... It is not a good time to be French in Francophone Africa, except if you are a high official from Paris privately visiting a strongman's palace. As democracy slips in country after country in the region, France often quietly sides, once again, with the once-and-future autocrats.

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French officials have discouraged scrutiny of African leaders' corruption, the fruits of which often end up in Paris. A French good-government group's campaign to expose and recover the "ill-gotten gains" of three of the most notorious leaders -- the late Omar Bongo of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo Republic and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea -- has been opposed by the prosecutor of the French Republic on the grounds that the group has no standing to sue, and that the facts are "ill defined."

In fact, the group, Transparency International, had set out in detail the leaders' extensive luxury real-estate holdings in Paris. Last month, an appeals court in Paris agreed with the prosecutors.

Reports of the luxuries to which Mr. Biya treated himself on his Paris visit "enormously shocked people," said Jean Faustin Kinyock, president of the National Human Rights League in Cameroon, and the French were seen as complicit.

Analysts said that the sentiment was pervasive. "People don't like France because France isn't helping Africans freely choose their leaders," said Achille Mbembe, a political scientist and historian at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. "And the democratic process is blocked, practically everywhere."