movement to its paramilitary security force, and finally its commando units.Footnote ⁸⁵

This background, of francophone African leaders urging intervention and Israel threatening France's pre-eminence in Chad, provided the background for French leaders’ debates on whether to intervene. Although French policymakers regarded Chad as a quagmire with little intrinsic value, key actors had already concluded that France needed to do more. De Gaulle's Secretary General for African Affairs, Jacques Foccart argued as early as 1967 that, ‘Soon we will have to take responsibility for this [Chadian] situation if we want to prevent matters from becoming more toxic.’Footnote ⁸⁶ De Gaulle himself observed in early 1968 that, ‘Chad constitutes a section of one wall in our [African] edifice. It is a rotten bit of wall, but it is one that must nonetheless be kept upright.’Footnote ⁸⁷ France's debate on whether to intervene came to a head on 25 August 1968 when Tombalbaye invoked the 1960 Franco-Chadian treaty to request military assistance.Footnote ⁸⁸

France's government initially responded to unrest in Chad by dispatching a senior civil servant. On behalf of de Gaulle, Foccart, took the initiative of replacing the career diplomat representing France with a special ambassador better qualified for Chad's burgeoning civil war in January 1968.Footnote ⁸⁹ This special ambassador, Fernand Wibaux, a Foccart loyalist, had developed expertise in clandestine operations while in the French Resistance. Wibaux, in turn, determined that France needed to act militarily when Tubu rebels encircled the Chadian Army garrison at Aozou. He advocated a short, swift operation to save the Aozou garrison as a means of shoring up Tombalbaye's regime and reassuring France's other African ex-colonies.Footnote ⁹⁰ France's Joint Military Staff under General Michel Fourquet, however, opposed intervening and argued that Chad could become a quagmire.Footnote ⁹¹

France's cabinet weighed Wibaux's and Fourquet's recommendations and sided with Wibaux, ordering a company of French paratroops to break the rebel siege of Aozou. De Gaulle personally specified that this intervention ‘will have a limited duration and we cannot envision stationing our forces permanently in Tibesti’.Footnote ⁹² The paratroops were quickly dispatched and accomplished their mission in two weeks without suffering casualties. A token force of five French counterinsurgency aircraft – piston-engined Skyraiders – then deployed to northern Chad to deter further rebel attacks as the paratroops withdrew.Footnote ⁹³ These actions, however, failed to improve Chad's security, which paradoxically deteriorated even faster as a result of France's intervention. The Aozou garrison, indeed, mutinied and abandoned their post rather than remain once the siege had been lifted.Footnote ⁹⁴

This act of indiscipline emboldened rebels throughout Chad. Rebel ranks soon swelled to 2,330 personnel who launched 227 attacks during the first half of 1969 alone.Footnote ⁹⁵ Rebel forces with soaring morale, yet poor armaments began defeating Chadian forces in conventional engagements, repulsing the government's ‘Mokofi’ offensive in January 1969 and annihilating a quarter of Chad's gendarmerie in March.Footnote ⁹⁶ France's handful of attack aircraft failed to arrest this dynamic because pilots failed to spot rebels on the ground and Chadian soldiers proved unskilled at guiding them by radio.Footnote ⁹⁷

Wibaux responded to these events by lobbying for another limited intervention. Calculating that French forces could quickly destroy FROLINAT's ill-equipped guerrillas in central Chad, Wibaux paved the way for a concerted civil-military effort to consolidate the Chadian government's control over Chad's most populous and prosperous provinces. Wibaux's renewed calls to intervene met with persistent hostility from the Joint Military Staff. Two civilian policymakers, Foccart and Cooperation Minister Yvon Bourges, travelled to Chad on the government's behalf to assess the situation and rallied to Wibaux's point of view.Footnote ⁹⁸ De Gaulle and his cabinet validated this delegation's assessment and began organising France's military intervention. It was thus on the basis of civilian policymakers’ judgements and against military objections that France deployed forces.

Organising the intervention

Having elected to deploy combat troops, France's government endowed Wibaux with proconsular power to manage all of the intervention's political and military components. While Wibaux's elevation guaranteed civilian supremacy on the ground in Chad, the government further limited the armed forces’ autonomy by clearly distinguishing between the campaign's military and administrative aspects. Authority over counterinsurgency activities was invested in two distinct bodies: combat forces under a Military Delegation (DM) and a civilian-run Mission for Administrative Reform (MRA). While a military officer led the former institution, a civilian functionary controlled the latter.

