Economy On October 1, 2026, France borrowed for ten years at 4.92%, a higher rate than Italy, while hundreds of billions of euros sat idle in checking accounts earning 0.04%. I propose a national loan reserved for individual savers: the ten-year rate minus one point, tax-free, locked for ten years and capped at €50,000. That one-point discount splits the tax wedge, so the saver earns more than on a market bond and the state pays less than it does to foreign funds. The limits are openly acknowledged, from draining the Livret A to fragmenting the bond market, but the interest would finally stay in France.
E-invoicing One in two French micro-entrepreneurs reports no revenue at all: half the scheme is an intermittent France of trial ventures, side income, and businesses in transition. To that dormant half, the e-invoicing reform says: pick a private operator and appear in the directory, not in order to invoice, but in order to be capable of it someday. The mandatory-subscription argument is wrong, though: thirteen of the nineteen offerings audited by l0g include a genuinely free tier. The real toll lies elsewhere, in a cognitive barrier to entry and in the precariousness of a free tier that has no reason to survive for customers who generate nothing. By scrapping in 2024 the free public gateway promised in 2020, the state locked in the intermediary requirement and put a price on its entrepreneurs’ sleep.
Digital sovereignty In late June 2026, an intruder armed with two stolen passwords wandered freely through French taxpayers’ fiscal records, and the Finance Ministry only grasped the scale of the theft when a hacker calling himself ZeroBytes went public with it two months later. The remediation plan announced in the aftermath reads like a confession: no multi-factor authentication across the board, no consultation quotas, systems without monitoring sensors. Meanwhile, that same state is finalizing mandatory electronic invoicing and DAC8, the largest economic data vacuum in its history. The asymmetry is the whole story: an obligation to surrender everything on one side, a proven inability to protect it on the other. Until the state can demonstrate that it knows how to keep what it already holds, it has no standing to demand more.
Geopolitics April 2013: an Alstom executive is arrested at JFK, and the group’s energy business ends up at General Electric. Thirteen years later, France is requiring its companies to route their entire invoicing flows through a hundred-odd private platforms: customers, suppliers, actual prices, volumes, dependencies, a real-time map of its economy. No hacking required when an extraterritorial subpoena, a platform acquisition, or a well-placed source will do. The sharpest irony: the most sensitive data doesn’t sleep in the administration’s fortress, but at the weakest link. In the name of VAT collection, France has just assembled the most complete economic intelligence trove in Europe, with no doctrine to protect it.
Justice Four years of investigation, search after search, and still no resolution: the McKinsey affair is no longer merely a suspicion of irregular financing of the Macron campaigns, it has become a revealing X-ray of how French justice works. The 2022 Senate report established the inconvenient facts: over one billion euros spent on consultants in 2021 alone, and a firm that paid zero corporate income tax in France for ten years. Against that backdrop, comparing judicial tempos is a cruel exercise: an inquiry opened the very day of the revelations for Fillon, immediate enforcement for Le Pen, eight years and a quiet closure for Mélenchon, perpetual suspension for the party in power. One clock, though, is ticking unwatched: Article 67 of the Constitution, which will make Macron an ordinary citizen before the law in June 2027. Seen from that angle, the next presidential election will also be an election about the judicial fate of the previous one.
Politics Every year in France, nearly 50 billion euros in public funding flows into the nonprofit sector. Behind the legitimate delivery of public services hides a major democratic drift: the funding of organizations whose sole activity is manufacturing rules and influencing policy. Subsidized by the very State they claim to watch, these groups use taxpayer money to wage permanent legal warfare, paralyzing projects and replacing the voters’ ballot with litigation. By losing their financial independence, these precious countervailing powers have changed in nature. Our democracy’s watchdog has become the administration’s lapdog.
Digital sovereignty The PEA was created to finance European companies, and yet millions of French savers use it to bet on the S&P 500. The key to this paradox lies in a little-known contract, the swap, which lets a fund hold European shares while paying the saver American performance. Far from a makeshift, this arrangement exploits an American tax quirk that often lets it beat physical ownership, but it rests on three dependencies you do not control: a bank, a foreign tax authority, and a regulatory framework. The replication is excellent and the returns are there, but you do not own America: you are leasing its performance. And that distinction, painless as long as all goes well, takes on its full meaning the day something seizes up.
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 Far from being a mobility solution, paid parking is a disguised tax whose national revenue jumped 84% after the 2018 reform. In Saint-Marcellin as elsewhere, the “squatter car” argument is just a smokescreen for rolling out automated LAPI surveillance and handing enforcement to private interests. This forced-turnover system eases nothing: it multiplies pointless trips, suffocates small retail, and taxes residents right up to their own front door. By turning public space into a financial product, elected officials prefer easy profit over the courage to enforce the existing Highway Code. It’s an institutionalized scam that hits the most vulnerable first, under a thin coat of green varnish.