Why leave France when you still love it?

I am not addressing only those who dream of governing France tomorrow. That would be too convenient: nearly sixty-nine million people could then point at a handful of leaders, declare "it's their fault," and go back to their business as if democratic sovereignty never committed us to anything. These lines are addressed first of all to my compatriots, from the right, the left, the center or the extremes; to convinced voters and resigned voters alike, to weary abstainers, to declared patriots as well as to those who feel more distant from that word. They speak as much to the French who are convinced they still live in one of the best countries in the world as to those who no longer quite recognize the country of their childhood. Today's, yesterday's and tomorrow's leaders will naturally find their share in them, but they are not the only intended readers. This text is above all a conversation with my compatriots, and therefore also with myself.

I would like to explain to them something that took me a long time to understand myself: why some French people want to leave, why many of those who would like to are materially unable to, and why I now deeply understand those who have the means and end up doing it. I am not speaking of all expatriates as if they formed a homogeneous political bloc. People live abroad for a thousand reasons: a career, studies, love, the climate, adventure, a professional transfer, a chosen retirement or simply the desire to discover the world. On December 31, 2025, 1,784,975 French nationals were registered on the Register of French Nationals Abroad, but registration is optional, and the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs estimates the total number of French people living outside the national territory at about 2.5 million. Because registration is optional, the ministry specifies that these data must be handled with caution and do not make it possible to know population flows exactly. On their own, therefore, they cannot tell us why each of these French people chose to live abroad. (Source: Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, "The French community abroad in figures," data as of December 31, 2025; see the official source.)

So I will never claim that two and a half million French people have "voted with their feet" against French policy. That would be false, and my argument has no need of such exaggerations to be heard. On the other hand, when we look specifically at certain highly qualified populations, the signal becomes much harder to ignore. The Ipsos bva barometer produced in 2025 for the Fédération Syntec estimates that about 15,000 young graduates of French engineering and business schools begin their careers abroad each year; among the working people and students with a master's-level degree or higher who were surveyed, 57% were considering working outside France within the next three years, 21% of them seriously. The volume of departures of the graduates concerned had risen by 23% in ten years, while 70% of respondents considered France to be in decline, 74% said they were worried about its economic situation and 81% about its political situation. At the same time, 84% cited at least one advantage of the French ecosystem. (Source: Ipsos bva/Fédération Syntec, "2025 Brain Drain Barometer," survey of 1,008 graduates and students at master's level and above, September 2025; see the Ipsos study: https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/barometre-2025-de-la-fuite-des-cerveaux.)

This is the contradictory France I want to talk about: a country one can love passionately, which retains considerable advantages, immense talent and powerful reasons to live there, but some of whose children nevertheless end up concluding that the relationship between what it asks of them, what it allows them to build and what it guarantees them in return has deeply deteriorated. This text is born neither of hatred for France nor of a wish to see it fail. It comes from the far more painful place where love remains, but where doubt gradually settles in: can one keep living with what one loves when one no longer knows whether one can still build one's life there?

Loving France does not mean writing the State a blank check

I love France. I love its landscapes, its language, its villages, its mountains, its countryside, its heritage and that extraordinary diversity that lets you almost change worlds after a few hours on the road. I love understanding what the generations before us built. I love the history of our kings, our Republics, our empires, our conquests and our defeats, our scientists, our explorers, our soldiers, our engineers and our builders. I am also interested in our colonial history without needing to turn the historical gaps in military, industrial, scientific, administrative or infrastructural development between societies into any hierarchy of worth between human beings, any more than I need to erase the violence, domination and injustice that accompanied that history. Loving your country's history obliges you neither to turn it into a golden legend nor to disown it. We should be able to look at our past as adults, with its greatness, its faults, its sacrifices, its contradictions and its achievements.

For me, France is above all not just the French State. The Nation cannot be reduced to Bercy, the General Tax Code, the Journal officiel or the government of the day. Governments come and go, majorities change, ministers are replaced and political regimes themselves have changed over the course of our history. The human, historical, cultural and emotional community we call France predates them and, I hope, will outlive them. That is precisely why I refuse to see patriotism systematically set against criticism of how the State works. One can love one's country so much as to be extraordinarily severe toward those who administer it, precisely because one still holds greater ambitions for it than those to which one sometimes sees it resign itself. Criticizing the State is therefore not necessarily attacking France; on the contrary, it can be the consequence of immense expectations of it.

Loving one's country deeply has never meant consenting without limit to everything the State imposes on it. Respect for the flag, for our history, for our soldiers and for those who died for France obliges no one to accept being shorn like a cash cow, nor to resign oneself to a tax burden felt to be excessive, to rules that creep into the smallest details of daily life, or to the feeling of being regarded first as a potential fraudster from whom every last euro must be extracted. Patriotism is not a blank check given to the State. It requires neither approval of all its policies, nor resignation in the face of its dysfunctions, nor the sacrifice of one's own future as proof of national love. One can remain deeply attached to France and conclude that one can no longer progress there as one had hoped. When a ship takes on water, some stay on board, bail, repair the hull and try to bring it back to port; they have all my respect. Others, after bailing for years, end up making for the shore because they refuse to drown with it. Their departure does not prove that they hate the ship. Sometimes it costs them precisely because they still love it.

€3,536 billion: let's stop reciting a figure no one can picture

According to INSEE, French public debt as defined by Maastricht reached €3,536.1 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, or 117.5% of gross domestic product, compared with 115.7% three months earlier. It had therefore increased by €75.6 billion in one quarter. Saying 117.5% of GDP means that the stock of debt represents about 1.175 times the value of all the wealth produced in France in one year. INSEE specifies, however, that the quarterly increase in debt must not be confused with the deficit for the same period, as debt is also affected by cash management and other financial operations. (Source: INSEE, "Quarterly Maastricht debt of general government, first quarter 2026," June 25, 2026; official INSEE publication: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/9010340.)

If we want to understand why this figure worries me, here again we must stop looking at a single quarter. In 2005, public debt stood at €1,147.6 billion and represented 66.8% of GDP. Twenty years later, in the first quarter of 2026, it reached €3,536.1 billion and 117.5% of GDP. In current euros, the stock has therefore been multiplied by a little more than three, or about +208%. One could rightly object that a nominal comparison over twenty years includes inflation and economic growth. That is precisely why the second figure is the most important: the weight of debt relative to GDP has also risen by 50.7 points, from 66.8% to 117.5%. So this is not just 2026 euros compared with 2005 euros. It is the place of debt in our national wealth that has profoundly changed. (Source: INSEE, long series "Public debt and deficit," Maastricht debt since 1980: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1288370.)

But let's be frank: €3,536.1 billion means almost nothing to the human brain any more. To give this number an intelligible scale, INSEE estimated the French population at 69.1 million on January 1, 2026. Relative to that population, the stock of debt represents about €51,174 per inhabitant, children and infants included. This is not an individual bill: no French person will receive a notice tomorrow asking them to pay this sum personally. It is simply an arithmetical equivalent, intended to make visible an order of magnitude that would otherwise be almost abstract. (Sources: INSEE, public debt in the first quarter of 2026 and "2025 Demographic Report"; population of 69.1 million on January 1, 2026; public debt; French population.)

CALCULATION NOTE €3,536,100,000,000 ÷ 69,100,000 inhabitants = €51,173.66, i.e. ≈ €51,174 per inhabitant.

Another misunderstanding deserves to be cleared up: a State does not repay its debt the way an individual repays a mortgage. Securities gradually reach maturity and are, to a large extent, refinanced by new issues. For 2026, Agence France Trésor shows a projected State financing requirement of €305.7 billion, of which €175.8 billion corresponds to medium- and long-term securities reaching maturity. Its program provides in parallel for €310 billion of issues of medium- and long-term government securities, net of buybacks. In other words, the €175.8 billion reaching maturity is not raised through taxes to make this old debt disappear for good: it is largely refinanced by new borrowing, while the current deficit must also be covered. (Source: Agence France Trésor, "State Budget – 2026 Finance Bill"; official financing table.)

What, on the other hand, is paid immediately and is permanently unavailable for any other use is interest. In 2025, general government spent €64.7 billion on interest. Relative to the population, this charge corresponds to about €936.32 per inhabitant per year. Dividing by twelve, this represents about €78.03 per inhabitant per month as a simple arithmetical equivalent; for a family of four, it comes to about €312 a month of collective wealth corresponding to interest alone. No one receives this bill individually: this translation serves only to show how much collective wealth several tens of billions in interest absorb each year. (Source: INSEE, "Expenditure by general government sub-sector in 2025," interest: €64.7 billion; calculation based on a population of 69.1 million; official INSEE table: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2381404.)

CALCULATION NOTE €64.7bn ÷ 69.1 M inhabitants = €936.32/year, i.e. €78.03/month per inhabitant and ≈ €312/month for four people.

Another forecast series, taken up in 2026 by the Finance Committee of the National Assembly on the basis of the Government's answers, puts the debt burden of general government at €66.6 billion in 2025 and forecasts €78.3 billion in 2026. This forecast series is not strictly identical to the provisional accounting figure of €64.7 billion published by INSEE for 2025. The conventions therefore do not overlap exactly, and the two series must not be read as if they were identical. They nevertheless converge on one point: the expected burden for 2026 is rising sharply. Relative to the population of 69.1 million, the €78.3 billion forecast for 2026 corresponds to an order of magnitude of €1,133.14 per inhabitant per year, or about €94.43 per inhabitant per month; for four people, the equivalent exceeds €377 a month. These amounts remain arithmetical equivalents based on a forecast, not an individual bill or a final accounting result. (Source: National Assembly, Finance Committee, report on the results of the management and approval of the 2025 accounts, government series €66.6 billion in 2025 and €78.3 billion in 2026; see the parliamentary report: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/rapports/cion_fin/l17b2847-ti_rapport-fond.pdf.)