Although such a division of labour may appear straightforward, counterinsurgencies notoriously blur distinctions between civil and military activities. France's government, therefore, defined the MRA's role as broadly as possible and the DM's as narrowly as feasible. It was the MRA that consequently was given the lead role in: increasing Muslims’ representation within Chad's administration, re-empowering traditional rulers, digging village wells, and building schools. France's government even granted the MRA authority over Chadian paramilitary forces, which the DM desperately wanted to control because of the role that such indigenous forces played in the military's counterinsurgency doctrine.Footnote ⁹⁹ French policymakers, in short, entrusted the MRA with managing the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign central to defeating Chad's insurgents. Thus, although force was deemed essential for achieving France's objectives, the armed forces would be monitored and circumscribed via institutional arrangements privileging civilian authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

De Gaulle's advisors took great care to select pliant field commanders in addition to institutionally circumscribing the armed forces’ role. One of France's most distinguished soldiers, General Marcel Bigeard, had already been promised command of African operations.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, Bigeard was both a media icon because of his exploits in Indochina and Algeria and an adherent to the counterinsurgency doctrines that had proven so toxic to civil-military relations.Footnote ¹⁰²

The French cabinet feared that Bigeard would operate too autonomously and therefore handpicked another commander. This officer, Brigadier-General Michel Arnaud, was judged more amenable to political directives and less popular with the media. The French government emphasised the DM's subordinate role in its instructions to Arnaud declaring that, ‘The place you occupy in the French military hierarchy in Chad makes you the “military adjutant” to France's ambassador. Your job is to suggest to the Ambassador means for obtaining a given objective and giving the orders necessary for a mission's accomplishment upon the Ambassador's request.’Footnote ¹⁰³

These command arrangements initially satisfied all parties. Upon arriving in Chad, Arnaud used his French forces (1,390 personnel in mid-1969) as a strike force to destroy rebel concentrations. He ordered two Foreign Legion companies to eradicate guerrilla bands in Guera province. The rebels’ overconfidence after repeatedly defeating poorly-trained Chadian forces led them to commit the fatal error of attacking the Legionnaires, which led to its comprehensive defeat in 24–9 April 1969.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This victory psychologically stunned the rebels, who became less aggressive throughout central Chad. However, the Foreign Legion's success created problems of its own. Rebels now eschewed contact with French forces, which in turn lacked the numbers to oblige rebels to fight.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

French forces’ inability to bring rebels to battle soon generated friction between Arnaud and his civilian superiors. Arnaud planned to establish a web of village militias as per the French doctrine of progressively extending quadrillage across a territory. Wibaux, for his part, considered militias and other irregular forces indispensable to both Chadian administrators’ authority and reestablishing traditional rulers’ authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He therefore subordinated militias to the civilian-run MRA rather than Arnaud's command.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Arnaud excoriated this arrangement for undermining his ability to enact the action lente considered so essential to counterinsurgencies. Worse still from Arnaud's perspective, Chadian administrators and rulers employed the militias provided by the MRA to bully villagers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Arnaud's relations with other members of the Franco-Chadian military committee deteriorated during the summer of 1969 over both the militia issue and other command decisions.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ His proposal to withdraw garrisons from two northern prefectures, for example, alienated both Tombalbaye and Wibaux, who worried about the psychological implications of ‘ceding’ territory to the rebellion.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Arnaud then clashed with Tombalbaye and Chadian commanders over Chadian forces’ use of indiscriminant violence, which Arnaud argued drove more Chadian villagers to join the rebellion. Arnaud thereafter lobbied for greater authority over Chadian units. Matters reached a climax when General Arnaud and President Tombalbaye publicly shouted at one another after Tombalbaye advocated massacring 15,000 pro-FROLINAT villagers in August 1969.Footnote ¹¹¹

Arnaud's poor relations with the MRA and the Franco-Chadian military committee prompted Wibaux to obtain his removal on 8 August 1969.Footnote ¹¹² Wibaux dramatically demonstrated the predominance of civilian over military authority with this act. While Arnaud had quarrelled with his civilian and Chadian counterparts, he had done so on behalf of the Army's cherished counterinsurgency principles and international human rights law.

Within this context, Arnaud's drive to control Chadian paramilitary forces reflected his desire to replicate the military-dominated command structures of past counterinsurgencies. The French armed forces’ internal investigation concluded as much, finding Arnaud's conduct irreproachable.Footnote ¹¹³ The fact that French political authorities relieved Arnaud under such circumstances demonstrated their willingness to punish commanders for the mere act of disagreeing with their political superiors. French commanders, within this context, only enjoyed the freedom to enact their favoured tactical recipes, such as quadrillage, so long as they did not conflict with civilian policymakers’ vision for how to accomplish France's objectives.

