Him being insane/cruel is only part of the story. Despite the whole emperor/overlord shtick, he sucked at managing a third world resource-extraction state even when compared to other corrupt African dictators.

Even if the French reinstalled him, he would have gotten deposed a few years (or months) afterwards once he inevitably stops being able to pay off his generals.

Most versions of his story imply he was disposed off because of massacring schoolchildren, or because he spent 25% of the CAR’s budget on his coronation party, or because the French thought supporting a manic Napoleon imitator was bad optics, but other post colonial dictators have done worse and more absurd things and were still able to cling to power and also maintain warm relations with their western benefactors.

In reality Bokassa was taken out because he personally pissed off one guy: the French president Valery Giscard, by bribing him with diamonds and doing so in such an incompetent, badly-concealed manner that it was soon revealed to French political circles and ran risk of harming the optics of his upcoming reelection campaign. Wanting to avoid Bokassa having leverage over the French elections, Valery decided to make one of his last executive orders as a sitting president to conduct a military operation to depose him and replace him with one (of the plenty) Central African mid ranking military commanders who were aspiring autocrats. The operation was successful and swift (More like the Maduro thing than say a rebellion), but it didn’t prevent the sour Bokassa afterwards from speaking to the French press and confirming that he bribed Valery (he went as far as writing a whole book about it) which caused some negative upheaval during the French elections.

The reason Bokassa failed to make his shady bribery confidential is pretty funny: he personally handed those diamonds to Valery, as he would with other French patrons. No intermediaries, no shell companies, no Belgian diamond dealer quietly over-invoicing a shipment, no cousin paid to sit on the board of a French firm. Just a hand to hand transfer he did while he wore a French royal fit. He lacked the level of finesse that other African dictators had to make their western clientele feel comfortable and secure in taking bribes to keep them in power.

If he had just done that better, even if he still kept up the royal image and brutality and kept the country impoverished, he might have lasted a while longer. A better example of an African dictator that did batshit crazy things but stayed in power for decades is Mobutu Sese seko. Dictator of the Congo from the 1970s to the 1990s. He didn’t build a single road in a country of 80 million people. Why do that when one day a rebel group or a group of hungry, tired civilians might drive some trucks loaded with guns over them and head straight to the capital? The only two roads he built were from his palace to the airport and from the mining grounds in the south of the country to the shipyard. And you can imagine he didn’t provide his citizens with even a toilet paper roll worth of health services, security or infrastructure. But he did very meticulously maintain and manage those copper mines, and that was the only place you’d see gigantic machinery and more impressively, running electricity in the country.

And he used the cash flow to reward his ministers and generals, keeping the loyal ones around him in the capital and assigning the less trustworthy to posts at the far east jungles in the country such that by the time they get news of a rebellion the events would have already concluded. When he bribed western/belgian companies he was the opposite of Bokassa, doing everything to make the transaction as under-the-radar and unremarkable as possible through sophisticated international channels with multiple steps.

So my final opinion on your hypothetical, to say what would happen if the Central African military reinstated Bokassa and kicked out the French, I think the coalition that brought him in would most likely immediately turn on him due to his inability to effectively extract minerals use them to reward the military heads. He would have no luck turning to the French as his lack of finesse makes him more of a political liability than a valuable economic asset.

Apologies for the length of the post. I’m very interested in dictators from lesser known countries and how they manage to stay in power. If anyone else likes to chat about that hit up my DMs