CALCULATION NOTE €78.3bn ÷ 69.1 M inhabitants = €1,133.14/year, i.e. €94.43/month per inhabitant and ≈ €377.72/month for four people.

Meanwhile, the public deficit amounted to €152.5 billion in 2025, after €169.1 billion in 2024, or 5.1% and 5.8% of GDP respectively. Relative to the population, the 2025 deficit represents about €2,207 per inhabitant over the year, i.e. nearly €184 per inhabitant per month of additional borrowing requirement. This benchmark is not added to the interest equivalents as if it were a separate item: interest is already part of the expenditure that contributes to the deficit. (Source: INSEE, "General government accounts in 2025," May 29, 2026; official INSEE publication: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8997691.)

So I sincerely ask you, you who are reading me: does this not bother you? Does it not bother you that those we vote for, majority after majority and government after government, keep presenting deficit accounts that we must collectively finance today and whose consequences our children will bear tomorrow in the form of interest, refinancing and reduced budgetary room for maneuver? If this debt at least radically transformed our country, if it left us with spectacularly better infrastructure, a revived industry, strengthened energy independence, smoothly running hospitals, swift justice, impeccable security and schools that were once again exemplary, the debate would be different. Debt can perfectly well prepare the future when it durably finances productive assets or investments from which future generations will benefit. But anger arises precisely when we have the simultaneous feeling of seeing debt rise and some of the services deteriorate whose excellence the scale of our spending ought to guarantee.

We levy an enormous amount: what we get in return should be exceptional

France is not a minimal State, and I have never asked it to become one. In 2025, general government expenditure represented 57.3% of GDP, while compulsory levies stood at 43.6% of GDP. A compulsory levy rate of 43.6% does not mean that each French person personally pays 43.6% of their salary: the indicator aggregates the compulsory taxes and contributions of the whole economy and relates them to national wealth. It nevertheless gives a measure of the considerable place occupied by the public sphere in our economy. (Source: INSEE, general government accounts 2025; see the public accounts: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8997691.)

On labor, the OECD uses a different indicator: the tax wedge, which measures the gap between the employer's total labor cost and the employee's disposable income after the taxes and contributions taken into account by its methodology. For a single person without children earning the average wage, this tax wedge reached 47.2% in France in 2025, compared with an OECD average of 35.1%. France then ranked third among the 38 OECD countries, behind Belgium, at 52.5%, and Germany, at 49.3%. (Source: OECD, Taxing Wages 2026, 2025 data; official OECD report: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/taxing-wages-2026_3a5169ef-en.html.)

In twenty years, taxation has not only weighed heavily: it has also become fragmented

Looking at twenty years here again requires resisting slogans. I could write that the French tax burden has risen continuously since 2005; that would be too simple. INSEE's historical series put compulsory levies at around 42.6% of GDP in 2005. They reached 43.6% in 2025, after climbing as high as 45.3% in 2017. Between the two endpoints twenty years apart, the increase is therefore about one point of GDP, not ten; between the low point of 2010 and the peak of 2017, on the other hand, it was much more marked. Because the bases of the national accounts have been revised over time, the older decimals must be read with caution, but the order of magnitude leaves little room for doubt: France was already living with a very high level of levies in the mid-2000s and, twenty years later, it is still among the leaders. In 2024, the OECD measured a tax-to-GDP ratio of 43.5% in France compared with an OECD average of 34.1%, placing our country second among the 38 members, behind Denmark. The problem, then, is not the easy story of a curve that rises every year without ever coming down; it is that of a level that has remained exceptionally high for a long time, punctuated by new surges whenever public finances come under strain. (Sources: INSEE, historical series of compulsory levies, 2005: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3676764 ; INSEE, compulsory levies 2025: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2381412 ; OECD, Revenue Statistics 2025 – France: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/revenue-statistics-2025_b1943459-en/france_c55b0aeb-en.html.)

But the overall weight does not tell the whole story. We must also look at the fragmentation of the tax system. In 2014, the Inspection générale des finances counted 192 low-yield taxes and found that the pace at which this category alone was being created had sharply accelerated: between 1970 and 1997, France created on average 1.7 low-yield taxes a year; since the late 1990s, this average had risen to 6.6 a year, almost four times as many. The IGF also estimated that the number of these small taxes was, according to the available comparisons, two to four times higher than in several of our main European partners. No comprehensive and consistent series, however, makes it possible to convert this finding into a reliable number of new taxes created in twenty years, so many have been the creations, abolitions, mergers and changes of scope. But this constant succession is already information in itself: it fuels fiscal and regulatory instability and reduces the visibility everyone needs in order to work, invest, start a business, build up assets or simply build a long-term life plan. The official diagnosis of this proliferation comes neither from an editorial nor from a leaflet: it comes from the Inspection générale des finances. (Source: Inspection générale des finances, Low-yield taxes, 2014 report: https://www.igf.finances.gouv.fr/files/live/sites/igf/files/contributed/Rapports%20de%20mission/2014/2013-M-095_Tome_1.pdf.)

It must also be acknowledged that abolitions were subsequently undertaken. The Cour des comptes estimates that the number of low-yield taxes fell from 305 in 2019 to 243 in 2024. This is a real decrease and it would be dishonest to hide it. But the figure that remains is almost more telling still: after several years of clean-up, 243 small taxes remain, raising an estimated €5.98 billion or so, and the Cour states that 117 of them did not even have a known or estimated yield in 2024. In other words, France can maintain hundreds of levies, some of which bring in relatively little, sometimes at the price of administrative, reporting and accounting complexity that is never free. (Source: Cour des comptes, Low-yield taxes, 2025: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2025-04/20250417-synthese-Taxes-a-faible-rendement.pdf.)

The inventories by the IGF in 2014 and by the Cour des comptes ten years later do not form a perfectly consistent statistical series; I therefore do not mechanically infer a change from 192 to 305 and then 243 taxes. Each nevertheless documents, with its own method, the persistent scale of this fiscal fragmentation.

And this mechanism is not a thing of the past. For 2025 alone, INSEE puts the positive effect of new measures on compulsory levies at €23 billion. This amount includes very different schemes, including certain exceptional contributions, so it must not be presented as twenty-three billion taken directly from households alone. But the budgetary mechanism appears clearly: when the accounts deteriorate, the temptation to seek new revenue remains powerful. These measures include in particular about €8 billion linked to the exceptional contributions on the profits of large companies and on maritime freight, €1.6 billion linked to the reshaping of general relief on social contributions, and €1.8 billion from the increase in the pension contribution rate for the local and hospital civil service. (Source: INSEE, General government accounts in 2025, May 29, 2026: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8997691.)

That is also what citizens feel when they talk about "more and more taxes." They do not consult a national accounting aggregate every morning; they encounter a tax, a contribution, a levy, an excise duty, a deduction, a surcharge, a threshold, an extra form, a new rule. Some are justified, others replace older schemes, some are abolished, and not all of them fall on the same people. But their accumulation builds a daily experience of taxation that cannot be reduced to the overall rate alone. One can perfectly well live in a country where the levy ratio has risen by only one point in twenty years and still have the feeling of a system that has become far more intrusive, far more fragmented and far harder to understand. For someone who works, invests, runs a business or is thinking of building a life elsewhere, this complexity matters almost as much as the rate itself.

On top of this comes an immense social system. In 2024, social protection benefits amounted to €932.5 billion, or 31.9% of GDP and about €13,650 per inhabitant. And contrary to the shortcut of presenting this sum as if it were essentially the budget for "welfare dependency," DREES specifies that old age-survivors and health account for about 80% of these benefits. A considerable share therefore corresponds to our pensions and our health spending. (Source: DREES, Social protection in France and Europe in 2024, 2025 edition; official DREES publication: https://www.drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communique-de-presse/panoramas-de-la-drees/251217-protection-sociale-france-europe-2024.)

All this money does not mysteriously vanish into a bottomless pit. It finances our pensions, our health care, our schools, our defense, our police, our justice system, our local authorities, our infrastructure and many solidarity mechanisms. It is precisely because this collective effort irrigates so many essential functions that it deserves to be judged demandingly. The legality of a levy does not guarantee its moral and political acceptance forever: the more a country levies, the more entitled its citizens are to ask what becomes of their contribution, and the more remarkable the return should be in terms of the quality, efficiency, safety and availability of public services. The decisive question is therefore not only "how much do we pay?" but "what are we entitled to expect when we pay so much?"

There is, however, a threshold beyond which the vocabulary of accounting is no longer enough to convey what some people feel. For me, one expression ends up imposing itself: the despoiling of the fruit of our labor. In law, tax is not theft. But it can be experienced politically as State theft of the fruit of one's work, legalized by texts voted by "our elected representatives," when citizens no longer sufficiently recognize, in what they receive, the counterpart of what they give. This is a political feeling, not a legal classification, and that distinction matters. It does not, however, exempt the State from listening to it. Consent to taxation does not rest solely on the power to levy; it also depends on the conviction that the levy remains legitimate, proportionate and used with sufficient efficiency.