Fighting and negotiating

Brigadier-General Edouard Cortadellas succeeded Arnaud as France's military commander. Although Cortadellas was, like Arnaud, a veteran of Indochina and Algeria, the conditions of his appointment chastened him to the point that he never challenged his political superiors’ authority. However, Arnaud's clashes with the MRA and his Chadian counterparts had revealed management shortcomings in France's counterinsurgency. Wibaux and Cortadellas therefore created two institutions to facilitate a comprehensive counterinsurgency effort: a Franco-Chadian General Staff to improve inter-military collaboration and a civil-military general staff to promote cooperation between the DM and MRA.Footnote ¹¹⁴

These new institutions promoted more effective cooperation between French civil and military actors and between the French and Chadian components of France's counterinsurgency. Moreover, Wibaux's incessant requests for more military support drove France's government to send reinforcements, doubling France's contingent to 2,851 personnel with 34 aircraft by late 1969.Footnote ¹¹⁵ France, meanwhile, also agreed to fund the Chadian army's expansion from 1,900 to 4,300 personnel.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Wibaux and Cortadellas then replaced Chadian field commanders, whom they considered unqualified, with 610 French officers and non-commissioned officers, sending the Chadians on a two-year officer training programme.Footnote ¹¹⁷ French and Chadian forces’ strength and management therefore improved rapidly in early 1970.

Wibaux continued to dominate French strategy despite the arrival of Cortadellas and reinforcements. Simply put, French forces would clear an area of insurgents, after which regular Chadian forces would deploy and the MRA would establish paramilitary units. These lower-quality forces would then prevent insurgents from returning to the area as the MRA reinstalled traditional rulers and reformed local administration. French authorities hoped to pacify Chadian regions one by one in this way, starting with economically productive regions near Chad's capital and then shifting to poorer and more peripheral regions.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Franco-Chadian forces consequently launched successive offensives in Guera, Chari Baguirmi, Ouaddaï, and Salamat provinces between October 1969 and June 1970. ^{Footnote 119} The MRA established sixty more village militias and reinstalled the Sultans of Ouaddaï and Sila in their traditional domains in these offensives’ wake.Footnote ¹²⁰ Having distributed 2,410 firearms to paramilitaries, more Chadians were now fighting with the French than against them.Footnote ¹²¹ As soon as paramilitary forces detected rebel bands, horse-mounted paramilitaries, and motorised Chadian units converged from multiple directions. In this manner Franco-Chadian forces decimated one rebel band after another, thereby pacifying central Chad by July 1970.Footnote ¹²²

Successes in central Chad were, however, offset by developments in northern Chad. Gaddafi's new regime in Libya raised new perils for Tombalbaye. Gaddafi prioritised ejecting Israel from Chad as soon as he came to power in September 1969, but his colleagues in Libya's Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) opposed overtly intervening.Footnote ¹²³ Revelations in June 1970 about Prince Abdallah al-Abid al-Senoussi's plans to invade Libya with Israeli assistance from Chadian territory, however, then convinced Libyan leaders to support Chad's insurgents.Footnote ¹²⁴

Libya's government immediately deployed its two most reliable infantry battalions to the Chadian frontier to intimidate Chad's government and then began supplying rebels with Second World War vintage armaments.Footnote ¹²⁵ More importantly, Gaddafi obliged six hundred Tubu veterans of Libya's recently abolished Royal Guard to join their rebel kinsmen in northern Chad and recruited another 150 expatriate Chadians and trained them to fight for FROLINAT.Footnote ¹²⁶ Gaddafi's infusions of fresh blood and armaments transformed the struggle in northern Chad that had been languishing with only four hundred rebels.Footnote ¹²⁷

The emboldened Tubus now launched offensives against four objectives: Fada, Zoui, Zouar, and Bedo. While the Tubus failed at Zoui and Fada, they won psychologically significant victories at Zouar and Bedo. Rebels defeated a Chadian Army unit near Zouar in June and then blockaded Zouar's garrison in September.Footnote ¹²⁸ Slightly thereafter, on 11 October, another Tubu band ambushed French paratroops, killing 12 and wounding 15.Footnote ¹²⁹ Coming in quick succession, these reverses stunned French policymakers. Cortadellas, indeed, admitted that ‘The situation is entirely new and extremely grave. I no longer possess either the numeric superiority, firepower advantage or mobility to deal with more than one trouble spot at a time … I have lost the initiative and can only hope to react.’Footnote ¹³⁰

