The coup, as the more exclusive cousin of revolution, stands as one of the premier arts of historical contingency. Unlike revolution, popular mutinies, or a conventional battle between warring states, the coup is notable for just how few people it can require. History is littered with stories of regimes falling merely by a handful of generals entering a palace or presidential office with handguns. Coups also serve as excellent case studies in the limits of historical contingency and randomness. While in a given moment it can appear as the fate of the world is in the hands of a half dozen military officers, supermen in uniform capable of making and ending governments, the actual degrees of freedom are quite limited. Generally, the less amount of people involved in the coup, the less the overall political and economic system will change. The seemingly infinite degrees of freedom in the moment, the nearly unlimited contingency, can only yield a small number of different outcomes.

The extent to which men make their own history is incredibly limited on this macro scale of grand strategy, economic modes of productions, and historical epochs. But on the smaller scale, on the scale of tactics, history is a much more manageable enterprise, as the first Napoleon himself could attest to. The French Emperor stands apart on the outside limits of the historical possibilities represented by the coup, having had the double good fortune of surviving his political opponents in the crucial moments of the coup that launched him to power and doing so at the ground zero for the abolishing of feudalism. A combination that would catapult Napoleon into the role of one of the main protagonists of bourgeois society in continental Europe. In this case, his coup would serve as an encounter, a critical juncture, of world historical importance.

But Napoleon took power in an already extraordinary moment, most other plotters have no such fortune. Indeed, the vast majority of coups pass by with nothing more than a few days coverage in the international press. The determining factor on the higher order of magnitude is always the systems in place, the material conditions, and the political situation of the masses. As I will argue, Bokassa, much like the French General and Emperor he sought so hard to emulate, was a tactical genius in his own right[1]. But a tactical genius in an impoverished nation of 1 million, with a withering army of 500 men. His enemies were not so much great foreign powers, but his own subjects, his own military and police.

I would do well to provide some background on those who might be unfamiliar with one of Africa’s most illustrious and cruel strongmen. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, himself orphaned by the cruelty of France’s colonial regime in Central Africa, was a soldier for France in both World War Two and the war for French Indo-China. Equatorial French Africa, which had once been the laughing stock of its imperial holdings for its corruption and backwardness, had served as the sole major base of support for De Gaulle after the fall of Paris to the Germans. Bokassa proved himself on the battlefield as an able soldier, and his education in a missionary school afforded him a mastery over the French written and spoken language which few other recruits could offer. He rose quickly rose through the ranks, and when he finally returned to his home country after the war he did so as a Captain.

When the Central African Republic (CAR) gained its independence Bokassa became the commander in chief of its armed forces and it was from this position that he deftly organized the Saint-Sylvester coup which overthrew his unpopular cousin, David Dacko, and made himself president.

In a radio address announcing the end of the old regime, Bokassa declared “Central Africans! Central Africans! This is Colonel Bokassa speaking to you. Since 3:00 AM this morning your army has taken control of the country. The Dacko Government has resigned. The hour of justice is at hand. The bourgeoisie is abolished. A new era of equality among all has begun. Central Africans, wherever you may be, be assured that the army will defend you and your property … Long live the Central African Republic!”[2] Within the context of French Africa “bourgeoisie” referred not necessarily to capitalists or the middle class, but to the civil service. Indeed, Bokassa would pitch himself as a committed anti-communist in order to gain the trust of his French patrons. But with this declaration came the seeds of the final, ultimate farce of the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The grandiose notions of abolishing the old order, the revolutions in the name of lofty things such as equality, justice and freedom, the events of the mid 19th century which Marx made the subject of his famous quote could not even hold a candle to the level of parody evoked in Bokassa’s boldness and vanity.

Bokassa would end up ruling for 13 years from 1966 to 1979, a rule characterized by increasing idiosyncrasy, paranoia, and opulence. In 1977 he declared himself Emperor in a lavish ceremony meant to copy one to one Napoleon’s coronation, complete with costume’s designed by a Parisian theater troupe and crown jewels paid for at the expense of the French government.

Needless to say, Bokassa was deeply unpopular among nearly every strata of the population soon after the initial coup, and yet he was able to cling onto power for over a decade. His downfall came, not from one of the eight coups plotted against him, or even the popular revolt led against his government, but by French paramilitary intervention after massacring school children and bombing his own people. He was put on trial for his crimes and was even rumored to have committed cannibalism for mystic purposes.