Our health care is not free: it is paid for collectively, and at great cost

All my life I have heard this sentence: "In the United States, falling ill can ruin you; in France, at least, health care is free." It contains a grain of truth, but it also rests on a considerable misuse of language. Our health system is not free: it is socialized, that is, financed collectively through levies, contributions, taxes, supplementary insurance and the various public and private resources of the health system. In 2024, current health expenditure in the international sense reached €333 billion in France, or 11.4% of GDP. We therefore pay a great deal for a system whose great strength remains that it pools risk and prevents a serious illness from automatically turning into a financial catastrophe for the patient. (Source: DREES, Health expenditure in 2024, 2025 edition; DREES report on health expenditure: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/2025-12/Les%20d%C3%A9penses%20de%20sant%C3%A9%20en%202024_v17%20complet_1.pdf.)

But let us now look at the trajectory, because an annual snapshot sometimes hides more than it reveals. In 2003, France had about 468,000 full hospitalization beds. At the end of 2024, it had only 367,100. That is about 100,900 fewer beds in twenty-one years, a decrease of around 21.6%. This figure must not be used simplistically: closing a traditional bed does not necessarily mean eliminating care. Outpatient surgery, medical progress, treatments allowing people to return home sooner and hospitalization at home have profoundly transformed the hospital. DREES moreover counted, in 2024, 91,000 partial hospitalization places and 25,400 patients who could be cared for simultaneously in hospitalization at home. And according to the OECD, France still has more beds per inhabitant than the average of member countries, with about 5.4 beds per 1,000 inhabitants compared with 4.2 in the OECD. Saying this is essential if we want to remain honest. But the other half of reality is just as essential: full hospitalization capacity has indeed fallen by more than one hundred thousand beds since the early 2000s. (Sources: DREES, Overview of health establishments, 2013 edition, 468,000 beds in 2003: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/2021-01/panorama2013.pdf; DREES, Health establishments in 2024, 2026 edition, 367,100 beds: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communique-de-presse-documents-de-reference/panoramas-de-la-drees/260520-Etablissements-de-sant%C3%A9-en-2024; OECD, Health at a Glance 2025, France: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025_15a55280-en/france_fea63dd5-en.html.)

This shift would matter much less if, at the same time, the pressure on the system were easing. Yet the emergency departments tell the opposite story. DREES recorded nearly 14 million emergency department visits in 2002, nearly 20 million in 2021 and 20.8 million in 2023. Between the early 2000s and 2023, the order of magnitude therefore increased by about half. Even over the single decade 2013-2023, annual visits rose from 18.8 to 20.8 million. And when we look not only at how many people come through the door but at how long they stay, the deterioration becomes very concrete: in 2013, half of the patients who received full care had left the emergency department in under 2 hours 15 minutes; in 2023, the median exceeded 3 hours 10 minutes, 55 minutes more. The share of patients spending more than eight hours there rose from 9% to 15%; among those aged 75 and over, from 24% to 36%. (Sources: DREES, "Shedding light on the situation of emergency departments," long series 2002-2021: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/actualites-evenements/eclairer-la-situation-des-services-des-urgences; DREES, 2023 Emergency survey: https://www.drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/sources-outils-et-enquetes/enquete-urgences-2023; DREES, "Emergencies: length of stay has increased over ten years," June 2026: https://www.drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communique-de-presse/etudes-et-resultats/260602-urgences-duree-de-passage-augmente-en-dix-ans-patients-parcours-longs.)

The problem does not always begin at the hospital, either. In 2023, 21% of patients questioned in emergency departments explained their visit in particular by difficulty getting a medical appointment elsewhere, compared with 14% in 2013. This trend matches another indicator: between 2012 and 2021, when DREES adjusts medical density to take account of the aging of the population and therefore of care needs, the standardized density of general practitioners fell from 155 to 139 per 100,000 inhabitants, or -10%. Here again the picture must be updated honestly: medical demography has recently been improving, since DREES counted 101,000 general practitioners at the beginning of 2026, up 1% over one year after several years of decline. But this recent improvement does not erase the accumulated trough or the regional disparities that have made access to care much more difficult for part of the country. (Sources: DREES, access to care before the emergency department, 2023 compared with 2013: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communique-de-presse/etudes-et-resultats/250319_ER_urgences-la-moitie-des-patients-y-restent-plus-de-trois-heures-en-2023; DREES, medical demography 2012-2021: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/communique-de-presse/medecins-sages-femmes-chirurgiens-dentistes-et-pharmaciens-combien-de; DREES, demography as of January 1, 2026: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/communique-de-presse-jeux-de-donnees/jeux-de-donnees/260702-medecins-supplementaires-en-activite-en-France-au-1er-janvier-2026.)

That is why the word "free" ends up irritating me when it is used to close the discussion. I do not deny the immense advantage of a system in which illness must not ruin the person it strikes. I am simply saying that a theoretical right to care is complete only if care remains genuinely accessible. An appointment can be 100% reimbursed and 100% useless if no one can see you when you need it. Over twenty years, France has not stopped providing care, far from it; it has transformed its hospital system, developed outpatient care and continues to devote considerable wealth to health. But when beds fall by a fifth, emergency departments absorb nearly half as many visits again as in the early 2000s and waiting times lengthen, it becomes legitimate to ask whether the French promise of access to care still holds everywhere with the same strength as before.

Even reimbursements must be looked at without myths. Since October 15, 2023, Health Insurance coverage of many dental treatments has been lowered from 70% to 60% of the agreed tariff base. The official page of ameli.fr: https://ameli.fr/ still stated in February 2026 that consultations with a dental surgeon and reimbursable conservative or surgical treatments are generally covered at 60% of the agreed tariff base, except in special situations. This means that the share of the agreed tariff base not covered by compulsory Health Insurance has risen from 30% to 40%; it does not mean that the patient necessarily pays 40% out of pocket, since supplementary insurance may step in. (Sources: Health Insurance, 2023 review and ameli.fr: https://ameli.fr/, "Dental consultations and treatment: your reimbursements," updated February 2, 2026; confirmation of the change from 70% to 60%; rates applicable in 2026.)

But the problem that worries me today goes well beyond the reimbursement rate: what good is a fully reimbursed appointment when you cannot get it when you need it? In the comparative data published by the OECD on the basis of the Commonwealth Fund's international survey, 43% of French respondents who had seen a specialist reported waiting between two months and less than a year, compared with 22% in Germany, 15% in the United States, 15% in the Netherlands and 12% in Switzerland. These figures come from a self-reported survey, not an exhaustive administrative count; they therefore describe experiences reported by patients within a standardized comparative framework. Even with this caveat, the gap remains particularly disturbing. (Source: OECD, Health at a Glance 2025, figure 5.13, Commonwealth Fund 2023 data; see the OECD report: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/11/health-at-a-glance-2025_a894f72e/8f9e3f98-en.pdf.)

I am also speaking here from personal experience. After a heart problem, I was supposed to have a check-up and was faced with a wait of about six months to get the appointment I needed. In such a situation, the patient does not reason like a health economist, does not calculate a hospital performance indicator and does not wonder where France ranks in an international comparison. My reaction was much more basic: "In six months? I've got time to die fifty times before then." That wait is my experience, not a national average. My parents, now aged 89 and 82, have also faced waits of several months for certain medical appointments.

The subject of emergency departments is even more troubling. A prospective study published in JAMA Internal Medicine followed 1,598 patients aged 75 or over in 97 French emergency departments. Among those who were hospitalized, the ones who spent the night in the emergency department before getting a bed on a ward had an in-hospital mortality of 15.7%, compared with 11.1% for those transferred to a ward before midnight; after statistical adjustment, the relative risk was estimated at 1.39. The study establishes an association, not proof that a stretcher, a staff shortage or any single variable directly caused each death. The finding is nonetheless serious: among the elderly patients concerned, an overnight wait in the emergency department was associated with higher mortality and morbidity. (Source: Roussel et al., "Overnight Stay in the Emergency Department and Mortality in Older Patients," JAMA Internal Medicine, 2023; French multicenter study; PubMed scientific abstract.)

That is why I now refuse to let every criticism of our system be swept aside with a simple "yes, but in the United States." The American system is extremely expensive: health spending there reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, or 18% of GDP and $15,474 per person. But the caricature according to which only the rich are insured there is also false: according to the Census Bureau, 92% of the American population, about 310 million people, had health insurance for all or part of 2024, while 8% had none. Employment-based insurance was the most common coverage, ahead of Medicare and Medicaid. These data do not make the American system fair or desirable in every respect. They simply remind us that reality is much more complex than the usual French slogan. (Sources: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, US health spending 2024; U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2024; US health spending; health insurance coverage.)

The right question, then, is not whether our system is "better than America," as if that comparison should put an end to all thought. The right question is to understand how a country that devotes €333 billion a year to health can nevertheless leave some of its citizens with the distressing impression that access to a specialist or to prompt care is becoming a regional lottery. A health system must be judged at the same time on its financial accessibility, on its medical quality and on its real capacity to provide care when the patient needs it. Free care that cannot be obtained is not a complete victory; care that is immediately available but financially out of reach is not one either.

Even the school system tells the story of a trajectory

The hospital is not the only field in which twenty years tell us more than a debate on the latest budget. Schools deserve the same caution, because no single indicator can sum up the intelligence of a generation or the work of hundreds of thousands of teachers. But the international PISA survey at least makes it possible to compare skills using a relatively stable method. In mathematics, the main domain of the survey in both 2003 and 2022, France went from 511 points in 2003 to 474 in 2022, 37 points fewer. Over the same period, the proportion of struggling students, below level 2, rose from 16.6% to 28.8%, while the share of the highest performers, levels 5 and 6, fell from 15.1% to 7.4%. In 2022, France remained around the OECD average. The 2022 survey was moreover conducted after the health crisis, a context it would be absurd to ignore, without, however, attributing the entire observed decline to it alone. It would therefore be absurd to conclude that "French schools are worthless now." But it would be just as absurd to act as if the twenty-year trajectory did not exist. (Source: Ministry of National Education, Repères et références statistiques 2024, sheet 5.22, PISA results in mathematics: https://www.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/RERS%202024_ouvrage%20complet-403131.pdf.)

