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 […]
Economy At the Berchem Ouest service area, Europe’s largest service station by revenue, using the toilets costs 50 cents. The rebate-token system (recoverable against your purchases) has a certain coherence, but it conditions access to a biological function on a commercial act. What strikes you more is the apparatus: a machine to change your bills into coins, a terminal to pay, a turnstile to filter and, as a last resort, an ATM if you don’t have change. An industrial infrastructure running 24/7, in a place that handles millions, to collect 50 cents per entry. You can find that reasonable. I find it indecent.
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.
Artificial Intelligence Since April 8, Grok has been automatically translating all content on X, without you even noticing. No more clicking “Translate”: the algorithm now folds Japanese, Brazilian, or Nigerian posts straight into your feed. This invisible automation changes everything: language silos blow apart, creators reach global audiences, dissidents bypass censorship through instant translation. Of course, disinformation travels just as easily as information. But for the first time in history, billions of people can communicate with no language friction, and nobody seems to have grasped the scale of the earthquake.
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.
Economy We all know the past predicts nothing, yet we keep believing in it out of a kind of instinctive loyalty. This recurrence bias isn’t stupidity, but a cognitive nostalgia inherited from evolution, pushing us to look for promises where there are only curves. Faced with the glacial indifference of the markets, clarity alone isn’t enough, because our willpower runs out. True wisdom, then, lies in delegating our decisions to mechanical rules, to protect our wealth from our own emotions. Choosing the future over memory is probably the hardest act of discipline there is.
Digital sovereignty As France settles into a world record for pessimism, our flagship industrial projects like SCAF and IRIS² are sinking into bureaucracy and European compromise. While China and the United States build the future without asking permission, we prefer to turn the precautionary principle into a state religion. This deadlock isn’t technical; it’s cultural. We’ve sacrificed bold ambition for a regulatory comfort that manufactures nihilism. It’s high time we reclaimed the right to dream big and finally put builders ahead of analysts. Because meaning doesn’t come from caution. It comes from audacity owned without apology.
Artificial Intelligence An AI text detector isn’t a flawed tool that better engineering will eventually fix: it’s an impossible one. Large language models are trained to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between their own distribution and that of human text; making statistical distinction impossible is their explicit objective. A score of “87% AI” is not evidence: it’s a probabilistic estimate over overlapping distributions, produced by a system its own makers refuse to stand behind in a disciplinary setting. OpenAI pulled its own detector in July 2023, admitting a true-detection rate of just 26%; the arms maker concedes its radar is blind, and universities keep buying licenses. To condemn a student on that basis is to punish an unlucky statistical draw: a wrong, not an error of judgment.
Economy Behind the thin strand of glass that reaches your home sits a chain of seven entities (the county government, the infrastructure operator, a local subsidiary, subcontractors, a scheduling platform) that you never chose and whose existence you won’t even suspect until your first outage. The Isère THD public network represents 510 million euros, including 285.5 million in public money committed over 25 years to the benefit of an Altice subsidiary. If XPFibre changes hands (and a sale is on the table), Isère’s taxpayers will have financed infrastructure that a foreign pension fund will operate until 2042. Every link in the chain does its job: this isn’t a criticism of the companies, it’s a question about the architecture of the system that puts them there. The fiber works, but if it goes down, you still won’t know who to complain to.