The Only Intelligence Service Still Working in France Is Ours

Saturday 24 October 2026.

The Logbook

I belong to those Signal and Telegram groups, among others, where thousands of citizens track the police meter by meter, minute by minute. A checkpoint goes up at a roundabout, and it is on the map before the first ticket is written. An unmarked car moves to another sector, and it is flagged three towns over. A speed camera freshly put back into service is reported there, and it is usually out of service again within forty-eight hours. I am not saying that members of these groups are the ones doing it. I am stating a fact. Just this week, a speed camera that flashed 6,000 drivers a year was burned to the ground. Our data is up to date, cross-checked, and time-stamped. No budget, no civil servants, no briefing memos.

Nobody does this for fun. We do it because we pay, willingly or not, for a system that claims to keep us safe, that has failed to do so for decades, yet never misses a license plate.

They Never Saw It Coming

On October 17, the state was caught completely off guard. Looting, the Limoges city hall in flames, curfews in several cities, 150 police officers and gendarmes injured, more than 2,500 people taken into custody. Five days later, the President of the Republic convened a security council at the Élysée to examine the “malfunctions” of the intelligence services, while the Prime Minister summoned party leaders to demand that they condemn what his government had failed to prevent.

The state’s services, with all their resources, their wiretaps, and their databases, did not see a nationwide riot building. We, with our phones, know the location of every laser speed gun in the département.

But Your License Plate? That They See Perfectly

Because the state is not blind. It is selective.

In 2025, speed cameras and electronic tickets generated 45 million fines and brought in €2.13 billion. The network is set to double by 2031, reaching 10,000 units. The government is aiming for 750 urban traffic cameras by the end of 2027, and the first noise-detecting camera is due for certification in early 2027. After speed and noise will come phones, seat belts, restricted lanes: everything a smart camera can read inside a car. The 2027 budget forecasts yet another revenue record. Add to that automated license plate reading for parking enforcement, barrier-free tolls, and recycling centers that scan your plate: French surveillance technology has never worked better. It is simply pointed in the wrong direction.

The state cannot see a riot coming. It can see your seat belt just fine.

The Gendarme Is Not the Target

Let me be clear, because the charge of hating law enforcement is coming: the gendarme parked on the side of a country road decided nothing. On October 17, it was his colleagues who took the paving stones. What we track on our maps is not a man but a doctrine: the one that assigns officers to the cash register while neighborhoods burn, the one that measures performance in tickets rather than in actual safety.

But we have to face what this situation produces. In the 1940s, carefully noting the movements of men in uniform was called either the Resistance or informing, depending on which side you were on. I am not saying our gendarmes are an occupying army. I am saying that part of the French people has started treating them like one, and that this is the worst diagnosis anyone can make of a regime. When citizens keep a logbook on their own police, the social contract is already broken. We no longer pay to be protected. We pay to be policed, and we watch those who watch us.

The Three Pillars Have Fallen

Julien Rochedy put it well in a recent video, and I believe he is right: democracy is not a moral choice that fell from the sky. It is a regime that rests on material and spiritual conditions. He identifies three. All of them are giving way.

Growth. It allows everyone to improve their lot through work, and it keeps redistribution from turning into plunder. France has now gone seventeen years without it, and I have already shown why inequality becomes unbearable in a society that still believes itself a society of equals. A speed camera network that brings in two billion euros is the admission: when the pie stops growing, the state helps itself from your plate.
Educated citizens, and respect for knowledge. Democracy requires people capable of debate, of critical thinking, and of granting at least some credit to intellectual authority. The worst PISA results in our history and a political class in free fall tell you where we stand. Trust in institutions, meanwhile, is now measured by how fast people share the location of a traffic stop.
A shared sky. People accept the general will, taxes, and solidarity as long as they feel it is their own people who vote and who benefit. The more a society fragments, the more coercion it takes to keep redistribution going. I have written it before: no shared sky, no people, and multiculturalism does not make an “us”.

Remove all three pillars, and what is left to hold the structure up? Coercion. And we can already see it settling in: cameras, databases, curfews, and a presidential promise that “those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held to account.”

The Boomers Are Holding the Door

What still keeps the roof on is the boomers. They vote overwhelmingly for the managerial center, hold the capital, collect the pensions that debt no longer cools, still watch the eight o’clock news, and still believe in the institutions. They are the ones who elected Macron, election after election. They are the last fuse in the consensus.

They will leave the stage in large numbers starting in 2035 to 2040. The generation coming after them has neither growth, nor trust, nor a shared sky. It has Telegram groups.

Rochedy then lays out several possible outcomes: a right-wing dictatorship, a communist dictatorship that would be only the antechamber of an Islamist one, or a subtler, algorithmic dictatorship that would not even need tanks. I do not claim to know which. But I believe an authoritarian regime is coming, and that today’s cameras are its foundation stones. A state that can already read the inside of your car will not have much left to install the day it decides to read something else.

What People Will Say

“Your groups help criminals dodge police checks.” Some of them, no doubt, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the state has tolerated hazard-zone alert devices and navigation apps that do exactly the same thing for twenty years. And if the only way to fight crime is a traffic stop whose location stays secret, then everything else has already failed. The problem is not that we can see the checkpoints. It is that checkpoints are all that is left.

“We vote in April 2027. Democracy is alive and well.” The ballot boxes will be there. The conditions will not. An election does not make a democracy any more than a speed camera makes a road safe. You can hold elections in a regime whose results no one accepts anymore, and that is precisely what comes before authoritarian regimes.

The Regime Is Not France

Two days ago, I wrote that France is finished? We have heard that before. I stand by every word. Because we must not confuse the country with the regime that runs it. France has buried the monarchy, the Second Empire, the Third Republic, Vichy, and the Fourth Republic. It has never been its regime. It has always outlived it.

The managerial democracy of the Fifth Republic, the one that cannot see a riot coming yet counts your speeding down to the last kilometer per hour, may well not survive the boomers. It has stopped meeting the conditions of its own existence, and it knows it: that is why it keeps adding cameras.

Those who keep the logbooks today will not disappear with it. They have learned to organize without the state, to gather intelligence without it, and to trust one another when they no longer trust anything else. They are exactly the French who, when the day comes, will refuse to sign.

The regime may fall. France will rise again.