Rebels dominated northern Chad even after a hastily assembled relief column broke the siege of Zouar in late October and a heliborne force destroyed a rebel supply base at Goubone.Footnote ¹³¹ Cortadellas, therefore, pleaded for reinforcements to mount a decisive counteroffensive.Footnote ¹³² He envisioned elite forces launching rapid successive anti-guerrilla sweeps in France's Army's best tradition of action vive. Cortadellas anticipated that coming to grips with elusive Tubu rebels would be difficult, but expected that his heliborne infantry and motorised columns could maintain a high enough operations tempo long enough to erradicate them.Footnote ¹³³ Wibaux and Foccart, however, only aimed to coerce Tubu rebel leaders into negotiating a settlement. They, therefore, approved preparations for an offensive whose duration and aims were far more limited than Cortadellas desired.Footnote ¹³⁴

France's government consequently sent reinforcements and materiel for two months for France's largest offensive, codenamed Bison. Cortadellas attempted to use the 1,250 soldiers (900 French and 350 Chadian), 150 vehicles, 18 helicopters, 8 attack aircraft, and 1,600,000 liters of stockpiled fuel at his disposal to crush the Tubu rebels beginning on 10 January 1971.Footnote ¹³⁵ Operation Bison's very size backfired by convincing rebels to hide rather than fight. During the offensive's first phase (Bison Alpha), the targeted rebel band (150 combatants) escaped detection. During the next phase (Bison Bravo), French forces located twenty rebels, but suffered two dead and five wounded in their haste to engage them.Footnote ¹³⁶

The Tubu‘s traditional leader, the Derdeï, announced at this point his willingness to negotiate provided that France agreed to a ceasefire. Cortadellas, for his part, strongly opposed a ceasefire, arguing that further operations would defeat the Tubus outright.Footnote ¹³⁷ The cabinet, however, overruled Cortadellas and imposed a ‘negotiating pause’ on 12 February. The Derdeï, though, duplicitously dragged out negotiations to provide rebels the opportunity to either conceal themselves amongst the local population or flee deeper into the mountains. French forces consequently failed to locate rebels when they renewed their offensive (Bison Charlie) after the Derdeï broke off negotiations.Footnote ¹³⁸

France's largest offensive in Chad consequently failed after neutralising only 16 rebels out of a thousand active in northern Chad.Footnote ¹³⁹ Cortadellas therefore cancelled the planned follow-on operation to pacify northern Chad with locally recruited paramilitary forces before it had even begun. France's heavy consumption of materiel meanwhile left French forces temporarily unable to conduct intensive operations. The Bison offensive had indeed consumed 2,400,000 liters of fuel and wore wheeled vehicles down to the point that they were discarded.

Worse than the offensive's material results were its psychological ramifications. French elite forces’ failure to defeat Tubu rebels consequently discouraged Chadian officials, who had hitherto nourished an exaggerated faith in the efficacy of French arms.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Cortadellas's efforts to apply the French counterinsurgency practice of action vive to northern Chad thus foundered upon civilian officials’ more limited objectives and their ability to curtail the Army's offensive. The Defense Ministry's own internal study later reflected on Cortadellas's reduced authority, observing ‘The commander of the intervention was not … a proconsul in the way commanders in Hanoi and Algiers had been … . Although he retained some autonomy … it was nothing compared to that enjoyed by his predecessors during past wars.’Footnote ¹⁴¹

Stabilisation and disengagement

The upsurge of Tubu attacks in 1970 and Operation Bison's failure in early 1971 confronted French policymakers with a new state of affairs. Rather than confidently anticipating the rebellion's collapse, political leaders now recognised that obtaining decisive victories would be prohibitively expensive. Major figures within France's government, including Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann, feared increased casualties and argued for withdrawing French forces in July 1971, despite the worsening security situation.Footnote ¹⁴² Cortadellas and other commanders, however, argued that more offensives would maintain the initiative and gradually wear down the guerrillas. President Pompidou steered a middle course between these alternatives of precipitous withdrawal and an open-ended commitment to victory by decreeing that he would withdraw from Chad before France's 1973 legislative campaign. Pompidou entrusted Wibaux with laying the groundwork for France to withdraw without undermining its broader African alliances.