Why add this to a text about those who are considering leaving? Because a family does not choose a country solely on the basis of how much tax it pays. It also looks at what will become of its children, the quality of their schools, the possibility of getting health care, everyday safety, the ability to work and get around, the stability of the rules and the confidence it can place in the future. Taken separately, each of these indicators can be put into perspective. Put end to end over fifteen or twenty years, they draw a feeling that is much harder to brush aside: that of paying ever more only to have, at times, to wait more, give up more and worry more.

Solidarity: protecting the vulnerable without discouraging effort

The debate on social benefits on its own concentrates this French difficulty in holding two truths together. As a landlord, I personally examined the application of a prospective tenant whose supporting documents showed more than €2,000 a month in combined social benefits. This figure came neither from a viral post nor from a story told at second hand: the documents were in front of me. I showed them to my parents, who were deeply shocked. I nevertheless accepted the application because three guarantors in employment secured the rental risk. This case remains an individual experience, not a national statistic, and that is exactly how it must be read.

I could use this experience to claim that in France it would generally pay better not to work. That would be spectacular, but the national data do not bear it out. DREES shows that in January 2025, in its standard case of a single person of working age, not disabled, renting in the private sector and with no earned income, benefits reached €873 a month, of which €572 in RSA (minimum income) and €301 in housing benefit. With a full-time job paid at the net minimum wage (SMIC), the disposable income of the same standard case reached €1,673, of which €1,426 in wages and €246 in activity bonus. For a single-parent family with two children, DREES estimates disposable income at €1,720 without work compared with €2,544 with a job at the SMIC. (Source: DREES, Minimum social benefits and solidarity benefits, 2025 edition, December 2025; see the DREES study: https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communique-de-presse/panoramas-de-la-drees/251204-minima-sociaux-et-prestations-de-solidarite.)

Acknowledging this reality, however, by no means closes the debate, because a person does not simply compare two columns in a table. Working means getting up at a fixed time, traveling, sometimes buying or maintaining a car, paying for fuel, organizing childcare, accepting a hierarchy, having less free time, taking on responsibilities and being exposed to fatigue and to the ups and downs of working life. The real political question is therefore whether the gap between assisted inactivity and work always remains large enough for the extra effort to appear immediately and lastingly rewarded, especially when the costs incurred by working are taken into account. This is neither an insult to the poorest nor a challenge to the principle of solidarity; it is a perfectly legitimate question about how that solidarity is designed and about economic incentives.

The society I hope for must be able to catch those whom life knocks down. Illness, disability, an accident, a layoff, a separation or a personal disaster can shatter a life, and a civilization is also judged by the way it treats the most vulnerable. But this same society must allow work, training, taking on responsibility, effort and initiative to substantially improve a life. Social protection must be a safety net that keeps people from crashing, not a ceiling that makes the desire to climb back up pointless. Between abandoning the weakest and a system that would discourage effort lies an immense political space that deserves better than caricatures.

There is, moreover, a contradiction in housing that by itself sums up part of my unease. People rightly lament that rents are becoming too expensive, yet tax law allows the administration, when it establishes that a rent is notoriously below the normal rental value and that no circumstance beyond the owner's control justifies the gap, to increase the declared property income by the amount of the generosity thus granted. That is precisely what I was confronted with: because I had chosen to rent out several of my properties well below market prices, out of personal choice, sometimes to help tenants and simply because I believed I could freely dispose of my own property, the tax audit reassessed the last three years and all the properties concerned by this analysis. The rule exists, I do not deny it; but its logic seems to me profoundly contradictory. If an owner, without fraud or any hidden consideration, voluntarily agrees to earn less in order to keep a rent affordable, why should the State reconstruct for tax purposes an income he never received? By denouncing rising rents while taxing more heavily the landlord who voluntarily chooses to stay well below the market, the system ends up discouraging exactly the behavior it claims to want. And this kind of contradiction also helps make people want to leave. (Source on the tax rule: BOFiP, BOI-RFPI-BASE-10-10, III, "Leases with reduced rents and abnormal leases," § 430; https://bofip.impots.gouv.fr/bofip/5809-PGP.html/identifiant=BOI-RFPI-BASE-10-10-20140214 ; see also Conseil d'État, June 23, 1986, No. 48466.)

When taxpayers feel hunted while the State struggles to scrutinize itself

To this question of the amount is added something more intimate: the way citizens feel looked upon by the State. When I observe the resources the tax administration is able to mobilize to detect an anomaly in a tax return, I cannot help comparing this technological efficiency with the slowness I perceive when it comes to simplifying a procedure, abolishing one that has become useless or tracking down, with the same persistence, public spending whose effectiveness is no longer demonstrated. This is not about disarming the fight against fraud, but about wishing that the administration would apply to itself the same demand for modernity, precision and results that it applies to the taxpayer.

The DGFiP's Foncier innovant (Innovative Property) program thus uses artificial intelligence algorithms applied to public aerial photographs from the IGN, the National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information, in order in particular to detect certain potentially undeclared buildings or swimming pools. The DGFiP specifies that an official then systematically checks each anomaly before any reminder or tax assessment. (Source: Directorate General of Public Finances, file "What is the Foncier innovant project?"; official DGFiP document: https://www.impots.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/media/2_actu/home/2022/dp_foncier_innovant.pdf.) In 2025, 52% of the business cases closed by DGFiP services and more than 54% of those concerning individuals had been selected thanks to artificial intelligence and data mining. The Ministry of the Economy also states that these techniques made it possible to recover €2.8 billion that year. (Source: Ministry of the Economy and Finance, "Fight against fraud: tax audits even more effective in 2025," April 7, 2026; official 2025 tax audit report: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/actualites/lutte-contre-la-fraude-un-controle-fiscal-toujours-plus-efficace-en-2025.)

I do not blame the State for fighting fraud. A fraudster makes honest taxpayers bear a burden he himself refuses to carry, and it would be absurd to call for greater tax justice while at the same time asking the administration to turn a blind eye to those who cheat. But I want to state very clearly what feeling this asymmetry can provoke: in the long run, citizens who work, invest, own, rent and run businesses may feel hunted like rats, tracked like rats, so that the slightest euro the administration might be missing can be sought out in the last corner of their assets. This is a political judgment and a feeling, not a legal description of tax audits, but the feeling exists and it would be dangerous to brush it aside.

My question, then, is extremely simple: where is the "Foncier innovant" for public waste? Where is the artificial intelligence tasked with tracking down, with the same meticulousness, every obsolete procedure, every administrative duplication, every subsidy whose usefulness is no longer demonstrated, every public software project whose budget explodes, every underused building, every body whose reason for existing has disappeared or every program whose real effectiveness no longer matches its cost? Why does the State give me the impression of being extraordinarily modern when it is looking for an anomaly in my assets, but so much more hesitant when it comes to looking for its own anomalies? It is this asymmetry, far more than the existence of audits as such, that ends up eroding trust.

The same feeling appears in the face of regulatory accumulation. In a June 2023 report on regulatory restraint, the Senate referred to 44 million words of standards and denounced a regulatory proliferation that puts rules increasingly out of companies' reach. The report also stressed that the exact stock itself remained difficult to measure in full. (Source: Senate, information report "Regulatory restraint to strengthen business competitiveness," June 2023; official Senate summary.) A standard is not bad simply because it exists: an electrical rule prevents fires, a health regulation can save lives, an environmental standard can prevent irreversible destruction and a planning rule can prevent chaos. The problem is therefore not "rules" versus "freedom." The problem lies in their accumulation, their complexity, their instability, their proportionality and in the real ability of a reasonable citizen to know what is required of him.

We nevertheless continue to live with the principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse, even though the body of applicable rules has become materially impossible for a normal human being to read, master and memorize. Running a business therefore no longer consists only in knowing one's trade, one's customers or one's market: one must learn to find one's way through a regulatory universe whose complete mastery would almost require becoming at the same time a lawyer, a tax specialist, an urban planner, an accountant, an environmental specialist and an administrative expert. This is not a call for a world without rules. It is simply a reminder that an incomprehensible, unstable or disproportionate rule can end up producing exactly the opposite of the order it was meant to create.

And then I listen to my compatriots. I hear their rants, their anger and sometimes their despair, especially when some of them call programs such as Les Grandes Gueules on RMC to describe their daily lives. In these voices mingle the exhaustion of French people who are considering exile because they say they can't take it any more; the resignation of workers who confide that from now on they will settle for a few undeclared hours because they feel that every extra euro they earn partly slips away from them; the discouragement of small self-employed workers tempted to keep a marginal activity off their returns because they think they work more to feed the system than to improve their own lives; and the weariness of households for whom the price of fuel alone is now enough to cut back on travel, outings or holidays. I also hear a vocabulary emerging that ought to worry us: some say they have to "go submarine," to hide a small activity, a sale, a service rendered or a few euros earned, with the absurd impression of having to behave like economic illegals. Yet these are neither traffickers nor members of organized crime, but sometimes our neighbors, craftsmen, employees, retirees, small self-employed workers or families who are simply looking for a few tens or a few hundred euros of extra breathing room at the end of the month.

