He was then rehabilitated in 1986 by the new Prime minister Jacques Chirac as an adviser on African affairs for the two years of "cohabitation" with socialist president François Mitterrand.

According to the international affairs magazine The National Interest, "Foccart was said to have been telephoning African personalities on the subject of Zaire right up to the week before his death."

Jacques Foccart was born on August 31, 1913, in Ambrières-les-Vallées, Mayenne, in west-central France,[3][1] to a family of white planters from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

[5] He was instrumental in putting in place the dense web of personal networks (or réseaux), a central feature of Françafrique, that underpinned the informal and family-like relationships between French and African leaders, which would go on to survive until the 1990s.

There were initially eleven countries involved: Mauritania, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Dahomey (now Benin), Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, Chad, Gabon, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and Madagascar.

The National Interest review asserts that this "Cooperation Ministry, focal point of the new evolving French system in Africa, regarded Foccart both as their "guarantor" and their advocate with de Gaulle.

"[2] Close to Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, he was, in 1967, an important actor in the French support of the Biafran secession, through the use of mercenaries.

National Interest's review of his biography goes on with Foccart's admission that the French secret services eliminated the Cameroonian Marxist leader Félix-Roland Moumié in 1960.

Furthermore, it quotes "some reports" which "suggested that Foccart and Houphouët spoke on the phone every Wednesday, and there is no doubt that he considered the Ivoirian leader the African centerpiece of his network.

National Interest observes that "His biographer's claim that General de Gaulle asked Foccart to reorganize the SDECE (in view of the tainting of both the armed forces and the intelligence agencies by the movement for Algerie Francaise) is indirectly confirmed, but there is not a clear picture of the organization of the barbouzes."