Wibaux achieved this by refocusing France's military and administrative efforts on central Chad, and its diplomacy on depriving the rebellion of external support. Wibaux concluded after months of indecisive operations in Borkou, Ennedi, and Tibesti that French forces could not rapidly vanquish the rebellion in northern Chad. Tubus were superlative guerrillas and their nomadic lifestyle rendered them difficult to control. The obstacles to pacifying northern Chad were, however, exceeded only by the region's poverty.Footnote ¹⁴³

Wibaux argued that France should abandon all of northern Chad except the urban centres of Fada, Largeau, Zouar, and Bardaï. France would use the resources economised in the North to consolidate control over Chad's most productive regions, termed le Tchad utile (useful Chad) in the centre. French diplomacy would, meanwhile, strive to deprive insurgents of external sanctuaries.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Wibaux oversaw the MRA's and DM's implementation of this strategy and Cortadellas, for his part, redeployed most French military units from northern to central Chad after reluctantly abandoning airmobile operations against Tubu guerrillas after a final assault in June 1971.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The French military's final act in northern Chad was a massive logistics convoy that transported stockpiles of food and equipment large enough to sustain the Chadian Army's four northern bases for six months. Wibaux prohibited further operations – even potentially promising ones – that might escalate hostilities. France needed its forces in central Chad even though the withdrawal from northern Chad emboldened Tubu rebels and discouraged the region's pro-government populations.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

French intelligence was tracking Libyan efforts to reanimate the rebellion in central Chad. Although France had suppressed the revolution in central Chad by mid-1970, Gaddafi helped central Chadian rebels regain the initiative by smuggling arms and material to their camps in Sudan's Dharfur province. Gaddafi also permitted FROLINAT to use Radio-Tripoli's powerful transmitters to broadcast propaganda throughout Chad and Sudan.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Over 1,000 FROLINAT guerrillas were armed and ready to attack from Sudan by early 1972. FROLINAT's leaders planned to invade central Chad with four large camel caravans that would establish liberated areas and recruit new guerrillas.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Wibaux, however, was forewarned by French intelligence and preemptively deployed the DM's and MRA's resources. The MRA played the preeminent role, expanding its paramilitary forces, such that over one hundred village militias guarded central Chad by late 1971.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ To win peasant support, the MRA also drilled 146 village wells and built 21 schools.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In a country as poor as Chad these measures secured the neutrality, if not support, of much of the local population. French administrators used these developments and paramilitary initiatives to convince four hundred rebels from the Moubi ethnic group to change sides. France's entire military contingent and Chad's best units stood poised behind the MRA's village-level structures ready to annihilate any rebel bands detected. The French, meanwhile, also deployed radio jammers to disrupt FROLINAT's propaganda broadcasts.Footnote ¹⁵¹

French precautions had thus transformed central Chad into a well-prepared trap before FROLINAT attacked in February 1972. French and Chadian forces detected all four rebel caravans between 18 February and 9 March. Regular military units pursued, engaged, and shattered the rebels in each case.Footnote ¹⁵² Once defeated, small rebel groups sought food and refuge in Chadian villages. Village militias however either slaughtered or drove these survivors into the bush. Ultimately, nearly 60 per cent (six hundred rebels) of FROLINAT's Sudan-based guerrillas perished in this ill-conceived campaign.Footnote ¹⁵³

French policymakers conducted a diplomatic campaign to deprive the rebellion of external support in parallel with Wibaux's efforts in central Chad. Foccart early on convinced the mercurial Central African Republic leader Jean-Bedel Bokassa to extradite FROLINAT supporters in January 1970.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ French diplomats then frenetically negotiated with Sudan and Libya. A breakthrough occurred in April 1972, when Sudan's dictator Jaafar Nimeiri ordered his army to massacre four hundred Chadian rebels based on his territory.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Foccart, then, through Nigerien President Hamani Diori's mediation, convinced Gaddafi to cease supporting Chadian rebels in exchange for Chad expelling Israeli advisors and ceding de facto control over territories on the Chado-Libyan border.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