When filling the tank also becomes a tax issue

Fuel deserves a pause here to look at the figures, because it has become one of the most immediate symbols of this exasperation. In its weekly survey for August 21, 2026, the Directorate General for Energy and Climate shows an average national diesel price of 223.12 cents per liter, or €2.2312, compared with 159.67 cents in the corresponding period of 2025: +39.7% in one year. As I write, the official feed of pump prices, supplied by the stations and updated every ten minutes, confirms prices commonly above €2.20. For someone who lives far from their job, a craftsman, a sales representative, a home-care nurse or a rural family, these are not geopolitical abstractions: they are tens of extra euros every time they fill up. (Sources: Ministry of Ecological Transition, DGEC, Prices and margins of petroleum products, weekly document NPG-2026.08.21, survey of August 21, 2026: PDF dated August 21, 2026: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/documents/NPG-2026.08.21.pdf ; official petroleum prices page: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/politiques-publiques/prix-produits-petroliers; official DGCCRF real-time price dataset: https://www.data.gouv.fr/datasets/prix-des-carburants-en-france-flux-instantane-v2-amelioree.)

And this is where words must be precise. At €2.2312 a liter, it would be wrong to write that the State already takes "more than one euro in taxes" on every liter of diesel. The exact figure is almost as striking: the same official document gives a price excluding all taxes of 125.18 cents and a price including all taxes of 223.12 cents. The difference is therefore 97.94 cents of taxation per liter, almost one euro and about 44% of the final price. On a 50-liter fill-up, that arithmetically represents almost €49 of taxation. The normal excise duty on B7 diesel is set in 2026 at 60.75 cents per liter in most mainland regions, to which is added VAT at the standard rate of 20%, which also applies in the formation of the final price. (Sources: DGEC, excluding-tax and including-tax prices cited above; Directorate General of Customs, duties and taxes applicable to energy products as of August 1, 2026: https://www.douane.gouv.fr/la-douane/informations/bulletins-officiels-des-douanes/bod/7659; Ministry of Ecological Transition, 2026 Guide to energy taxation: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/documents/Guide%202026%20sur%20fiscalit%C3%A9%20des%20%C3%A9nergies%202026.pdf.)

The Strait of Hormuz is therefore not a convenient invention: its closure and the conflict in the Middle East really did cause a major oil shock. The Directorate General of the Treasury points out that about 20% of world oil production passes through this strait and that Brent crude had jumped by more than 40% in March after the conflict broke out. It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that Bercy created this global increase. But the reverse would be just as misleading: Hormuz explains the shock on oil; it does not oblige France to keep all its taxation unchanged when that shock reaches the pump. Taxation is indeed a national lever, within the limits of European law, and the Government made the political choice not to lower it across the board. (Source: Directorate General of the Treasury, July 17, 2026: https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/Articles/2026/07/17/flash-conjoncture-pays-avances-conflit-au-proche-et-moyen-orient-un-choc-energetique-davantage-petrolier-et-mondialise-qu-en-2022.)

The Government makes no secret of its decision, moreover. In an answer published on July 7, 2026 in the National Assembly, it explains that a general cut in VAT on fuel would cost several billion euros and would benefit the wealthiest households more, as they consume more fuel; it therefore says it favors targeted aid and the electrification of uses. This budgetary and redistributive argument can be defended. But I also have the right to see in it exactly the problem I have been describing since the beginning of these pages: when public finances are so constrained that the State believes it cannot forgo several billion in revenue, even as millions of people are paying more than €2.20 for diesel, the public authorities' dependence on tax revenue itself becomes part of the social problem. In a country whose debt exceeds €3,500 billion and whose annual deficit remains above 150 billion, I understand that Bercy is desperately looking for revenue; I understand much less why citizens are always invited to regard the share demanded of them as beyond discussion, and then to cut back on their travel, their holidays or their activity when they can no longer keep up. (Source: National Assembly, written question No. 15193, Government answer of July 7, 2026: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/questions/QANR5L17QE15193.)

In my view, the fairest way to put it is therefore this: the Strait of Hormuz explains an essential part of the surge in the product's price; the decision not to cushion this surge broadly through taxation belongs to French policy. That does not make the State solely responsible for the €2.23 liter. It means that it has a lever, that it knows its budgetary cost and that it has chosen not to use it across the board. For a family that gives up a weekend, a visit to relatives or a few hundred kilometers of holiday travel, or for a professional who turns down a job that has become too costly in fuel, this economic nuance remains accurate; it does not make the fill-up any easier to pay for.

Hearing this anger does not mean excusing fraud. Undeclared work, concealment of income or the deliberate non-payment of legally due contributions remain offenses, and the burden they evade falls partly on those who follow the rules. But to stop at this legal answer alone would be another way of understanding nothing. When citizens no longer ask themselves how to contribute fairly to the system, but how to escape it, reduce their footprint, work less officially, consume less or leave the country, the problem goes beyond the sum of individual frauds: it touches consent itself. A democracy cannot rest for long on fear of audits alone; it needs a sufficiently broad majority to still regard the rules as legitimate.

The day ordinary citizens begin spontaneously to use the vocabulary of clandestinity to describe how they survive economically in their own country, it may be time to ask not only how to monitor them better, but why they have come to want to hide.

CAMPING LA RESSOURCE: I wanted to pass on know-how; I learned to build files

CAMPING LA RESSOURCE was meant to be my concrete answer to the criticisms I was making. After the health crisis, in 2021, the idea took shape of a place where autonomy would no longer be a concept presented in a book or a video, but a reality that people could touch, observe and reproduce: producing part of one's electricity, controlling one's energy better, collecting one's water, growing food, practicing permaculture, reducing waste, understanding other ways of building and lessening one's dependence on outside infrastructure. On about three hectares, this "living showroom" was to become an open-air laboratory, not to promise self-sufficiency, but to give families back some control over the most basic needs of their lives. I presented this project, its history and its obstacles in detail in my article "France against its entrepreneurs," published on January 12, 2026: see the project's public file: https://www.delta-sierra.com/articles/france-contre-entrepreneurs.html.

The project rested on a simple idea: to pass on useful know-how and let everyone leave with something they could really apply at home. I did not expect the State to build the campsite for me, to guarantee its success or to protect me from all business risk. It was up to me to invest, to build it myself, to find partners, to take the risk and to bring the idea to life. Then the momentum ran into what I gradually experienced as a wall of regulation, taxation, procedures and permits: referrals from one body to another, environmental review, dozens of documents, successive authorizations, difficulties obtaining bank financing, and then even the association-based solution was halted by the tax analysis of its public-interest status. I have traced these steps and obstacles in the same public file.

This journey also forced me to revise my own figures. Some initial projections of development taxes had led me to anticipate amounts above €100,000. A detailed calculation published later, based on a revised configuration and phasing, came to more than €33,000 in levies anticipated before the project actually began, including about €30,000 in development tax in the scenario described, before the first stone had even been laid... The most recent figure is less spectacular than the initial estimate; above all, it is more precise and more defensible, which is why it is the one I use. The detailed calculations and the phasing are available in the same file: https://www.delta-sierra.com/articles/france-contre-entrepreneurs.html.

More than thirty thousand euros before welcoming the first customer or taking in the first euro does not become insignificant simply because the initial estimate was higher. For a large group, such a sum may be just one budget line; for an individual trying to build an unusual project step by step, it is a very real barrier, to which are added studies, the architect, equipment, permits, environmental requirements, plans, utility connections and all the other expenses needed before operations even begin. So here I am, forced to consider progressing in stages, to the point of multiplying procedures and permit modifications in order to self-finance gradually what could have been conceived as a whole. That is the whole irony of my journey: I wanted to build a campsite devoted to autonomy and I became a specialist in administrative dependence; I wanted to build buildings and I learned to build files.

I wanted my assets to set me free; they have now also become my chains

The lightly tossed-off line "if you're not happy, leave" ignores what leaving really means when a whole economic life has been built in a country. At twenty, with a suitcase, a few clothes, few possessions and few commitments, changing country can sometimes be decided in a few weeks. With homes, land, loans, contracts, a business and projects, the same decision takes on a completely different dimension. A life no longer fits in the trunk of a car, and leaving no longer simply means buying a ticket.

I have devoted a considerable part of my life to building up a property portfolio because I wanted to progress, to move up the social ladder, not to depend on a salary forever and to build an economic freedom no one would hand me for free. I went without, I took risks, I worked and invested in the belief that one day these assets would give me precisely the opportunity to choose my life more freely. And here is one of the most painful ironies of my journey: I have made myself, at least in part, a slave to my own investments. What was supposed to offer me freedom has also become one of the reasons why leaving is not as simple as one might imagine.

If I decided tomorrow to sell certain properties quickly, capital gains tax could come into play depending on their situation. For taxable real estate capital gains under the ordinary regime, full exemption from income tax is obtained after 22 years of ownership, while full exemption from social levies comes after 30 years. The administration also specifies that, when taxable, the capital gain is in principle subject to a rate of 19% in income tax and 17.2% in social levies, before the application of allowances and any exemptions. (Source: impots.gouv.fr: https://impots.gouv.fr/, rules applicable to real estate capital gains and allowances for length of ownership; official rules on capital gains: https://www.impots.gouv.fr/particulier/questions/je-vends-mon-bien-immobilier-vais-je-payer-de-la-plus-value-immobiliere.)

Given my own acquisition timeline, waiting for this taxation to disappear completely on certain investments would take me roughly to the age of seventy. In other words, I built up assets to gain more freedom and I am discovering that these same assets can also prevent me from leaving quickly without giving up, along the way, a share of the fruit of decades of effort. I am not saying that this situation is legally unfair; I am simply saying that it helps explain why so many people who sometimes dream of leaving end up staying where they are. Chains do not always take the form of handcuffs. They can be a loan, an apartment, a plot of land, a business, children, elderly parents or simply a whole life built somewhere.