After his overthrow, and the reinstallation of the Dacko regime, the CAR fell into a deep period of increasing instability that exists to the present day as coups and countercoups eventually led to open civil war. Where Bokassa had the tactical wherewithal to defeat his political enemies and even the masses themselves, the hollowed out state and institutions he left behind proved incapable to maintain even the most basic functions. A situation which only deteriorated as the end of the cold war meant the end of geo-political significance for countries like the CAR to great powers.

In order to understand the impact of well executed tactics on history it we must then understand what exactly were the tactics Bokassa employed to maintain control.

Much of the literature about coups pertains to systemic risks that encourage them, while a small minority deals with the tactical measures that coup plotters employ in order to succeed. In contrast to these approaches I have examined the tactical measures incumbents use to disrupt coup attempts already in progress. The mainstream literature does a very good job of explaining why there would be so many coups in the CAR, it is an extremely undeveloped country with a minimal political culture, it’s political issues “decided by factions of the professional armed forces with the rest of society as mere onlookers,”[3]. In many ways, the political culture of the CAR went backward under Bokassa’s rule, with the CIA noting just one year after he took power that the country’s sole political party had degenerated to the point it no longer was “an effective means of mobilizing the population behind him,”[4] and Bokassa would go on to suspend the country’s only trade union as well in 1978[5]. However, given this high coup risk, there is not much explanation for exactly how Bokassa was able to cling to power; the theoretical work on the tactical side of things tends to focus on what the coup plotters do right or wrong, rather than the regime. And yet, for Bokassa to have remained such a fixture, it appears he must have had some kind of tactical doctrine well equipped for defeating these coup attempts. To reconstruct this tactical doctrine, we may begin by examining the tactics of would-be coup plotters, understand what steps the government could theoretically take to disrupt such operations, and then compare them to the concrete record of Bokassa’s tactics.

The tactical objective of coup plotters is the creation of a fait accompli whereby it appears that the government has already lost control and those who do not get on board with the coup will be on the losing side, with all the penalties such a status incurs. In the ordinary course of business, the power of the regime is an accomplished fact; coup plotters must turn this on its head, turning all the signals of their power into theirs with a single stroke. To meet this objective, military coup plotters must usually take control of both symbolic and strategic locations which will allow them to control public information and the popular narrative, all while having as few military casualties as possible. This minimization of casualties is extremely important since excessive bloodshed between military forces risk dragging the country to civil war, a catastrophe that would entail fratricide and the possible ruin of the military[6].

From this broad outline of the tactical objectives and reasoning of the usurpers one can begin to draw up measures which make the coup more difficult. Since the goal of the plotters is to create the perception of control in the moment so as to bring the rest of the military to their side, expectations informed by history can come into play. If coups have been broadly successes or failures in the past, people may extrapolate this into the future[7], making it a possible benefit to a head of state to foil a coup attempt earlier in their reign. Bokassa established such a track record early on, but it’s unclear if it helped him one way or another as none of the coups against him made it to the level of a coordination game.

Bokassa did seem to directly benefit from other implications of this theory, however. If the worst-case scenario for coup plotters is a civil war then perhaps the regime should aim to divide the armed forces in such a way to maximize bloodshed and thus the cost of any coup attempt. Similarly, if the goal of plotters is to take symbolic locations such as the presidential palace or parliament, as well as essential telecom and mass media infrastructure, these areas should be fortified and guarded with loyal troops.

This trade off, between coup risk and civil war risk, is well documented in the literature of civil-military relations of developing countries. The incentive is thus for regimes to maximize civil war risk and its one of the tactics which brings the singular great man closest to a great mover of history. It is a tactic of ultimate destruction, not unlike the historical power impressed upon the American commander in chief with his football and nuclear codes. It reminds me, if I was to offer up another tortured analogy, of how modern cosmological measurements must be made with such exacting precession that it threatens to defy quantum uncertainty; scientists develop ever more sophisticated measures of pushing such uncertainty into aspects which they are not measuring, but even the slightest quantum tremor or quirk of sub-atomic scale physics could radically change our view of the cosmos[8]. It is precisely with these tactics of brinksmanship that the tiny world of men can consciously (although often unconsciously) force themselves upon the seemingly exorable systems which “make the world go round”. It’s the sort of accomplished fact which can surprise not just a country of 36 million, as the coup of Louis Napoleon was said to, but countries of hundreds of millions and even billions. And unlike a simple coup, this “nuclear option” represents a point of no return.

But, of course, the most successful and lucky tacticians can avoid both the coup and the civil war. And so let us return to the practical measures Bokassa employed to do just that.

