On the night of 7 December 2025, a group of French special forces successfully secured the Togbin military base outside Cotonou, Benin’s main city. A few hours earlier, a group of mutineering Beninese soldiers, under the lead of colonel Pascal Tigri, used it as a starting point to launch their coup against then president Patrice Talon.
Tigri’s soldiers launched attacks across Cotonou, attempting to capture senior military leadership and Talon himself, taking over the national broadcaster and declaring Talon’s removal. However, the announcement was premature, and the mutineers would slowly be pushed back by Beninese, Nigerian, and notably, French soldiers. Due to the swift and precise intervention of those foreign units, another coup in the region was thwarted and Tigri fled the country.
This anecdote represents the new operative mode of the French security strategy in West Africa. After six years of anti-French military coups in Mali (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023), France’s reputation as a reliable security partner was tarnished.
Despite these setbacks, France’s presence or influence in West Africa did not vanish overnight, instead Paris decided to radically change its posture. Maintaining a large operational presence in the core of Africa would be replaced with more discreet special forces on its edge, as the five thousand French soldiers, deployed in the states of the central Sahel, such as Mali and Niger during operation Barkhane, were replaced by high skilled special forces units across the Gulf of Guinea in states like Benin and Côte d'Ivoire
These special forces units often engage with the Défense Conseil International (DCI) a semi-private French company still very closely linked to the French state. DCI offers military assistance, in the form of drone equipment or intelligence, to foreign partners and their activities often take place within European structures, such as the European Peace Facility mechanism.
Overall, these forces operate in more secretive and discreet ways. With the growth of anti-French sentiment across the region, for partner-states like Benin or Nigeria, a too close relation with France could cost them political capital. Forced to act more covertly, and pushed from the heart of the Sahel, France's strategic goal has changed: contain the chaos at the borders and preserve the legitimacy of the governments in place.
Focus on the Gulf
For now, the era of French military bases on the African continent appears to be over. December 2026 will mark three years since the last French soldier left Nigerien soil, after already departing from Burkina Faso in early 2023 and Mali in 2022 at the direction of the new military juntas. Only the bases in Djibouti and Gabon are left as a French pied à terre in Africa.