France's cabinet unobtrusively withdrew French forces from Chad in August 1972, well before France's upcoming legislative elections, after establishing Chadian governmental control over central Chad and diplomatically isolating FROLINAT.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The Franco-Chadian counterinsurgency campaign had inflicted 5,100 casualties in exchange for 39 French killed and 102 wounded, and 629 Chadian military casualties.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The rebellion consequently collapsed in central Chad and was extirpated from its foreign sanctuaries. France's government conducted a public relations campaign to convince domestic and international audiences that these accomplishments amounted to victory.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Field commanders, however, knew that the rebellion's strength was undiminished in northern Chad where Chadian security forces were still unable to operate effectively.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Foccart, furthermore, anticipated that Gaddafi would soon renege on his commitments. While France's intervention saved Tombalbaye's regime, it stopped short of defeating FROLINAT and therefore ensured that Chad's civil war would continue. Northern Chad's Tubu rebels capitalised on this situation soon after France's withdrawal and gradually overwhelmed the state's armed forces, seizing Chad's capital in 1978, catalysing events that necessitated further French interventions.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Continuity and change

A French motorised column races across a rugged Sahelian desert to do battle with nomadic guerrillas. The year is 2013 and the country is Mali. To the untrained eye this scene uncannily resembles those that unfolded in Chad four decades previously. The similarities between France's interventions in this conflict and the preceding one are, moreover, more than aesthetic. France's political leaders compelled General Bernard Barrera to push forward and conclude operations faster than he was comfortable with, just as they had with Cortadellas. In Barrera's own words, ‘From the operation's beginning, the Executive [President] and [Defense] Ministry strongly pressured the Armed Forces’ Chief of Staff and his deputy in charge of operations to accelerate, always going further and faster. This translated into orders to liberate Malian cities faster than our logistics allowed us.’Footnote ¹⁶²

Nonetheless, the four intervening decades of technological progress between these operations reshaped French practices, even though strong continuities are apparent. France's armed forces meanwhile recovered the prestige that they had lost in Indochina and Algeria, while public confidence in political leaders waned. This section therefore examines how these dynamics impacted French leaders’ management of African interventions. As will be shown, France's political leaders continue to impose their preference for strategic satisficing, but increasingly rely on new communications technologies to supplement proconsular ambassadors as their means for imposing that preference.

Technical means for steering interventions in real time did not yet exist during de Gaulle's era. It was thus in the Chadian intervention's immediate aftermath that France began building a network of high-powered, high-frequency (HF) radio transmitters across Africa.Footnote ¹⁶³ This grid – known as l'Organisation Mondiale Interarmées des Transmissions (OMIT) – featured both permanent stations and mobile units that could be deployed wherever needed.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Even though OMIT did not permit voice communication, it provided political leaders for the first time with the ability to control operations from Paris in real time. The limits of this system, which remained incomplete until the late 1970s, prompted France to invest in communications satellites, deploying a network of three Syracuse satellites between 1984 and 1986, which provided consistent coverage of francophone Africa.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became the first to use new communications tools to direct an intervention, when France intervened to halt Sahrawi nomads, fighting for the POLISARIO movement and the Western Sahara's independence, from raiding Mauritania's iron ore trains in 1977. Mauritania's immense size prompted Giscard to rely primarily on air power, in the form of fighter-bombers dispatched to Senegal. In an echo of the Chad intervention, Foccart's successor, René Journiac, dispatched Wibaux to Dakar to oversee the operation at a strategic level. Giscard and his inner circle, however, introduced an additional level of political-military complexity because they combined their tactic of airstrikes in Mauritania with negotiations with POLISARIO in Algeria.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ To best coordinate these far-flung air strikes and negotiations, Giscard insisted on approving each attack from Paris via a combination of OMIT transmitted HF messages and telephone communications.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Despite technical glitches, Giscard's direction of Mauritanian air strikes yielded swift results, deterring further POLISARIO raids after three precise strikes. This successful experience of micromanaging operations from Paris encouraged Giscard to apply the same techniques when France re-intervened in Chad the following year. This time in Operation Tacaud, the French government combined the appointment of a civilian proconsul, Ambassador Louis Dallier, with the president's direction of operations from Paris. In principle, the HF liaison linking the Defence Ministry's Operations’ Centre to the military headquarters in Chad offered faster communications with Paris than the Embassy, where the ambassador received general instructions from Journiac. Leaders in Paris used these two systems to fashion France's use of force.

