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.
On April 21, 2026, the BPCE Group announced with great fanfare the first Wero e-commerce transactions in France. The same day, Netzpolitik.org revealed that EPI had been forced to admit that Wero runs its critical infrastructure on the servers of Amazon Web Services. In November 2025, this same EPI was torpedoing the ECB’s digital euro in the name of sovereignty: a project that, by construction, would have rested on the natively sovereign infrastructure of the Eurosystem. Building Wero on AWS is like building a European Defense Ministry on land leased from a foreign power: the owner always has a spare set of keys, and can cut off the water whenever a federal judge asks him to. Without a public roadmap for migration to a SecNumCloud infrastructure, the slogan “strong and independent solution” remains a fine poster stuck on an American wall.
After four years of patience in the face of the promise of a “modern PrestaShop”, I migrated my entire client fleet to WooCommerce. The trigger didn’t come from a catastrophic bug, but from the loss of confidence in the project’s trajectory: governance blur between “Project” and “Edition”, the absurd coexistence of two template engines (Smarty and Twig), and updates that turn every minor maintenance into a risky operation. When a product-page change takes 4 hours on PrestaShop versus 1.5 hours on WooCommerce, the opportunity cost for the client becomes unsustainable. I developed a WooCommerce Multisite + API-first architecture (via my StockSync tool) that offers more robustness than PrestaShop’s native multistore, with no dependence on direct SQL writes. PrestaShop may have gained Symfony, but it has lost its field ambassadors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.