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.
Economy 780 arrests, two deaths, bus shelters in flames: every big match now replays the same ritual, in which winning is little more than a pretext. A good moment to think back on 1998, the most fully realized World Cup down to its smallest detail, and the last one you could watch anywhere, in the clear, with no subscriptions to stack. Back then soccer was a commons, and the elation spilled into the streets without setting them alight. Twenty-eight years on, the spectacle has been walled off behind a paywall, and the celebration has slid into mere venting. Scrambled on one side, burned on the other: in between lay a kind of soccer you could still love without paying twice.
Economy Michelin isn’t a company that’s dying: it posts 1.7 billion euros in profit, announces a 2-billion share buyback, and in the same breath eliminates up to 1,500 jobs in France, two-thirds of them white-collar. This isn’t bankruptcy, it’s arbitrage: employing people in France has become a cost line that a champion in perfect health coldly optimizes. When the CEO himself points to a punitive regulatory environment, this is no longer about the economic climate, it’s a verdict. You don’t feel the debt, but 1,500 jobs in Clermont, you feel. The country doesn’t collapse all at once: it empties out one announcement at a time, cleanly, politely, voluntarily.
Politics We keep hearing that the French Grand Prix vanished because Formula 1 got too expensive, but money is only half the story. The real lock is political: in a country where the car has become a negative symbol and every public euro is scrutinized, no leader can fund luxury race cars without setting off a firestorm. France isn’t alone in this, either; F1’s economic model is driving the entire old continent out in favor of the Gulf and the United States, customers who pay cash and decide without asking the public’s opinion. That said, the bill is real and the return on investment seriously contested, which makes the taxpayer’s skepticism perfectly defensible. So this absence isn’t an anomaly to be corrected, it’s a revelation of what we’ve become.
Economy At the corner newsstand, a front page catches my eye, I hand over a few coins, and I walk off with the paper, with no one asking me to commit for twelve months. Online, that instinct hits a wall: the article I want, I can’t buy, I’m offered only a subscription at “1 € for the first month,” an auto-renewal trap calibrated on my forgetfulness. Yet the willingness to pay is there, and so is the micropayment plumbing; if it isn’t offered to me, that’s not technical incapacity but commercial calculation. The rare platforms that tried pay-per-article didn’t die for want of readers: they were smothered by publishers bent on protecting their subscription funnel. So I take a pass, every time, and each locked paywall loses the euro it could have collected on the spot.
Cars Two euros to inflate your own tires is air resold at forty times its cost, a markup of nearly 4,000%. The richest part is that the motorway network, no stranger to easy rents, guarantees free air precisely where safety demands it, while your corner station bills you for it. You can invoke maintenance, real estate, or razor-thin fuel margins all you like: between a defensible few dozen cents and two euros collected, the gulf stays wide open. A small, barely approximate calculation of the most discreet racket on the forecourt.
Economy In May 2026, an audit uncovered management failures at Duralex and put court-ordered restructuring back on the horizon, within two weeks of the deadline I had predicted six months earlier. Behind the genteel language of “approximations” lies a perfectly clear mechanism: the former director’s son catapulted into the role of chief financial officer, a symptom of cooperative governance that ended up reproducing the worst habits of the most dysfunctional family-run business. But the worker cooperative is only a surface-level factor, because keeping a mass-production glassworks running in a country that is busy deindustrializing, all while maintaining some of the highest labor costs and energy prices in the world, was a near-impossible mission from the start. The most galling part is that the audit now dismantles a miracle the State and the media had themselves stage-managed, with a heavy dose of emotion and public subsidies. Hats off to the workers, the only people in this whole story with nothing to answer for.
Democracy Factual television news has vanished in France, crushed under the weight of permanent pundits, decorative special correspondents and ever-present political guests. This ousting owes nothing to an ideological conspiracy and everything to simple accounting: commentary costs a hundred times less than fieldwork. There’s no point mourning a golden age that never existed, though; the news broadcast of 1985 was no better, merely reverent toward power instead of chattering for the ratings. The public, for its part, isn’t innocent in this drift: it tunes out the moment you dig deeper, it flares up the moment people start trading insults. Institutional servitude yesterday, market servitude today, and in between, the viewer was never the point.
Economy I have been loyal to Levi’s for decades, and yet I have never owned the same pair of jeans twice. Every time I replace a pair, something has changed: cut, colour, fabric composition, weight. This is not disorder. It’s a strategy. By making product loyalty impossible, the brand exploits precisely the loyalty to the icon: the red tab, the Far West mythology, a carefully maintained heritage designed to conceal a denim that has gone from 14 to 15 oz in the 1980s to 10 to 12 oz today. What is the point of being loyal to a brand that makes loyalty to its product impossible?
Democracy Three days without bank transfers, two years to renovate a five-million-euro rural bridge, eleven months to repair three escalators at Châtelet, two weeks without internet in Saint-Marcellin. These situations are no longer accidents: they have become the cruising speed of a country that has lost its ability to do things fast and at a reasonable cost. At the root of this paralysis, four structural causes that reinforce one another; cascading subcontracting, administrative layering, the asymmetry of privatisation, devouring bureaucracy. A million euros has become the minimum unit at municipal scale, a billion at national scale, and the citizen ends up taking out a Starlink subscription to get what the State, the operators and the local authorities no longer know how to guarantee. A methodical slide and a way out, on condition of shortening decision chains and rehabilitating local doing.