The coexistence of two channels of command, however, proved deeply problematic when two Chadian factions turned upon one another in early 1980.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As the crisis unravelled, Journiac instructed Ambassador Dallier that French forces should adopt a neutral posture. Giscard, however, opined to the French military's chief of staff, General Guy Méry, that France should align itself with Hissène Habré’s faction, which appeared more powerful. Méry therefore used HF communications to order France's field commander, General Louis Forest, to facilitate Habré’s victory by allowing his forces to pass through French roadblocks.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Dallier's and Forest's contradictory orders confused lower-level commanders and French forces’ inconsistent behaviour convinced all Chadian factions of their duplicity.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

French leaders’ use of nearly instant communications grew during France's next African intervention. During Operation Manta – France's 1983–4 intervention in Chad – political leaders insisted on steering even minor military actions from Paris. One French colonel observed, ‘By expressing their exaggerated belief in “sophisticated” communications, [political] authorities clearly indicated their desire to “pilot the crisis”. No latitude is left to Manta's commander. He is not a general entrusted with a command, but instead an orderly tied to a telegraph.’Footnote ¹⁷¹

The OMIT network that French leaders relied on at this stage was, moreover, woefully inadequate for how they used it. OMIT messages generally took ten minutes to cypher and transmit, and a response could, at best, be expected thirty minutes later.Footnote ¹⁷² Delays such as these proved catastrophic during fast-moving crises, such as occurred when Libyan-backed forces attacked the Chadian Army at Oum-Chalouba in September 1983. France's field commander, General Guichard, rapidly concluded that only air strikes could salvage the situation. He needed, however, political leaders’ assent for such strikes. Between transmission delays and the time needed for the message to reach the President or Defence Minister, it took 65 minutes for Guichard to receive permission to launch air strikes. By this point, however, the battle of Oum-Chalouba was already over, won in extremis by France's allies.Footnote ¹⁷³

Even when commanders like Guichard received orders in a timely manner, those orders were crafted by a process that privileged political and diplomatic considerations over military ones. Admiral Jacques Lanxade, who led France's armed forces late in the Mitterrand administration, lamented this mode of crisis management. According to Lanxade, civilians decided matters of crucial importance in so-called ‘crisis cells’ organised at France's Foreign Ministry.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Within these cells, ‘Discussions are dominated by civilian staff members from the Foreign and Defence Ministries, and the Prime Minister's Office … . When military officers are invited, they are generally of a rank too low to influence decisions.’Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Politicians’ use of new communications technologies to steer interventions from Paris was not however a consistent or unidirectional process. Politicians can and did privilege civilian proconsuls over long-distance micromanagement on occasion. President Jacques Chirac, for example, empowered a special ambassador when French forces intervened amidst army mutinies and attempted coups in the Central African Republic (CAR) in 1996–7. In his personal instructions to Jean-Marc Simon, a diplomat with considerable conflict experience, Chirac told Simon, ‘You could demand a more prestigious post, but we need you there [in the CAR]. You will be, all at once, our governor, our general, our diplomat, and above all my friend.’Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Once in Bangui, Simon comported himself as Chirac directed, shaping military operations and brokering agreements between warring factions.

Even as French leaders juggled the opportunities provided by new communications technologies with the institutional tools de Gaulle developed for managing interventions, France also experienced a prolonged upsurge in the armed forces’ popularity. Public approval for France's military arguably reached its nadir in the early Fifth Republic, following the military's repeated interventions in politics and ‘lost’ wars. Public approval for the military, however, soared since the 1990s. Opinion polls, consequently, reveal that public confidence in France's armed forces climbed twenty points in two decades.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Today, the armed forces enjoy an 82 per cent approval rating and are therefore France's second most popular institution, lagging one point behind hospitals, but significantly outperforming the media or politicians.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

A range of factors are driving this growth in the armed forces’ popularity. Receding memories of the Algerian War and the militaries’ professionalisation in the mid-1990s have distanced French citizens from their negative associations with the armed forces. A succession of ‘popular’ interventions – beginning with the 1991 Gulf War and proceeding through peace-making in the Balkans, to conclude with France's intervention in Mali – have all reinforced the military's perceived legitimacy as an expert body striving for the public good in a manner that prior French African interventions had not.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Coming on top of these developments, the military's domestic counter-terrorism deployment, Operational Sentinelle, following the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks drove the military's popularity to its current stratospheric levels.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

The armed forces’ increasing popularity and high operational tempo have empowered military officers to increasingly express their discontent with national defence policy.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Armed forces chief of staff, General Pierre de Villiers, did this most publicly with his critiques of the government's low level of defence spending.Footnote ¹⁸² As Grégory Daho demonstrates, the combination of public esteem and operational experience is also eroding the pre-existing ‘taboo’ of military officers positively evoking French doctrine and accomplishments during the Algerian War.Footnote ¹⁸³ Despite French commanders’ increasing willingness to publicly express themselves, their activism has not as yet altered how France intervenes in Africa.

