IS FRANCE about to embark on another African military intervention? Things certainly seem to be moving very fast in Paris. Just over ten months after it dispatched soldiers and fighter jets to push back an Islamist incursion in Mali, the French are putting things into place in order to launch another operation, possibly as early as next week, this time in the Central African Republic (CAR).

This is Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, making the case for intervention in Le Figaro, a newspaper, on November 25th. He described a “collapsed state” in which violence, rape and executions by armed gangs was turning into inter-religious hatred. Intervention always had a cost. But, he wrote: “We don’t want tomorrow to pay the far higher price of inaction”.

France is not alone in sounding an alert over the CAR, a former colony. Jan Eliasson, the United Nations deputy secretary-general, has described “pre-genocide” conditions there. The UN estimates that there are 400,000 displaced people, or a tenth of the population, within the country, as villagers flee the violence.

As Mr Fabius laid it out, the French case is chiefly humanitarian. Yet French officials stress that there are two other reasons to intervene. One is to try to restore security on the ground before the violence takes on an explicitly inter-religious character. The CAR is composed of over a dozen different ethnic groups, mostly Christian, some animist, and a significant Muslim minority.

The other is to avert a destabilisation of the region. CAR is mineral-rich and landlocked, bordered by six countries, each of them linked to a broader zone of instability. The French worry that the emergence of a failed state in this strategic location could draw into the void any number of networks, including traffickers in drugs and arms, Islamists or regional terrorist groups.

France has drafted a UN Security Council resolution, which it hopes to put to the vote in New York next week. This would authorise a UN peacekeeping operation as a “bridging force”, to restore security in the country pending a reinforcement of the regional African unit there, known by the acronym MISCA. “We won’t be there to replace the African force, but the strengthen them,” said a defence-ministry official. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defence minister, said that the plan is to send an extra 1,000 or so French soldiers, who will join the 400-odd already guarding the capital’s airport there.

French officials stress that this is a quite different operation to that conducted in Mali, where the French went directly into combat against a well-trained, well-armed Islamist force that had conquered a big chunk of territory. Things are far more chaotic and disorganised in the CAR, with disparate armed gangs on the loose. This time, and unlike in Mali, stresses an official, this is “not a war mission”.

Whatever the differences, though, the French are struck by the consistently warrior-like behaviour of their Socialist president, François Hollande, now about to launch his second African intervention of the year. The French are being careful to secure international authorisation for their mission. But they are set to go it alone, with no sign of wanting help. “If he did not swear by socialism in France,” wrote Le Figaro in an editorial, “François Hollande could pass for a neo-conservative abroad.”