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 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 […]
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.
Economy François Marciano, CEO of Duralex, was abruptly ousted on April 12, 2026, five months after I predicted that a new crisis would break out “within six months at most.” Despite the 8 million raised in November 2025 through crowdfunding and a solidarity fund in January, the worker co-op’s EBITDA is negative by more than 4 million euros. The employee-shareholders who thought they had saved their company are discovering that they risk a double penalty: losing their job and their personal savings invested in the cooperative at the same time. La Lettre Valloire confirms what I had been warning about since August 2025: “Unstable governance, contested strategy, growing dependence on outside financing: the co-op is teetering.” Within 12 to 18 months, Duralex will be either taken over by an industrial buyer or in court-ordered receivership.
Democracy France’s parliamentary inquiry into public broadcasting reveals a pathology deeper than the usual burial of a scandal: under a 1958 ordinance, its own hearings can legally vanish from public view, and relaying them can become a criminal offense, if the final report is never adopted. Transparency turns out to be a reversible concession. The curtain falls, the lights go out, and all of it perfectly legal: the system is working exactly as it was designed to.
Economy France’s 2025 budget is shaping up to be unbalanced once again, deepening a colossal debt already past 3 trillion euros. With the government threatening to invoke article 49.3 to force the bill through, it is long past time to ask the obvious question: how can we accept a burden like this on future generations? Our political leaders need to answer for it and stop gambling with the country’s future.