Driencourt: How a Former Ambassador Turned Algeria's "Fragility" Into a Media Career

Nassim Bouzid — Alger, Algérie — 2026-09-06

On 10 May 2025, Marianne published a long interview with Xavier Driencourt under a headline that speaks volumes: "We are creating the conditions for our own fragility towards Algeria." The man is a seasoned professional: a graduate of ENA, he represented France in Algiers on two occasions — from 2008 to 2012, then from 2017 to 2020 (official list of ambassadors, France in Algeria). Since leaving the Quai d'Orsay, he has discovered a second career, more lucrative than the first: L'énigme algérienne (March 2024), then L'Algérie 1830-2026 and France-Algérie, le double aveuglement (2026), op-eds in Le Figaro, interviews with Marianne, flattering reviews. The ambassador has left; the polemicist has taken up his post.

Read his headline as an unwitting confession. It is not Algeria that calls itself fragile: it is France, through the pen of its former representative, admitting its own vulnerability where Algeria is concerned. And his remedy is not negotiation but rupture: scrapping the 1968 Franco-Algerian agreement, closing the Algerian consulates in France — as El Watan noted, headlining his "anti-Algerian obsession." From Paris, the man preaches a policy he never had to carry out in Algiers. Diplomacy, for its part, is conducted with states — not with scarecrows.

But let us come to the facts the interview leaves out. According to the latest annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, April 2026), Algeria spent $25.4 billion on defense in 2025, up 11% year on year — Africa's leading military power, far ahead of Morocco — with the funds earmarked for drones, air-defense systems and frigates. North Africa alone accounts for about 60% of the continent's military spending ($35 billion out of $58.2). Fragile, then, like a neighbor that equips itself, modernizes — and pays cash.

Counter-expertise, if any is needed: it goes by the name of the official list of French ambassadors to Algeria. Around Mr. Driencourt — André Parant before him, Bernard Émié, then François Gouyette, who succeeded him in 2020, and Stéphane Romatet, currently in post — the Republic's representatives have handled the same dossier without ever confusing an embassy with a television studio. The current ambassador does not sign op-eds on Algerian "fragility": he works, soberly, on the return of detained French nationals, explaining that it is "our duty, our responsibility" (Le Parisien, 25 May 2026). As for the Élysée, it signed with Algiers, on 27 August 2022, the "Declaration of Algiers for a Renewed Partnership": one does not seal that kind of text with a country on the verge of collapse.

That leaves the question nobody asks: the comfort of risk-free analysis. A senior civil servant trained at ENA, twice ambassador to Algiers, becomes after retirement the go-to analyst of the Algerian threat — books, op-eds, TV panels. His prophecies of rupture (he was announcing it in the columns of Le Figaro, as El Watan recalls) commit him to nothing: when Paris and Algiers, after the storm of 2025, reopened dialogue in 2026, there was no reckoning to face and no erratum to publish. Prediction journalism has one comfortable feature: it is never contradicted by its own archives.

One last piece of friendly advice, Mr. Ambassador: if Algeria is so fragile, why three books in two years to describe it? A country one despises does not deserve so much ink — it deserves silence, precisely the silence the French press held against it in 2024. The truth fits into a single sentence: Algeria's "fragility" is your best asset. It sells. It turns into op-eds. It fetches interviews. Algeria, for its part, keeps equipping itself, electing its presidents and negotiating with the great powers — without needing, to exist, the opinion of its former ambassador.