Colonialism Devours Itself: The Waning of Françafrique

France is the only country that never decolonised its colonies, emotionally, financially or strategically. In the aftermath of losing the Second World War, notwithstanding de Gaulle's attempts to convince his people otherwise, the French knew the game was up. (The Resistance fighters were heroes; but heroes are lonely.) For France, after 1945, the Second World War blended into the early Cold War, which Paris jumped into the day before it began. It fought in Indochina, and lost again. The independence war dragged on in Algeria. Then France lost there, too--painfully, with millions of its ordinary citizens expelled to a homeland that many of them hardly knew.