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.
Politics On September 25, Emmanuel Macron was hoping for a state visit: the Republican Guard, the Legion of Honor, a few minutes with the pope inside Notre-Dame. Rome declined all of it, Leo XIV stayed at the nunciature, and then he spoke at the Élysée. Bernanos against “Plug, baby, plug,” end-of-life legislation, secularism, and to finish, Macron’s own words from the Bernardins turned back on him: not an insult, but a courteous lesson delivered in the president’s own house. That is precisely what makes it so formidable.
Society No society has endured without the sacred, and France has let its own die out. The republican mystique held the country together for a century, then nothing replaced it, while forty thousand churches crumble in the care of a Republic that owns them but has walked away. I argue for a laïcité that owns who we are: complete freedom of worship for all, but public upkeep of Christian buildings and Christian visibility protected by law. This is not an anthropological necessity; it is an identity choice, and I own it. The state oversees the stone, never the faith.
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.
Digital sovereignty In 2023, Cédric O bought into Mistral AI for €176, then lobbied for a lighter AI Act; after the latest funding round, his stake is worth around €90 million on paper. Since then, the French state has become the startup’s first customer, from the armed forces to the civil service. This summer, Mistral crossed a threshold: its infrastructure now hosts third-party models, starting with China’s GLM-5.2. The pivot to a platform model is rational, and I defended it myself. What isn’t rational is to keep selling it as technological sovereignty.
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.
Europe Dario Amodei’s essay never mentions Europe, and yet the AI Act already contains, on paper, the first step of his plan: evaluations, cybersecurity, incident reporting, a panel of independent experts, and since August 2, 2026 an AI Office with the power to investigate and to fine. The difference comes down to one thing: the regulation organizes disclosure under secrecy, where Amodei proposes permanent presence and publication. Brussels selects by a compute threshold what it has never observed, and its Article 78 is why the public learned of the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident from an American nonprofit and a competitor’s blog. The embryo of that college of evaluators already exists, in Article 68, and three things are missing from it that an implementing act and one amendment would suffice to supply.
Politics A butler at the prime minister’s residence taken into custody over a cocaine handoff. An adviser to the prime minister carried out of a party by paramedics after an overdose. A former Attal spin doctor who says he was “blowing his brains out” on coke while at the finance ministry. A France Télévisions journalist describing deliveries made within steps of government ministries. In June 2026, Sébastien Lecornu had his ministers, their staffs, his prefects and his ambassadors tested for drugs, then refused to release a single figure. Parliament, which writes the country’s narcotics laws, called the idea of testing itself “ridiculous.” This piece asserts nothing and proves nothing. It lines up three years of public facts and asks the one question they leave open: since when does an institution refuse an exam it is certain to pass?
Artificial Intelligence On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that a swarm of 10,000 agents had solved Navier-Stokes in 88 hours, an Anthropic researcher resigned accusing the labs of gambling with our lives, and the OECD published the worst PISA results in French history. The night before, on LCI, a presidential candidate had found nothing to say about Pompidou. One thread runs through all of it: everyone is speaking in the future tense, and no one is rereading the past. Some because they are manufacturing the future by the token, others because they no longer have a past to draw on. The question for France is not whether AI will kill us. It is who, here, will still be able to read the proof.
Democracy In late August, LCI aired the Medef debate: seven chairs, seven candidates for the 2027 French presidential race, and no published selection criteria. Behind that stage sits an invisible round of voting, in which invitations, polls, airtime, and published sponsorships assemble the shortlist that voters will merely ratify in April. The seven disagree in real ways, but only within the walls: nobody there ever questions the walls themselves, from the European Union to the death penalty, birthright citizenship, or the church-state settlement of 1905. A democracy that never lets certain questions reach the ballot turns its political choices into dogmas. The test is not whether those ideas are good, but whether they can be beaten fairly or only ruled out in advance.