The necessity of loyal forces to guard key places and the head of state is conventional wisdom, and Bokassa created a presidential guard in 1975 expressly to fulfill this need. This force was specially tailored to its purpose: its members were paid more than the normal army, trained by Soviet and Israeli advisors (who unlike the French did not have a base of power in the country), armed with small arms and ammunition from the USSR, and was staffed entirely by members of Bokassa’s M’baka tribe[9]. Titley considered it a practical implausibility in 1979 for the under-trained and under-armed army to effectively challenge these guards[10], indeed, CIA documents show they actually did attempt to do so in March of that year and failed miserably[11].

Bokassa also effectively utilized counter-balancing measures more generally to exploit the coup plotters’ fear of military casualties, most notably in the run-up to the Banza coup. In the weeks just before the fateful day, Bokassa beefed up the National Police, giving them new uniforms, weapons, and communications equipment as well as rearranging the leadership structure[12]. The police engaged in much harsher enforcement in this period, doing frequent patrols including at night (an opportune time for coups), and illegally searching homes for weapons. The US Embassy in Bangui surmised that these measures were intended to intimidate any would-be coup plotters[13]. Steps such as these can act as effective deterrence by making the potential resistance faced by coup plotters that much higher, signaling that any such attempt would likely be a longer, bloodier affair than the quick decisive action required to best “make a fact”.

While there was doubt in both French and American diplomatic circles about whether Banza had actually attempted a coup at the time of his arrest, it does appear that Banza represented a genuine coup threat. When Bokassa was previously away at a regional summit and Banza was left in charge of the country a report surfaced that Banza had bought off most of the officer corps and was on the cusp of making a coup. Although the US embassy could not corroborate the report, they said that some of it rang true and that Banza would have a motivation for doing so after his recent demotions[14]. This ambiguity about whether alleged coup participants were actually plotting a coup or not is a common theme among most of the coups in this era, as many could also be explained away as Bokassa’s paranoia or desire to remove rivals. However, the times in when these coups were set to have occurred broadly align to when the opportunity and likelihood for a coup was strongest, making the fact that Bokassa survived unscathed somewhat impressive regardless, and preserving our ability to analyze Bokassa’s anti-coup measures.

Besides objectives, there are other aspects of coup plotting that provide opportunities for incumbents to neutralize the threat. These aspects include the recruiting and subversion process necessary for potential coup plotters to seek out allies and collaborators. In attempting to bring individuals into a plot, or in attempting to convince military units to act against the government, coup plotters necessarily expose outsiders to evidence of their intentions. If the incumbents simply have knowledge of these overtures early on, then the coup can be snuffed out quite easily.

Fortunately for the regime, the people targeted by coup plotters are not random. It is well known that the higher ranking the officer, the more likely the coup attempt is to succeed, and it is also the case that coup plots tend to be formed by officers of the same rank due to their fraternity and similar structural incentives. Given this fact, one of the simplest ways to mitigate coup risk would be to closely monitor the communications between high ranking officers. Furthermore, the best coup plotters are highly skilled and respected military commanders, meaning they would both be well prepared to plan the coup as a military operation and be able to leverage their participation to encourage the rest of the military to take the side of the plotters[15]. While it may sound perverse to hold the most respected and skilled commander in suspicion, ideally, they should not know about this surveillance or else they might take effective counter measures.

Indeed, much of these coup-proofing methods boils down to the intelligence available to the regime, and I would go so far as to say this is perhaps the most essential aspect of coup proofing. Knowing that a coup is going to happen or is happening can make all the difference; knowing that the Navy was about to stage a coup only ten minutes in advance gave Peron, in 1955, the crucial time required to call for back-up from the army and put down the revolt[16]. Bokassa himself was very good about this kind of intelligence gathering, he apparently built up a network of informants over the years[17] and used the state’s intelligence services to spy on allies and rivals alike via methods such as monitoring telephone conversations[18]. Evidently, this network yielded results as we do have records of Bokassa killing at least two coups in their infancy before they were able to launch operationally besides the Banza coup. In September of 1971, troops that had planned to initiate a coup after being deployed across Bangui during anti-French protests were confined to their barracks and stripped of their weaponry[19]. While other sources corroborate the historical existence of the anti-French protests and the surrounding tensions, records of the coup only appear in the CIA archives, suggesting that it never progressed far enough to be widely publicized. A similar event occurred November of 1974, whereby a coup attempt by the Gendarmerie was foiled. Around this time the French embassy also reported that Bokassa had abruptly postponed his arrival to a meeting in Yaounde in early December citing domestic business[20]. Given this description, it appears likely that the coup plotters were hoping to take the capital while Bokassa was away in Cameroon but were foiled before they could do so.

