Economy In May 2026, an audit uncovered management failures at Duralex and put court-ordered restructuring back on the horizon, within two weeks of the deadline I had predicted six months earlier. Behind the genteel language of “approximations” lies a perfectly clear mechanism: the former director’s son catapulted into the role of chief financial officer, a symptom of cooperative governance that ended up reproducing the worst habits of the most dysfunctional family-run business. But the worker cooperative is only a surface-level factor, because keeping a mass-production glassworks running in a country that is busy deindustrializing, all while maintaining some of the highest labor costs and energy prices in the world, was a near-impossible mission from the start. The most galling part is that the audit now dismantles a miracle the State and the media had themselves stage-managed, with a heavy dose of emotion and public subsidies. Hats off to the workers, the only people in this whole story with nothing to answer for.
Economy On 6 February 2026, Stellantis shares lost 25% in a single session, taking with them an illusion carefully maintained for twenty years: these savers had not bought a “protected” investment; they had sold their bank a catastrophe insurance policy disguised as a coupon. Some buy-back valuations now show -99% on instruments stamped “with safety barrier”, and yet the French structured products market has tripled in four years to reach €60 billion in net inflows in 2025, because no other product generates as much revenue for banks. The mechanics are crystal clear once you strip away the marketing: you surrender the dividends, you cap your gains at the coupon, and you retain 100% of the downside risk beyond a barrier whose statistical robustness amounts to sophistry, while one in five CAC 40 stocks has experienced a drawdown exceeding -50% over the past twenty years. Belgium settled the matter as early as 2011 with an FSMA moratorium that eliminated single-stock barrier autocalls from the retail market, without any collapse of the savings market; France, meanwhile, is still publishing AMF/ACPR mapping reports calling for “more financial education”. At some point, we will have to stop pretending.
Economy I have been loyal to Levi’s for decades, and yet I have never owned the same pair of jeans twice. Every time I replace a pair, something has changed: cut, colour, fabric composition, weight. This is not disorder. It’s a strategy. By making product loyalty impossible, the brand exploits precisely the loyalty to the icon: the red tab, the Far West mythology, a carefully maintained heritage designed to conceal a denim that has gone from 14 to 15 oz in the 1980s to 10 to 12 oz today. What is the point of being loyal to a brand that makes loyalty to its product impossible?
Economy The refrain is familiar: when the firm makes 200,000 euros in profit, it’s the workers’ labour that created the wealth. But when it loses 50,000 euros because the market turned, far fewer voices call for symmetry. The employee risks their job, their unpaid back wages, their pension. The shareholder risks their stake. Both take a risk, but not the same one, and it’s precisely this imbalance that has to be discussed honestly, figures in hand. A coherent answer does exist, by the way: the cooperative, where everyone is exposed. And when it breaks, as at Duralex, it’s the worker-shareholders who lose their savings. So, the real question: do you accept the symmetry, or do you just want the upsides of capitalism without the downsides?
Culture The Alloncle report came out this morning; at 8:56 a.m., Sébastien Lecornu was already posting a reaction tweet on X. Nearly four hundred pages digested in two hours by a prime minister: the feat is such that it’s worth examining the mechanics of it. The tweet isn’t a reaction, it’s a prefabricated rebuttal, calibrated from the past weeks’ leaks to occupy the media space before anyone has opened the PDF. A sentence-by-sentence breakdown of a little masterpiece of political communication drained of all substance, in which we find the three tics of late-stage Macronism: the flight into vision, the outsourcing to independent authorities, the neutralization by co-optation. Spoiler: we already know how it ends.
E-invoicing FICOBA in January, ANTS in April, Mentor at the end of April, impots.gouv flagged in early May: four sovereign vaults gutted in ninety days. On 1 September 2026, the State will force ten million businesses to push the entirety of their invoicing flows through one hundred and fifteen private platforms it has accredited. Sold as a fight against fraud, the reform in reality builds a complete graph of the private French economy, hosted at around a hundred operators, over which the State decides everything and answers for nothing. It’s the French invention of an unprecedented mechanism: responsibility without culpability, in which political risk is transferred to private operational risk with no transfer of the decision. We haven’t multiplied the targets: we’ve merged them.
Economy When a lawyer claims that out of a hundred euros of toll paid on a French highway, thirty-three end up going to shareholders in the form of dividends (once the debt is repaid, the operating charges paid and the taxes levied), you can shrug and see it as a militant approximation. Except that the figure […]
Economy At the Berchem Ouest service area, Europe’s largest service station by revenue, using the toilets costs 50 cents. The rebate-token system (recoverable against your purchases) has a certain coherence, but it conditions access to a biological function on a commercial act. What strikes you more is the apparatus: a machine to change your bills into coins, a terminal to pay, a turnstile to filter and, as a last resort, an ATM if you don’t have change. An industrial infrastructure running 24/7, in a place that handles millions, to collect 50 cents per entry. You can find that reasonable. I find it indecent.
Culture The Strait of Hormuz may be six thousand kilometers away, yet for two months it has been dictating the price of fuel at the pump and promises to weigh for a long time still on food prices and plane tickets: France, which imports 29% of its diesel from the Middle East, is the willing hostage of a dependence it has refused to reduce for fifty years. Macron sent the Charles de Gaulle there, a sovereign posture that poorly masks a short-term survival policy. But reducing this conflict to a question of barrels would be a convenient way of not looking at what lies behind it: Hormuz is the economic symptom, Beirut is the heart of the war, and the 2,454 Lebanese dead in six weeks aren’t a geopolitical abstraction. Manon Debs, Vernis Rouge, a French-Lebanese artist evacuated from Lebanon in 2006, has just released a song because she’s afraid for her own and because writing is the only way she knows to feel useful. Two Frances facing the same conflict: one watches the price of a liter, the other waits for news of a street it knows by heart.
Digital euro On April 21, 2026, the BPCE Group announced with great fanfare the first Wero e-commerce transactions in France. The same day, Netzpolitik.org revealed that EPI had been forced to admit that Wero runs its critical infrastructure on the servers of Amazon Web Services. In November 2025, this same EPI was torpedoing the ECB’s digital euro in the name of sovereignty: a project that, by construction, would have rested on the natively sovereign infrastructure of the Eurosystem. Building Wero on AWS is like building a European Defense Ministry on land leased from a foreign power: the owner always has a spare set of keys, and can cut off the water whenever a federal judge asks him to. Without a public roadmap for migration to a SecNumCloud infrastructure, the slogan “strong and independent solution” remains a fine poster stuck on an American wall.