Geopolitics On September 22, Dassault Aviation flew two sovereign AI algorithms aboard a Rafale. Ten days earlier, France’s defense procurement agency confirmed that France would prepare the Rafale’s successor on its own, SCAF or no SCAF. We have finally taken back the reins. One question remains, and nobody is asking it: who pays? The studies for a sixth-generation engine require a billion euros, the demonstrator has no funding at all, and I am making a fiscal choice that I fully own.
Geopolitics On September 18, Emmanuel Macron gathered his potential successors at the Élysée and insisted three times that soaring prices are not the result of government decisions. The transcript published by the presidency bears him out on the immediate facts: Hormuz was closed by Iran’s response to American and Israeli strikes, Russia is genuinely running a hybrid campaign in Europe, and France chose none of these wars. What remains is the word that recurs like a refrain, enduring, and that is where the account starts to crack. You endure an earthquake, not four years of forks in the road that replaced Russian gas with American LNG at triple the price, indexed a fully amortized nuclear fleet to that gas, and left Europe funding its ally’s defense industry. France does not lack an energy policy. It has one that is tactical, reactive, and never consolidated into doctrine, which is exactly what condemns it to discover its dependencies on the day someone decides to use them.
Digital sovereignty Dario Amodei proposes to slow the race for AI capabilities: third-party evaluators stationed inside the labs, coordination among companies in “democratic countries” under an antitrust waiver, negotiation with China. The word Europe never appears in the essay. Behind the vocabulary of caution, the three concrete measures, a chip embargo, a crackdown on distillation, and the securing of model weights, describe a regime in which frontier capability becomes a commodity rationed by Washington. There is still one idea worth taking whole, the embedded evaluators, and one question to ask before applauding it: who has their foot on the pedal.
Digital sovereignty On July 28, 2026, China began volume production of its own immersion scanners, the 60-million-euro machines that print circuits onto silicon and that only ASML truly knows how to build: five units this year, about twenty in 2027, against ASML’s 130 systems a year. One to twenty-five: the ratio looks trivial, yet Seoul dropped 10% and Tokyo 4% in the days that followed, because a technology embargo has no proportional value. Its value is binary, and it has just stopped being a wall and become a delay, something that can be calculated, amortized, and planned around. By removing the alternative, export controls created the competitor they were meant to smother, exactly as they had taught Chinese AI frugality. Three days later, Bpifrance sold 2.5% of Orange for 1.1 billion euros and called it asset rotation: for the same sum, one bought productive capital, the other three months of cash.
Digital sovereignty For his very first post on X, Jensen Huang said nothing about GPUs: he shared a letter defending open models, signed by NVIDIA, Meta, Mistral and Hugging Face, but conspicuously left unsigned by OpenAI and Anthropic. That list of absentees says a great deal: the line between those who signed and those who held back maps precisely onto the line between an economy built on openness and one built on the tollbooth. The text speaks of “American leadership,” yet every one of its arguments makes the case, in spite of itself, for everyone else’s sovereignty. Because an open model knows no borders: the same file that spreads AI through the factories of Ohio also lets you run inference at home, out of reach of the Cloud Act.
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.
Artificial Intelligence On June 12, SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in history. Four days later it bought Cursor for $60 billion, then unveiled Origin, a Git forge built for agents. The press boiled it down to the purchase of an IDE and missed the point: one man is buying, layer by layer, the right to decide what counts as true, first in code, soon in knowledge itself. The real bottleneck is no longer producing code, it’s arbitrating what deserves to be merged, and for training agents that validation layer is worth more than all of GitHub’s public corpus combined. Yet there’s a crack in the narrative of inevitability: the keystone, Anthropic, is the one piece Musk cannot buy, even as he already supplies part of its oxygen. The real question is no longer to understand his plan, but to decide how much longer we keep renting him the future.
Democracy Le multiculturalisme ne peut pas fonctionner dans le cadre d’une démocratie libérale. Ce n’est pas une question de dosage, de bonne volonté ou de moyens. Appelons ça une loi, si le mot gêne les puristes : une tendance lourde, une constante empirique que trois continents et un siècle d’expériences reproduisent sans exception. Putnam l’a démontré malgré lui : plus un quartier est culturellement diversifié, moins les individus se font confiance, pas seulement entre groupes différents, mais au sein de chaque groupe. Quand le “nous” commun s’effondre, les individus retournent à leur appartenance primaire, l’élection devient un recensement ethnique, et le perdant ne reconnaît plus la légitimité du vainqueur : il conteste celle du système.
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 sovereignty The IMF is forecasting -0.2% growth in 2026. The real data (destroyed refineries, terminals out of service, sector-wide shortages) point to a -1.5% scenario for developed economies. Standard models reason in prices, not volumes, and ignore threshold effects: a 10% loss of energy triggers a 15% drop in heavy industry. Between the reassuring forecasts and the crisis ahead, no one is preparing the public, and every day lost is one day less to organize collective resilience.