Having more general knowledge about which units are less loyal and more likely to participate in a coup is also useful, as this can allow a regime to simply place these units farther away from key infrastructure, as well as allocate them less ammunition and equipment. Indeed, this is exactly what Bokassa did to counter Banza’s attempts to maintain ties to the army[21].

In contrast to this information-based approach, there are other ways to make the subversion and recruitment portions of coup plotting more difficult. One way is by working to eliminate the motivations to join the coup plotters among the targets of subversion and recruitment. Whereas high ranking officers make for good planners, ambitious officers who make up the 2nd in command potentially have the most to gain by supporting the coup. Moreover, well placed officers with political and ethnic sympathies with the coup plotters can also be helpful to their efforts[22]. Bokassa was quite aware that ambitious officers in the army and Gendarmerie could well be his down fall, in fact he probably erred on the side of overestimating these threats. All the same, his frequent promotions, demotions and reassignments of duty directly countered such plots by keeping these officers off guard[23].

While the difficulties posed by Bokassa’s attempts to restrict potential recruitment and subversion prevented many plots from becoming fully operational, there were methods that could potentially work around this. If, on the one hand, there is great advantage to having the head of state leave the country because doing so will prevent them from using their influence to stop the coup, or coordinate a defense[24], then there is also an advantage to having the head of state out of the picture all together. The traditional seizing of strategic and symbolic locations by a number of military units and the classic assassination attempt can form two ends of a spectrum with regards to the number of people who must have knowledge of the plot ahead of time.

To seize a number of important targets, would-be coup plotters require signifigant manpower, arms, transportation and other equipment. This can be done clandestinely in certain ways; Ferguson, for example, suggests that coup plotters use field training as an excuse for mobilizing military forces. This echoes the strategy employed by the coup plotters in September of 1971, who intended to strike as the military was mobilized for the anti-French protests Bokassa had orchestrated. Unfortunately for these plotters, Bokassa discovered the trap before it could be sprung, once again revealing the Achilles heel of such large coup operations: well developed regime intelligence gathering.

The assassination is a tactic which can potentially escape this problem due to its far lower personal and logistical requirements. Indeed, it was an assassination attempt that came the closest to actually toppling Bokassa’s regime: the attempt by Fidele Obrou and his close compatriots which only failed due to a dud grenade[25]. It is the kind of failed contingency which perhaps best reveals the limits of contingency itself. Consider, for example, what would have happened if the grenade had actually gone off and Bokassa had been done in. Obrou’s infant child (Bokassa grandchild), which was killed in retribution, would likely have survived for one. More importantly however, the schoolchildren’s revolt and massacre, one of the defining moments of CAR’s postwar history, would never have occurred. The illustrious coronation, the short-lived empire would equally have vanished. And yet, the more things change, the more they would have stayed the same. The extractive economic system would have persisted and the political situation would have continued to deteriorate and perhaps at a quicker pace too. Stubborn institutions have gotten the better of many a committed revolutionary, and Obrou did not even have such lofty ideals, his attempt of assassination was nothing more than a naked grab for power.

Obrou came this close to overthrowing his father-in-law despite the fact he had earned Bokassa’s suspicions from the moment he married his daughter and had aborted several assassination attempts previously. Certainly, larger coup operations have sometimes been paired with assassination of the head of state, but there are important drawbacks, especially when the primary objective is the assassination. It is an action which can provoke the regime’s base of support, potentially lead to larger conflict, and possibly lower the perceived legitimacy of the coup plotters. These are only drawbacks, however, when the head of state has some measure of popularity or is supported by a fiercely loyal base. This was not the case for Bokassa, and therefore, besides the threat of French intervention, the assassination plot was his greatest weakness.

Ironically, this weakness was mostly due to Bokassa prizing self-preservation above all else. His arbitrary and ineffective method of governing made him unpopular among the elites of the country, and by allowing institutions like the CAR’s sole political party and trade union to wither away so they would not present a threat he also lowered the number of targets coup plotters would have to contend with, and thus the manpower required for a coup. In the end, by making the CAR’s government about himself and nothing else, Bokassa made himself the ultimate target. States with democratic norms and a healthy civil society are more resilient for such grabs for power for opposite reasons, there are simply that many more targets to deal with if one wants to seize control. That many more junctures for things to go terribly wrong.

