French pressure succeeded because Gbagbo was politically isolated after the 2002 partition

Evidence

These pressures were particularly effective, also because they took place in a climate of mutual tension and distrust between the Ivorian and French authorities. Laurent Gbagbo suspected that the French authorities were involved in several coup attempts against him, including that of 19 September 2002 which led to the partition of the country in two, with 60 per cent of the national territory under control of the rebel army of the New Forces of Ivory Coast. From that moment on, the Ivorian president had maintained ambiguous relations with some of the most powerful French multinationals, such as Bolloré, to which he transferred the management of the container terminal at the port of Abidjan in 2004, in dubious circumstance. This helps us understand why Gbagbo ended up accepting Paris’s demands on the CFA franc issue and replaced Bouabré with Philippe-Henri Dacoury-Tabley, a former BCEAO executive, more compatible with the French ‘monetary philosophy’. — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates how coercion and leverage, not formal process, enforce the colonial monetary pact.

Related

• France treated monetary and military pressure as interchangeable weapons. (similarity 0.82)
• France used military force to prevent the Ivory Coast from leaving the franc zone. (similarity 0.82)
• France used the BCEAO Central Bank to paralyze a targeted African government (similarity 0.81)
• France ran nearly 40 military interventions across Africa between 1960 and 1991 (similarity 0.80)