Even after a lifetime of work, the State is still waiting for the inheritance

In my family, this difficulty of leaving is compounded by an even quieter break: inheritance. My parents worked all their lives and paid income taxes, contributions, taxes on their consumption and the levies that accompany an economic existence in France. Their assets did not fall from the sky; they are the result of decades of work, saving, choices, sacrifices and management. They came to a simple conclusion: rather than continuing to deprive themselves in order to preserve until their death a capital of which a share could then be taken when it is passed on, they prefer to sell during their lifetime, have their money at their disposal and use it as they see fit while they are still here to enjoy it. It is their money, their life, their last years; I understand this decision deeply.

The rule deserves to be looked at coolly, because it is telling enough without being caricatured. In the direct line, each child is in principle entitled to an allowance of €100,000 on what he or she receives from each parent. Above that, the taxable share is subject to a progressive scale ranging from 5% to 45% depending on the bracket; reaching the highest bracket therefore does not mean that the whole inheritance is taxed at 45%. The surviving spouse and a partner bound by a PACS (civil partnership) are, for their part, exempt from inheritance tax. (Source: Directorate General of Public Finances, "Declaring an inheritance," impots.gouv.fr: https://impots.gouv.fr/ ; BOFiP, €100,000 allowance in the direct line, bofip.impots.gouv.fr: https://bofip.impots.gouv.fr/.)

A simple case is enough to measure its scope. If a child receives from a single parent a net share of the estate of €300,000, if no earlier gift reduces the available allowance and if no special exemption regime applies, the €100,000 allowance brings the taxable base down to €200,000. Applying the progressive scale in the direct line then leads to about €38,194 in duties to pay: €403.60 on the first bracket at 5%, €403.70 on the bracket at 10%, €573.45 on the one at 15%, then €36,813.60 on the remaining portion taxed at 20%, for a total of €38,194.35, rounded to about €38,194. And it is precisely here that, for many families, the feeling of paying one last time arises: this transfer comes after a lifetime during which income, consumption, savings and assets have already borne many levies. This textbook case does not claim to reproduce a real estate settlement, which depends on the composition of the assets, earlier gifts, the heirs, exemptions and many other parameters.

Transmission can naturally be anticipated within the framework provided by law. Each parent can give up to €100,000 to each of their children free of gift tax under the direct-line allowance, renewable every fifteen years; a couple can therefore, depending on their situation and on any earlier use of these allowances, pass on up to €200,000 to each of their children within this framework. Since January 1, 2026, the manual gifts concerned must in principle be declared online, even when they do not give rise to any duty. (Sources: Directorate General of Public Finances, "What can I give my children and grandchildren without paying duty?", updated July 13, 2026, impots.gouv.fr: https://impots.gouv.fr/ ; "Gifts between individuals: only the declaration method changes on January 1, 2026," impots.gouv.fr: https://impots.gouv.fr/.)

One clarification, however, is essential: selling a property during one's lifetime does not make the estate assets disappear. If my parents sell a property and the money from that sale is still in their accounts on the day of death, that cash is part of their assets and must be taken into account in the estate. Their decision therefore does not consist in believing that a sale would be enough to remove the money from any transmission; it consists in no longer depriving themselves with the sole aim of keeping intact a capital they will not take with them, and in lawfully using the fruit of their work during their lifetime according to their own choices. (Source: general rules for valuing and declaring an estate, Directorate General of Public Finances, impots.gouv.fr: https://impots.gouv.fr/.)

And, quite frankly, how could I blame them for this reasoning? For decades, this generation was told that it had to work, save, become homeowners, prepare for retirement, build up assets and, if possible, leave something to the children. Then comes the last stage of life and it discovers that the transmission itself can still be taxed beyond the allowances provided for by law. Legally, inheritance tax is not "theft": it is established by law and applies to a transfer of assets. But morally and psychologically, my parents ended up experiencing it as a final levy on the product of a lifetime of work, as if, after decades of taxes, saving and sacrifice, the State were still waiting on the threshold of the family inheritance. The legal classification remains clear; it does not, however, abolish the feeling of a levy that had become, in their eyes, one too many.

So I understand that they now say to themselves: "We worked for this money, we went without to earn it and keep it, we paid what the law asked of us throughout our lives; now that we are still alive, we want to use it as we wish." This is not fraud and it is not concealment: it is the lawful exercise of the right to dispose of one's assets during one's lifetime. There is even something deeply revealing when a family that had long thought in terms of transmission ends up reasoning differently: no longer only "what will we leave behind?", but "why keep depriving ourselves today to preserve for tomorrow a capital we will no longer enjoy and part of which could be taken when it is passed on?" At this stage, the problem is no longer only the rate of a tax. It is the relationship of trust between the State and the citizen that has deteriorated to the point of changing even families' behavior regarding their assets.

My parents have left

And then there is something far more important to me than my taxes, my apartments, my projects or my political disagreements. There are my parents. My elderly parents whom I love, who watched me grow up, who raised, protected and supported me, who worked and did everything in their power to give me an education, make my youth happy and allow me to flourish. My father is now 89 and my mother 82. These two people, around whom a huge part of my memories revolves, have made a decision I would once have found very hard to imagine: they have decided to leave their own country. By the time you read these lines, they will no longer be on French soil.

I am probably the first to regret this departure and, at the same time, the first to understand it. My father is not a man who spent his life turning his back on France or the State. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was a customs inspector. He served the French administration throughout his career, rose through the ranks, went through more than twenty transfers, always strove to be exemplary in his work, distinguished himself professionally on several occasions and received marks of recognition, up to and including thanks from ministers of whom most of us know nothing and whose names belong to the archives. He belonged to that generation of men for whom doing one's job properly in the service of the State was neither heroic nor extraordinary; it was simply a conception of duty. As was that of his brother, who fought and distinguished himself in Indochina before falling in Algeria, in a war whose political choices and outcome left in my family a wound that has never fully healed. And it is precisely this man, my father, after a whole life spent in France and in the service of the State, in the service of a French administration, who at 89 made the decision to emigrate, to leave France, to go and live elsewhere.

At 89, leaving no longer looks like adventure. At twenty or twenty-five, changing country can be a promise: learning a language, discovering a world, building a career, turning uncertainty into momentum. At 89, leaving means abandoning the habits of a lifetime, rebuilding one's bearings, learning new reflexes, adapting to another environment and moving away from part of what is familiar to you at the very age when one might legitimately wish for everything to become simpler. My mother is going with him. She is 82. They are leaving together after having lived their lives in France, after having worked there, paid contributions, paid their taxes, raised their children, loved, grown old and accumulated decades of memories.

I will never turn my parents into a national statistic. Their departure does not on its own explain the 2.5 million or so French people living abroad, any more than it reveals their motivations. But when an 89-year-old man who served the State throughout his career decides that he would rather spend his last years elsewhere, technocratic expressions such as "the attractiveness of the territory" suddenly take on a much more concrete dimension. It is no longer a curve in a report or an international tax comparison: it is my father, my mother, two people I love and for whom I know what this decision means in human terms.

So, before accusing a French person who chooses to leave of cowardice, ingratitude, selfishness or lack of patriotism, perhaps we should start by asking them a much simpler and much more human question: what happened to you, what did you go through, what did you wait for, what did you hope for, to end up thinking that your life would be better elsewhere? Their answer may not convince you. You might have made a different choice in their place. But at least you will have tried to understand before judging.

The country where I often look over my shoulder

Security is another fault line in my relationship with the country. To understand what fuels this feeling, looking only at the change from one year to the next is not enough: +4%, +5% or +8% can seem almost abstract as long as we do not look at the long-term trajectory. Over twelve months, from May 2005 to April 2006, the Ministry of the Interior recorded 421,095 intentional attacks on physical integrity. Nearly twenty years later, the Government told the Senate that in 2024 the police and gendarmerie had recorded 818,233 offenses classified as intentional attacks on physical integrity. In these two administrative snapshots, the recorded volume therefore rose from about 421,000 to more than 818,000 offenses, an arithmetical increase of about 94%. (Sources: Ministry of the Interior, "Developments in security since 2002," June 8, 2006: official archive: https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/fr/Archives/Archives-ministres-de-l-Interieur/Archives-de-Nicolas-Sarkozy-2005-2007/Interventions/08.06.2006-Evolutions-en-matiere-de-securite-depuis-2002; Government answer to the Senate on insecurity and crime, 2024 figures: Senate: https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2025/qSEQ250102890.html.)

I nevertheless refuse to write that "violence has doubled in twenty years," as if these two numbers alone were enough to demonstrate the real trend in all assaults. The ministry itself warns that the old series of crimes and offenses from the "état 4001" are not fully reliable over the long term and that changes in legal classification, recording practices, the reception of victims and the propensity to file complaints complicate comparisons over twenty years. This caveat is particularly important for domestic and sexual violence, whose recording has been profoundly changed by victims speaking out and by better support. I therefore prefer to say exactly what the data allow: the volume of violence recorded by the security services has changed in scale, but part of this increase also comes from the fact that acts once kept silent, unreported or coded differently now reach the statistics more often. (Source: Ministry of the Interior's answer to the National Assembly on the long series of intentional assault and battery, published June 3, 2025: National Assembly: https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/q17/17-1411QE.htm.)

