Delivered. No other country, apart from the United States, has carried out as many foreign military interventions over the past sixty years as France. There are some 32 of them of importance, that is to say mobilizing more than 1,000 soldiers, or, on a smaller scale, marked by combat and losses. In all, more than 120 in 17 different theaters of operations. But neither the means available to the French armed forces nor their size are those of their counterparts across the Atlantic. Hence a permanent overexposure.
“French soldiers are the most in demand in the world, nomadic fighters constantly jumping from one point of the globe to another in a kind of world war in pieces in the service of the interests of France and especially of its status as a power” , writes Michel Goya, a former naval officer and historian, who analyzes more than half a century of expeditions, wars, anti-terrorist operations, interposition missions, carried out by French forces alone or in coalition. The monument to the dead in external operations (“opex”) since the end of the Algerian war had, when it was inaugurated on November 11, 2019 in Paris, 549 names, an average of just under ten per year. .
Unique in Europe, this interventionism has never really been debated. “Even though the France of the Vand Republic has constantly launched its soldiers all over the world, no one has really apprehended that we have thus become a nation in permanent military engagement “, notes Michel Goya. Engaging professional soldiers, the “opex” have never aroused real opposition in an opinion largely convinced that France has a universal mission and must remain present in world affairs.
If the French presidents solicit their armed forces so much, it is first of all because it is easy. According to the 1958 Constitution, article 35, it is theoretically up to Parliament to declare war. He never did, contenting himself at best with approving the decision of the Head of State whose “reserved domain” has only extended, notably with the nuclear strike force. “Everything depends on a single head, which gives rise, from the beginning of the Vand Republic, to a particular art of war”, emphasizes the author.
Weakness of means
This “France’s little world war”, as Michel Goya calls it, had never before been treated in this form. The exercise is challenging due to the extent of the period covered, the variety of theaters involved, from Africa to the Middle East or the Balkans, and the geopolitical dimension. The first of the interventions mentioned is that of Bizerte, in Tunisia, in July 1961, on the orders of De Gaulle, to clear a French base besieged by the young Tunisian army.
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