The short-lived African empire whose Napoleon-style coronation swallowed a third of the budget
In December 1976 Jean-Bédel Bokassa, president of the Central African Republic, declared the country a monarchy and himself its emperor. His coronation a year later, modelled on Napoleon's, cost roughly US$20,000,000, about a third of the national budget. No foreign leader came, and the empire lasted less than three years.
Bokassa had already dissolved the government in September 1976. At a congress of his ruling MESAN party on 4 December, he introduced a new constitution, returned to Roman Catholicism after a brief conversion to Islam earlier that year, and proclaimed the monarchy. His formal title ran to a full sentence, calling him emperor by the will of the people united within the party, and he took the style His Imperial Majesty.
The model was Napoleon, who had turned the First French Republic into an empire. The crowning on 4 December 1977 matched France's entire aid to the country that year, and much of the finery came from France, including an imperial crown and a golden throne shaped like an eagle. Bokassa argued that a monarchy would make his country stand out and win the world's respect. Instead he was widely mocked, and his extravagance was compared with that of Uganda's Idi Amin.
France had been a close ally under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who had warned Bokassa against so grand a ceremony but was still the first to congratulate him. Support collapsed in 1979 after the regime violently suppressed student protests against costly compulsory school uniforms, and an estimated 100 young people died. While Bokassa was visiting Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, French troops flew into Bangui in Operation Barracuda, and on 21 September 1979 the former president David Dacko proclaimed the empire over.
The fallout reached Paris. In October 1979 the satirical paper Le Canard enchaîné reported that Bokassa had given Giscard d'Estaing diamonds and other lavish gifts, a scandal nicknamed Diamondgate that contributed to his defeat in the 1981 election. Bokassa died in 1996, and in 2009 his son Jean-Serge called his father's reign indefensible.
Source: Central African Empire