And even when we abandon the twenty-year comparison and keep only the revised and validated series since 2016, the signal remains considerable. For attempted homicides, the first statistical snapshot of 2024 reported 4,305 victims, compared with 2,259 in 2016, almost double; the 2025 report then shows a further annual increase in this indicator. The final 2025 report of the SSMSI also indicates that recorded physical violence has increased since 2016 at an average rate of about 8% a year; for sexual violence, the average rate reaches 11% a year, and 15% a year for rapes and attempted rapes. In 2025, the security services recorded 473,000 victims of physical violence and 132,300 victims of sexual violence. Homicides, on the other hand, have not followed the same explosion: 975 victims were recorded in 2025, a level stable compared with 2024. A clarification is needed: the 818,233 "offenses" falling in 2024 within the administrative aggregate of intentional attacks on physical integrity and the 473,000 "victims" of physical violence recorded in 2025 are not two directly comparable values of the same series. They rest on different units and statistical scopes. That is precisely why I want neither to minimize nor to caricature: not all indicators tell the same story, but several forms of recorded violence have seen increases over the decade out of all proportion to the few points of a single year. (Sources: SSMSI, Insecurity and crime in 2024: a first snapshot, 2016-2024 series of attempted homicides; SSMSI, Insecurity and crime in 2025: statistical report, July 9, 2026: Ministry of the Interior: https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/actualites/communiques-de-presse/insecurite-et-delinquance-en-2025-bilan-statistique-et-atlas-departemental.)

But my relationship with violence is not that of a commentator who has only read statistics. I worked as a security guard and then as a team leader in Auvergne, and I was assaulted twice on duty, seriously enough to require hospital treatment and, in all, two surgical operations, one of them cosmetic, which still leaves me with after-effects today. I have also known, professionally, security guards who never came home, killed in particular in knife attacks while doing their job. Despite experience, when I am in certain big cities at certain times, I often find myself looking over my shoulder, keeping close to a wall, instinctively watching groups, hands, exits and distances. This is not proof that every French person should live in fear; these are simply the reflexes a man can keep once he has learned physically what an assault means.

I therefore refuse two symmetrical propagandas: one that would claim that the whole of France has become unlivable, and one that would explain that any citizen expressing a sense of insecurity is merely imagining a problem that does not exist. A national average never erases the individual experience of a victim, any more than an individual experience can by itself sum up the situation of an entire country. We should be able to hold these two truths at the same time.

Those who agree to risk everything for the country

And despite all this anger, there is a France for which my gratitude is immense. I think of the soldiers, police officers, gendarmes, firefighters, caregivers, security guards and all those whose job sometimes literally consists of going toward danger when a human being's natural reflex would be to move away from it. I also think of the women and men who work in the shadows within the DGSI, the DGSE, the DRM and all the services working for our security. The general public will never know most of their successes, precisely because their success often consists in preventing something that, thanks to them, will never happen. We discuss politics freely, we criticize our institutions and we argue on social media while others monitor terrorist networks, interference operations, military threats or hostile interests of which most of us will never be aware.

I am thinking in particular of a testimony that left a deep mark on me. In a LEGEND program devoted to the French special forces and broadcast in July 2026, Charles d'Azérat, an officer of CPA 10 and author of the account À cœur ouvert, tells the story of a soldier who had already been wounded several times. At around two hours six minutes into the interview, he recounts that this man had been wounded three times for his country and had nearly died from the third wound while his wife was pregnant. According to this account, his insurance had offered him €514,000 in the situation presented to him, while his pay was estimated at around €2,500 a month. Yet he reportedly chose to keep the possibility of serving and eventually returned to combat. I naturally have no access to this man's insurance contract: the amounts, the circumstances and the choice that followed are therefore those reported in this public testimony, and nothing more. (Source: LEGEND, "French special forces: 150 hostages freed, the untold stories of the 3 biggest missions," July 1, 2026, running time 2 h 16; video episode on Apple Podcasts, passage at about 2 h 06.)

Let us simply measure what the amounts reported represent. €514,000 ÷ €2,500 = 205.6 months of salary, then 205.6 ÷ 12 ≈ 17.13 years. At the pay mentioned in the testimony, the sum therefore corresponded to more than seventeen years of monthly salary, without taking into account inflation, future promotions, taxation or other elements of pay. And, according to the testimony, this man reportedly replied: "You don't turn down the honor of fighting for your country."

Who would I be to condemn a man who, after three wounds, a brush with death and a family to support, had chosen the €514,000? No one. That man would already have given France infinitely more than the vast majority of us. That is precisely why the opposite decision, if it happened as reported, seems extraordinary to me. In a world where we calculate every pay rise, every loan repayment, every pension point and every euro of assets, here is a man who reportedly considered that the possibility of going back to serve his country was worth more than the equivalent of more than seventeen years of the pay mentioned.

This story moves me all the more because it raises a difficult question for me: what does a soldier feel when he agrees to risk his life for France while, like any citizen, he may personally disapprove of certain economic, industrial, diplomatic or social decisions taken by those who govern the country he protects? The institutional answer must naturally be absolutely clear: it is not for the soldier to settle a political disagreement by force of arms. The Defense Code recognizes soldiers' freedom of political opinion while framing its expression within the duty of restraint linked to their status. The Constitution makes the President of the Republic the head of the armed forces and provides that the Government determines and conducts the policy of the Nation and has the armed forces at its disposal. The subordination of military force to legitimate civilian authority is one of the fundamental protections of a democracy. (Sources: Defense Code, Article L. 4121-2; Constitution of October 4, 1958, Articles 15 and 20, Légifrance.)

But the fact that soldiers must obey democratically legitimate authority makes that authority's responsibility even heavier. How can some French people be asked to accept the supreme sacrifice when those who decide on their deployment can give part of the population the feeling that they are not protecting, with comparable determination, our industry, our sovereignty, our technologies, our economic independence, our public finances or our national cohesion? Defending France sometimes requires the courage to risk one's life; governing it should impose, in another register, a moral and political responsibility proportionate to the gravity of what can be asked of those who serve it.

I have the same thought for intelligence officers. What can a professional tasked with monitoring threats to the Nation feel when he believes, personally, that certain public policies are weakening that same Nation? What thoughts cross the mind of the analyst who detects an economic interference operation at the very moment an industrial capability he considers strategic is disappearing? His personal opinion cannot become clandestine political action, and fortunately so. An intelligence officer serves the republican State; he does not become its arbiter. In his life as a citizen, he retains what remains to each of us: to think, to vote and to express himself within the limits imposed by his status. Serving the Nation perhaps requires precisely this ability to distinguish France, which transcends governments, from those who administer it temporarily. To these women and men, to the soldiers on operations and to all those who carry in their bodies or minds wounds we will never see, my gratitude remains deep and sincere.

To those who fell before us

And then there are those who will never vote again. I think of the men who sacrificed their lives on the battlefields, and I refuse to exploit them politically by claiming that they would all have shared my opinions if they were alive today. That would be unworthy. They died under different regimes, in different wars, for different causes, some celebrated by history and others that it now judges much more severely. But whatever the historical or political debates, the individual sacrifice remains: behind a date printed in a school textbook, there was always a human being.

That man was often very young. He had a mother, sometimes a wife or a fiancée, perhaps children, perhaps a letter in his pocket, certainly plans and probably an immense desire to live. Yet he died for a flag, for a unit, for his comrades, for a certain idea of France, because he was carrying out the orders he had received or simply because, at the moment when everything was collapsing around him, he refused to abandon the man fighting beside him. I think of the dead of 1870, of 1914-1918, of 1939-1945, of the Resistance fighters, of the Free French, of those who fought in Indochina, Algeria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Sahel and in so many operations whose names most of our fellow citizens sometimes no longer even know.

Then an almost unbearable thought comes to me: if they could look today at the country for which they died, what would they think of us? I do not have their answer, and above all I have no right to speak in their name. Some would probably have visions of France entirely opposed to mine. But we at least have a duty to ask ourselves whether what we are collectively making of this country is worthy of the price so many others paid before us. Respect for the dead does not consist in artificially enlisting them in our contemporary battles; perhaps it consists first in never forgetting that what we take for granted today was sometimes paid for with lives.

We, the voters: are we really innocent?

That leaves the most uncomfortable question: our own. By constantly pointing at "the politicians," we sometimes end up forgetting that democracy also gives us a share of sovereignty, and therefore a share of responsibility. One hears this brutal formula: the plebs get the leaders they deserve. I do not use the word "plebs" here to belittle anyone, but to recapture the violence of the question it contains. If the people are sovereign when they choose, can they then declare themselves entirely foreign to the consequences of their choices?

In this respect, the CEVIPOF Political Trust Barometer published in February 2026 paints a striking picture. 82% of those surveyed in France still regard democracy as a good system of government, whereas only 20% trust the National Assembly and 15% trust political parties. The same study indicates that 76% regard politicians as "rather corrupt." This 76% measures a perception of corruption; it in no way describes the proportion of elected officials found guilty of corruption. (Source: CEVIPOF, Sciences Po, Political Trust Barometer, wave 17, February 2026; see the CEVIPOF analysis.)

The same survey also shows that 43% of respondents believe that in a democracy nothing gets done and that there should be less democracy and more efficiency, 36% approve of the idea of a strong man who does not have to bother with Parliament and elections, and 20% would favor the army running the country. These figures do not mean that France is about to tip into an authoritarian regime tomorrow morning. They nevertheless show that a significant part of the population is beginning to set democracy against efficiency, which should worry precisely those who wish to preserve democracy. (Source: CEVIPOF, same 2026 Barometer; full document.)

This is precisely the heart of my book The Limits of Democracy. In it I develop two simple notions: the filter, that is, a regime's ability to bring forward and put in power leaders competent enough to govern, and the switch, its ability to remove them peacefully when they fail. This book is not a call to abolish democracy; on the contrary, it asks how to preserve it when a democratic system can itself durably produce choices that weaken the country. For those who wish to take this reflection further, I have published a detailed presentation of it on Delta-Sierra: https://www.delta-sierra.com/livres/limites-democratie.html. In it I ask in particular this question, which sums up part of the vertigo we face: "Is democracy a principle of living together, or a suicide pact by which a people should let itself be destroyed provided that its destruction has been voted for?"