Now, I hope I have well explained the tactical genius of the last African Emperor at this point, as well as his weaknesses. We have even briefly touched upon the limits of those few contingencies that would have brought him to his knees. But we have yet to discuss the limits of his own genius as a historical force. Bokassa did not represent anything new. Hardly even the first strongman of independent Africa. Rather, he represented the perfection of the old system.

As the US ambassador to the CAR would write in 1978: “The essential fact about Bokassa is that he is not a forward looking man. For him the past is present. It is not merely that he has dressed his empire in Napoleonic costume, fabricated a pharaonic pedigree for his family and developed a byzantine protocol for his court; more profoundly he is marked by the colonial experience and by an ancient, if now distorted tradition of African chieftainship. Bokassa, after all, spent most of his early adult years as a French soldier and officer. He grew up in a remote corner of French Equatorial Africa where forced labor was common, brutality a way of life and African life cheap in the eyes of the ruling power. But it was an efficient and effective system. Unlike those who ecstatically went to Moscow in the 30’s and returned to proclaim they had seen the future and it worked, Bokassa has seen the past and knows that it works as well. Many of the techniques of his regime including the use of prison labor, beatings of prisoners, compulsory cotton production, he inherited from the French.”[26]

Bokassa hardly wanted to change this, even his most progressive rhetoric on economic development, such as in his autobiographical “The Philosophy of Operation Bokassa”, was largely just posturing. But even if he had, he would have found it largely impossible. A revolution, whether bloody or otherwise, which marks a new historical epoch and mode of production, requires political, economic and ideological components. Bokassa could provide none of those things.

The revolution had been killed years earlier, by Dacko and the French who shut down political life in the country to maintain their influence. Nor could Bokassa, for all his power and cruelty, eliminate state corruption even if he had wanted to; the tribal bonds which facilitated individuals getting the education they needed to take up positions in power also obligated them to channel graft back into their small communities. The mineral and natural exploitation of the countryside via cheap local labor could also hardly be stopped without cutting off the country from the lucrative patrons that reconciled the state budget. And those not involved in exploitation or corruption were simple subsistence farmers who largely avoided the drama of the capital city. With such retarded economic and political development, there could be no revolution to give Bokassa the true significance of a world historical figure of either Napoleon or Louis Bonaparte. No revolution to carry to the rest of the continent, nor revolution to counter.

The above quote by the ambassador, after all, was written only two years after this one: “The revolution has at last found its Napoleon. Two days after the anniversary of Napoleon’s own coronation, Bokassa has succeeded in achieving his long-held dream, his ultimate apotheosis, his proclamation as Emperor. Africa again has an indigenous empire; but how long can it last?… Among those Central Africans whom we have subsequently had contact, there is considerable cynicism about the changes and resentment that Bokassa has made the country an international laughing stock. This cynicism is usually accompanied by contemptuous derision of the President himself. There is little doubt that the disenchantment with Bokassa and his style has increased. When paraphernalia of Empire is elaborated and the coronation takes place, Bokassa’s posturings will be further criticized and his domestic credibility further weakened. Bokassa, however, remains a shrewd and tenacious politician. The arrest of various military officers (now said to number over 20) and a former Agriculture Minister only days before the proclamation of the empire may well have been designed as a warning to those who opposed Bokassa’s plans. Whether or not a coup was actually planned, Bokassa clearly demonstrated that he has the upper hand and intends to maintain it. There is still no organized opposition and no forum in which one can develop, given the network of informers Bokassa has built up over the years. Nonetheless, the hubris implicit in the Eagle in the Sun as his personal insignia is not lost on thoughtful Central Africans.”[27]

Here lies the contradiction at the heart of Bokassa and all coup makers and tin pot strongmen. The Faustian pact goes something like this: seize power and all glory is yours, as is all the symbols of status, all the material pleasure you can desire, all along with an impressive chunk of the social surplus; but only at the expense of reproducing and propagating the existing society. If this deal sounds familiar, it should. It is the deal presented to the ambitious of any given society, and especially to those of us who live under the equal opportunity of capitalism. It is the deal which formally excludes historical change and revolution; it is the deal which permits order to reign.

All this is merely a long way of saying that no matter your tactical genius, the extent of your grip on state power, history is not yours to make as you please. Whether it is the changing whims of an emperor or the substitution of one dictator for another, all these contingencies cannot help but funnel into a handful of outcomes: either the reproduction of the existing society, the nuclear option (a vicious return to a violent state of nature and fratricide), or, if one is very lucky, there is the rare possibility that the accumulated outcome of reproduction may result in a new possibility. This last contingency is that of revolution. And to the extent that emperors like Bokassa can play a role in them it is purely by accident, the historical equivalent of stepping on an errantly placed rake.

