Surveillance and civil liberties I rented a camera lens, and thirty minutes after delivery my phone warned me that an unknown AirTag was moving with me. Under the foam padding sat a tracker with an inventory number written in marker: AT 102. Protecting an asset handed to strangers is entirely legitimate, but a tracker that sleeps at my house for five days does not record a lens moving around, it records me. I only found out because of Apple’s anti-stalking alert, and not because of a line in the rental terms. The case does not turn on the principle of tracking. It turns on the silence around it.
Justice “For the last month, just take it out of the deposit”: the sentence every French landlord eventually hears, resting on a stubborn misunderstanding. A security deposit can indeed cover unpaid rent, but the landlord applies it at move-out, against receipts, rather than the tenant deciding in advance. Between the statutory cap, the return deadlines, the 10 percent penalty and the 20 percent holdback in condominium buildings, Article 22 of France’s 1989 tenancy law already sets careful limits on both sides. Which leaves a few myths to dismantle along the way, starting with the supposed “registry of defaulting tenants” that does not exist in France and whose very creation would be a criminal offense.
Politics The French Senate wants to hunt down “domestic interference,” an oxymoron that turns the critical citizen into a foreigner in his own country. Let’s take them at their word: applied honestly, their own definition points not to alternative media or anonymous accounts, but to the circulatory system connecting the machinery of the French state to McKinsey, Lazard, FTI, and General Electric. From Bruno Le Maire at Macro Advisory Partners to the McKinsey nexus under judicial investigation since 2022, the list is long, documented, and signed off at every step by the official ethics bodies. At the top, the revolving door is an asset; at the bottom, citizen speech is a risk to be mapped before 2027. Domestic interference is real: it doesn’t post, it invoices.
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.
Justice The murder of little Lyhanna Rameau Bernard revived, within hours, the two totems of the news cycle, the death penalty and chemical castration, the latter backed by 83% of the French in a CSA poll. We pretend not to know that it has existed since 1998, that it remains tied to medical consent, and that the word “mandatory” shatters against the refusal to conscript a doctor. But the real scandal lies elsewhere: triptorelin, used to chemically castrate an adult rapist, is exactly the molecule, Decapeptyl, that we inject into children, within its marketing authorization for precocious puberty and off-label as a “puberty blocker” for minors questioning their gender. Here is the world turned upside down: what we hesitate to impose on our worst criminals in the name of bodily integrity, we administer to healthy children in the name of a fashion, without the slightest proof that the effects on bone and brain are reversible. For what would have saved Lyhanna was not a syringe, but a justice system that acts on complaints instead of filing them away.
Digital sovereignty The National Gendarmerie runs an X account with a million followers, a formalized communication doctrine, polished hashtags, and a budget of nearly eleven billion euros a year funded by the taxpayer. The #FastAndFourrière hashtag, borrowing from American action cinema, turns every traffic stop into marketing content, in a complete break with the French military tradition of restraint. It isn’t the mission that’s at issue, nor its legality: it’s the posture, and above all what it reveals by contrast. Because while the institution tweets its speed cameras and its impound lots with emojis, its 2024 report devotes only four pages to the use of lethal force, and its internal reports rose 28% in a year. You don’t congratulate yourself for doing your duty.
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.
Economy In France, one organization can freeze your bank account without a court ruling, garnish your income without notice, and bring a company to its knees in a matter of weeks. That organization is called URSSAF, and the way it operates violates one of the oldest principles of Western law: no one may be a judge in their own cause. It alone issues enforceable orders carrying the force of a court judgment, without any magistrate having examined the merits of the debt. A reassessment can cover three years of past activity, amount to several times the annual profit, and kick in before the challenge has even been exhausted, not for fraud, but for a divergent interpretation applied in good faith. The cost isn’t only economic: it’s democratic.
Europe The European Union now strikes its own citizens with economic sanctions without trial, without a judge, without any criminal law defining the alleged offense. A Swiss colonel and a German journalist have had their accounts frozen for expressing analyses that displease the European Council; forced to apply for humanitarian waivers in order to feed themselves. These measures, labeled “administrative” to bypass the safeguards of criminal law, nonetheless inflict heavier consequences than a court conviction: a ban on working, on traveling, on receiving the slightest assistance. This drift is part of a methodical three-stage escalation: censorship delegated to the platforms via the DSA, the control infrastructure (digital identity, the digital euro), and now existential punishment through asset freezes. By turning political opinion into grounds for civil death, the EU is shifting from soft power to hard power; and trampling the very principles of the rule of law it claims to defend.