A key reason for this that de Gaulle's formula for managing foreign interventions depends on institutions that circumscribe the military's domain of competence and pit military commanders against one another in parallel chains of command, rather than an assumption that individual commanders behave meekly. Moreover, French military leaders have accustomed themselves to working through these institutions and are justifiably satisfied with the level of activism that they permit. Strategic satisficing, in other words, permits France to intervene more frequently than other states of a similar size and French officers are proud of that. General Benoît Pugo, who served as President François Holland's personal chief of staff, lauded this system in the following terms, ‘The decision-making process permits the president to rapidly bring together all essential actors and then give orders directly to military commanders. It's the best [process] in the world.’Footnote ¹⁸⁴ France's most recent major African intervention, Operation Serval in Mali, therefore demonstrates strong continuities with prior African interventions in its management.

Political leaders, within this context, implemented a combination of new technology-based and older personnel-based techniques for shaping operations. President Holland sacked the career diplomat representing France and replaced him with a specialist ‘crisis manager’ in an echo of de Gaulle's dispatch of Wibaux to Chad. France's new ambassador in Bamako, Gilles Huberson, possessed formidable credentials for overseeing an intervention having served as a military officer before embarking on a diplomatic career and having managed the Foreign Ministry's Mali-Sahel counter-terrorism assistance programme immediately prior to this appointment.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian soon, however, disabused colleagues of the notion that either Huberson or France's field commander, General Barrera, would play the primary role in shaping France's intervention. Le Drian, indeed, organised a so-called ‘war room’ around his personal cabinet that decided most important matters at meetings organised up to three times a day. Civilians dominated these meetings and most of the invited military officers represented intelligence agencies.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ President Holland, meanwhile, relied on his private military staff to monitor operations and issued orders directly to field commanders via his personal chief of staff, General Pugo.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The armed forces’ headquarters and professional military planners, meanwhile, felt marginalised. One general confided to journalists that the military's leadership felt relegated to a ‘second class’ position.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

The upshot of this civilian-dominated process was a plan with all of strategic satisficing's hallmarks. France would quickly smash al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb's (AQIM) larger units, convincing African allies of France's continued great power status, and then expeditiously hand over responsibility for reconquered territories to an African peacemaking force. Central to this plan were the twin notions that French forces could rapidly ‘break’ AQIM and that African troops would suffice, with minimal support, for subsequent pacification duties. Military commanders, however, harbored reservations about both assumptions. General Barrera, for example, felt pressured to maintain an excessive operational tempo.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Many military officers, meanwhile, doubted whether African states would provide either the quantity or quality of troops needed.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

In practice, France's intervention in Mali evinced strategic satisficing's strengths and weaknesses. France retook the cities that AQIM had seized and then assaulted the jihadists’ bastions in northeastern Mali in a 100-day campaign. Combined arms battles inflicted hundreds of casualties and French forces captured over two hundred tons of arms and munitions, losing only six French soldiers in the process.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Better still, the French organised democratic elections in August 2013, while insurgents were still reeling from these blows. The speed and seeming completeness of France's triumph convinced many abroad that France possessed some form of sublime savoir faire when it came to African interventions and led institutions, such as America's RAND Corporation, to examine France's experience for transferrable lessons.Footnote ¹⁹² The enemy, however, often evaded encirclements and lived to fight another day.

These fighters soon reemerged to harry Malian and African forces once French combat troops withdrew. Morale plummeted amongst the Malian soldiers, leading observers to conclude that France was failing to reconstitute Mali's armed forces. Jihadist attacks on African peacekeepers, meanwhile, exacted a heavy toll, killing over 150 soldiers by early 2018.Footnote ¹⁹³ Mali's deteriorating security situation since Operation Serval has gotten so bad that writers in the Defense Ministry's journal Défense Nationale now opine that ‘If we continue in a spirit of “business as usual” the future will be dark for Mali and the broader region as well.’Footnote ¹⁹⁴

These later operations demonstrate the robustness of de Gaulle's reforms, which put political leaders into the proverbial driver's seat when it came to employing force. Improved communications consequently only reinforced politicians’ ability to steer operations. Military commanders‘ increasing willingness to publicly express themselves, meanwhile, has yet to change this state of affairs. Continuity in whose preferences led, in turn, to further strategic satisficing, with forces of similar size intervening to achieve minimal objectives and thereby setting the stage for France to swiftly hand over responsibility to African forces.