Either way, the figure of Napoleon is a figure meant to act as a reaction revolution. In a world without revolution, without any seeming sort of movement, what use is he? In this way, Bokassa was a ridiculous thing. One of many absurdities of the Cold War. This sort of absurdity has not been lost with the maturity of capitalist society, indeed, as Marx hypothesized some 170 years ago, it has only become more acute. What are Trump, Bolsonaro, Macron, Xi, and Putin, to name a few, if not cheap, cheesy, callbacks?

But for as ridiculous they all are, they still represent with deathly seriousness the power of the state. If there’s one thing this lesson in coup proofing has taught you, it should be that Clausewitz is correct in a more fundamental way than he could have imagined that war is politics by other means. During a coup the distinction breaks down entirely; the petty political ambitions of the great actors become transformed into tactics of warfare, violence and control of territory. As I finish writing this essay, I am observing the fall of the Morales regime in Bolivia to a right wing coup, a contingency it seems Morales was not quite prepared for. The tactical doctrine I have laid out is largely a value neutral one. Just as it can be used by strongmen dictators, it can be used by even a popular regime duking it out against national elites.

In a truly revolutionary encounter there always awaits the contingency of failure. In such a situation, I would find it to be a true shame if tactical genius was reserved for hollow reenactments.



[1] Napoleon himself could only attribute so much of his success to his tactical genius regardless, much of which also came down the logistical luck of his armies. “Fortuna et Virtus” as Machiavelli might have put it.

[2] Brian Titly, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa McGill-Queen’s University Press 1997, pg 28

[3] FINER, SAMUEL. MAN ON HORSEBACK: the Role of the Military in Politics. ROUTLEDGE, 2017. Pg 118

[4] CIA. Weekly Summary 27 Jan 67. January 27, 1967. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79-00927a005600060001-6

[5] US State Department. UGTC Leader Sacked and Jailed. May 24, 1977. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1977STATE119163_c.html

[6] Singh, Naunihal. Seizing Power : The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pgs 22-28

[7] Singh, Naunihal. Seizing Power : The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pg 35

[8] My mind is drawn, in particular, to the absurdly high precision required to detect gravitational waves.

[9] CIA. Staff Notes. May 23, 1975. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79t00865a001000200001-9

[10] Brian Titly, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa McGill-Queen’s University Press 1997, pg 103

[11] CIA. Africa Review April 79. April 6, 1979. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79t00912a002700010037-0

[12] NARA. State Department Airgram March 5 1969. March 5, 1969.

[13] NARA. State Department Airgram March 19 1969. March 19, 1969.

[14] NARA. State Department Airgram May 20 1969. May 20, 1968.

[15] Ferguson, Gregor. Coup D’etat: a Practical Manuel. Arms and Armour, 1987. Pg 63

[16] Ferguson, Gregor. Coup D’etat: a Practical Manuel. Arms and Armour, 1987. Pg 79

[17] US State Department. Eagle in the Sun Central Africa’s Napoleon Emerges. December 7, 1976. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976BANGUI02342_b.html

[18] Faes Géraldine, and Stephen Smith. Bokassa Ier: Un Empereur français. Calmann-Lévy, 2000. Pg 133

[19] CIA. Central Intelligence Bulletin 1 October 1971. October 1, 1971. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79t00975a020100090001-7

[20] US State Department. Reported Coup Attempt in CAR. December 6, 1974. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974LIBREV01516_b.html

[21] Brian Titly, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa McGill-Queen’s University Press 1997, pg 42

[22] Ferguson, Gregor. Coup D’etat: a Practical Manuel. Arms and Armour, 1987. Pg 64-65

[23] Brian Titly, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa McGill-Queen’s University Press 1997, pg 48

[24] Ferguson, Gregor. Coup D’etat: a Practical Manuel. Arms and Armour, 1987. Pg 128

[25] Brian Titly, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa McGill-Queen’s University Press 1997, Pg 61

[26] US State Department. AMBASSADOR’S RETROSPECTIVE PART 1: BOKASSA — EMPEROR AND EGOIST. June 8, 1978 https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978BANGUI01280_d.html

[27] US State Department. Eagle in the Sun Central Africa’s Napoleon Emerges. December 7, 1976. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976BANGUI02342_b.html