Leurre wrote: mean, no.
This is rather an aside to the conversation and to your overall point, but I'm not sure on what basis or following what analysis you've drawn this conclusion about whether French would or would not have atrophied, what that would take, or what would count as atrophied. Im not sure what you consider to be a façade, I'm also not sure what kind of travel /living you've done in francophone Africa, but at its best it likely won't exceed mine. French is a...big thing in francophone Africa, at least in the breadth of its use as a lingua franca. A peulh and a malinké from countries very far away meet, and they're going to speak in French more often than not. This goes well beyond the kind of superficial 'well its spoken among the educated and in cities but not in the countryside' as this is not fully accurate either.
Anyway this wasn't your point but it's maybe a good reminder (also given the topic at hand here) that it is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations or qualifications about this language or that, all the more when what is being generalized is hardly an accurate representation of the whole.
No, I'm happy to address this. Which I will begin with:
I mean, yes. And also that I am not someone coming from the position of disliking French, I like it very much. My mother was a native French-speaker.
My point is that French has nothing like the reach or usage of English and has had to be bolstered against this by a very, very strenuous propaganda effort by the French government; including legal obligations to speak/use the language. Without this it would be much smaller than it is. That its position has atrophied over time is undeniable.
On the question of Francaphone Africa, I do know it. I've been to some countries there as a longer-term 'traveller', when my mother lived in the Maghreb (later she lived in Lebanon, I'll get to it). The 'superficial' thing you deny is actually a truth; not that people in former French colonies (actually still meddled in by France) don't speak the language to some level, but that it is only maintained by legal requirement. One only needs to watch Senegalese TV to see that there is a speaking divide between the people they interview, with farmers and people outside the city and many even
in the capital city speaking Wolof or something else. French in 'Afrique Noire' is not a natural language it is a colonial language and is maintained by legality above all. It is also promoted at the top level as a prestige language, which like English in the Indian subcontinent belies a class and often economic division.
How many 'ordinary' people from different countries meet and speak French? Yes, it does happen, I've seen it. But also that pidgins and creoles are used rather than pure French (very common in Cameroon). In time, as has happened with Swahili in the west, other languages may start to operate as African-based lingua-franca. To me it makes no difference, but any position claiming French isn't maintained with effort as a language in Africa, is not being honest.
Above all it should be understood that the French language in Africa is also a long-term soft-power tool covering economic foreign policy. Also the reason that Paris persistently says 'the future of French is in Africa'. I'll leave this for now.
Originally my mother lived in Tunisia at the start of the 90s (some kind of life-crisis), then moved to Lebanon with her north African partner. I stayed with her there. Again the idea one can not know Arabic and just get about with French is delusional. The language for getting about there is Arabic: end of. Yet Paris would love for it to be true. The entire approach (from the mainly conservative) French linguistic culture institutions regarding the status of French is bizarre. English people are just glad (or relieved) if someone speaks English, we don't want to own or direct it because that's a lost cause by now. Conversely Paris thinks it's the world's
duty to learn and speak French and to learn it well! On the basis that it's obviously the world's greatest language and culture. I don't think this is an exaggeration.
The intense jealousy of English's spread and adoption has just made this worse. It's no accident that Macron has again pushed the idea of French replacing English in the EU. Unfortunately the world's penchant for learning English stands in the way; and this is now evident in places like Belgium and Switzerland where the Francophone minorities baulk at the thought of learning Dutch or German and choose the option of a more widely-spoken alternative. This is the factual state of affairs in schools there. I don't say it's good, but it is factual.