In both cases, the question in Paris and other capitals was whether to intervene. And in both cases, France had an obvious interest in not intervening, in order to erase its colonial past (more so in Côte d Ivoire than in Libya, where Italy had been the European colonizer).

The irony of this remark is that in the Philippines, a country of more than 100 million people, of whom four out of five are Roman Catholic, it is precisely the Church that has been the ideological colonizer. It is the Church, after all, that has vigorously sought to impose its opposition to contraception on the population, opposing even the provision of contraceptives by the government to the rural poor.