Almost 40 years after this statement, the Ivory Coast, the largest producer of cocoa and one of the indispensable pillars of the franc zone, paid the price of this policy. When the monetary weapon failed to bring down Gbagbo 'like a rotten fruit', in the words of Alassane Ouattara, in April 2011, France chose to resort to force. … The cuts, the physical appearance of our currency had been completed', he says. 'We had decided to maintain the same nominal value as the CFA franc in order not to destabilise the population too much. The notes and coins would have been produced by a foreign country. We were negotiating with a friendly African country, who had agreed in principle to manage our foreign currency account until our central bank was operational. We were at an advanced stage in our new policy of monetary cooperation when France, certainly aware that it risked losing the Ivory Coast, launched its final assault. Just as we were on the verge of beating it on its own ground, France, to avoid a defeat, resorted to the one thing that it had in greater quantity than us: weapons.'

Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa's Last Colonial Curr…, loc. 273