This question does not mean that a minority should overthrow by force a majority whose choice it disapproves of. It simply means that a decision does not miraculously become rational because it has gathered more ballots. A majority can be wrong, favor immediate benefit over future cost, call for ever more spending yet refuse the levies needed to finance it, want to reduce debt yet oppose every saving that affects its own interests. And when we simultaneously demand more services, fewer taxes, more redistribution, no savings that concern us and less debt, we create a perfectly predictable political incentive: promise today what gets you elected and postpone the cost of that promise until tomorrow.

The politician who exploits this easy path bears an immense responsibility, but the voter who rewards it cannot always regard himself as entirely foreign to what results from it. Popular sovereignty cannot mean that the people are fully sovereign at the moment of voting and absolutely innocent as soon as the consequences of that vote appear. This does not mean that each citizen is personally responsible for every public decision; it simply means that an adult democracy also demands a certain responsibility from those who choose.

When staying is no longer self-evident

For a long time I chose to stay and act. Voting, persuading, writing, publishing, founding an association, putting forward proposals, appealing to institutions, going to court when necessary: I believed, and I still believe, in the power of these civic paths. My time in political life was born of the conviction that one can help, however modestly, to shift an idea or improve a decision. I met brilliant, cultured, honest and extraordinarily committed people there, and I refuse to erase them from my memory. I also discovered smaller ambitions there: the post sought for its own sake, the mandate preferred to the mission, the absolute moral standard demanded of opponents that suddenly becomes infinitely nuanced when it must apply to one's own side.

Violence, on the other hand, is not a way out for me. It would destroy precisely what I claim to want to save. A bullet does not reduce a deficit, a riot does not create doctors, a civil war does not simplify a regulation and a bomb does not revive an industry. The recovery I hope for must remain democratic, constitutional and republican. Others choose to come to terms with the system: they pay, they adapt, they consider that its advantages still outweigh its defects and that the overall contract remains acceptable. Millions of French people live this way, and their choice is as legitimate as mine.

That leaves a decision quieter than a revolution, but intimately radical: leaving. Leaving because a human life cannot be stretched, because one no longer wants to wait another twenty years to find out whether the country will finally take the hoped-for direction, because one rejects violence but no longer wants to devote one's entire existence to constantly fighting a system in which one no longer believes. Then come the concrete steps: selling what can be sold, closing what must be closed, organizing one's life, packing one's bags, embracing those one loves and looking elsewhere for what one can no longer manage to build here. It is this decision that I now deeply understand, not because it would be the only respectable one, but because I finally grasp what can lead a man or a family to that point.

Hope can also become a prison

A line from The Matrix Reloaded has stayed with me for a long time: "Hope... It is the quintessence of human illusions, at once the source of your greatest strength and of your greatest weakness." It is spoken by the Architect in the film released in 2003. (Source: The Matrix Reloaded, Warner Bros., 2003; French transcription referenced by Cinelog; line and film reference: https://cinelog.fr/replique-plus-grand-faiblesse.)

This line resonates with me particularly because hope has indeed been an immense force in my life. It was hope that drove me to enter politics, to write, to invest, to imagine CAMPING LA RESSOURCE and to believe that, at my level, with my books, my articles, my projects, my videos and my commitments, I could add my stone to something bigger. Without hope, nothing gets built. You do not invest years in a project if you are convinced it will fail; you do not write thousands of pages if you think no one will be able to get anything out of them; you do not commit yourself if you believe in advance that any improvement is impossible.

But hope can also become a prison when it convinces us to keep putting our own lives off until later. We wait for one more election, then one more government, one more reform, a new promise of simplification, a budget that will finally return to balance "in a few years," a new plan for the hospitals, for security or for industry. Each time, we tell ourselves that perhaps this time will be different, that perhaps the long-awaited change is finally beginning, and hope gives us the strength to wait a little longer. Yet while we wait, one thing never stops: our lives. The years go by. Our parents grow old. We grow old ourselves. Some projects become more difficult and some possibilities disappear.

We do not have an unlimited number of decades. That is why one thought seems to me today almost brutally true: "I still have hope for France, but I now refuse to put my own life on hold until that hope comes true." This sentence does not mean that one stops wishing for the country's recovery; it simply means that at a certain point a human being can decide no longer to index the rest of his existence on a national reform that he does not know will happen in five years, twenty years or never.

Country of my childhood and my dreams, what have you become?

When I look at those three colors, I do not see only a State, a government or an administration. I see a history, my parents, those who died, the mountains I have walked, the houses I have restored, the assets I have tried to build, the campsite I still dream of creating and the memories of a whole life. But I also see a State that I trust less and less spontaneously when it explains to me that the next expenditure will fix what the previous ones failed to solve. I see a tax administration able to use artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in my assets while public debt exceeds €3,500 billion. I see a health system on which we spend hundreds of billions while sometimes learning that a specialist will see us several months later. I see a body of rules that the Senate itself measures in tens of millions of words. I see a majority of the highly qualified graduates surveyed by Ipsos considering working abroad. And now, above all, I see my own parents who have packed their bags.

I nevertheless refuse to say that France is doomed. It still has extraordinary engineers, researchers, scientists, workers, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, farmers, soldiers, police officers, gendarmes, caregivers, passionate teachers and civil servants who do their work with an admirable sense of public service. Our country lacks neither intelligence, nor courage, nor human resources. What it too often lacks, in my view, is a lasting capacity to choose, to prioritize, to arbitrate, to simplify, to sanction failure and to accept a truth that is nevertheless elementary: a real reform necessarily makes someone lose something. As long as we only want to reform what concerns our neighbor, we will reform nothing deeply enough.

I dream neither of a country without a State, nor of a society without solidarity, nor of a France without taxes. On the contrary, I would like to rediscover a State that is powerful where its power is irreplaceable, a solidarity robust enough to catch those whom life knocks down without exhausting those who finance it, and a tax whose necessity the taxpayer can understand without feeling that he is the only one who has to account for himself. As for democracy, I do not want to weaken it: I would like us finally to have enough confidence in it to look clearly at its own weaknesses, before its failures give others the pretext to propose something infinitely worse.

One request, finally, seems to me almost elementary: let us stop systematically making those who leave feel guilty. Their departure does not mean that they love France less than those who stay. Some have simply stopped believing that they could still build the life they want there; others have decided that the time they have left is too precious to wait indefinitely for an improvement that is hoped for but always postponed. My own parents have left. I regret it deeply, because they are my parents, because I love them and because no economic or political reasoning makes the distance any easier. But I understand them just as deeply.

Perhaps, moreover, the most terrible signal for a country is not that a French person decides one day to leave. The real alarm bell rings when love of country is no longer enough to hold back someone who, for years, had still been looking for reasons to stay and trying to persuade others not to give up; when the question put to expatriates is no longer "Why did you leave?" but becomes: "How did you manage to leave?"

I would like to believe that this question will never become that of millions of other French people. But avoiding it means giving up that old habit of wanting to reform everything that does not affect us. Those in power must answer for what they decide; voters must face up to the consequences of the choices they reward; the legitimate beneficiary of a system cannot forget the resources needed to finance it; everyone must accept that a saving may one day touch their own interests and that an extra service always has a price. Saving democracy finally requires having enough confidence in it to question its weaknesses without mistaking that clear-sightedness for an attack on its principle.

And perhaps I must acknowledge something even harder. From the first lines, I have tried to distinguish France from the French State, my country from its rulers, the Nation from Bercy, from the tax administration, from the rules and the policies that succeed one another. Intellectually, this distinction remains valid: a country more than a thousand years old cannot be reduced to a government, an administration, a budget or a tax audit. But the more the years go by, the more this exercise costs me. The State, the tax authorities and political decisions cease to be abstractions when they impose themselves on our work, our projects, our assets, our health, our safety or our ability to build the future. Faced again and again with what I consider to be the dysfunctions of the French State, with this despoiling of the fruit of our labor that certain laws make perfectly legal without making it, in my eyes, morally acceptable, it sometimes becomes terribly difficult to contain my anger within the borders of the State alone and to keep it from spilling over onto France itself. That is perhaps what frightens me most: not that I might stop loving my country, but that I must now make an ever greater effort to protect that love from the anger aroused in me by those who administer it.

My country, my beautiful country, my country of Louis XIV, of Napoleon Bonaparte, of Charles de Gaulle, country of my childhood and my dreams: what have you become? I still love you. And it is precisely because I still love you that I can be so deeply angry about what I think we are making of you. That is also why I now understand those who, after hoping, waiting, working, paying, building and waiting again, end up leaving you one day.

David Salvan, Coutansouze, Allier

🇫🇷 It is not our place to be spectators of decline. It is our place to right the ship democratically, before the markets or the street do it for us.

Echoes

"Farewell my France... You are no longer the one I knew, the country of respect for values, for the anthem and the flag, the country of pride in being French. Farewell my France of trafficking of every kind, of unemployment, of Islamism, of polygamy, of laxity, of permissiveness, of the broken family... Farewell my France reduced to a state of emergency, my France deconstructed, at war with itself. I nevertheless want to remain optimistic and believe in your revival. But who will save you?"

Presentation text published by Éditions du Rocher for Adieu ma France (Farewell my France), by Marcel Bigeard, 2006.

Finally, there remains this definition of inaptocracy, reproduced here as a political aphorism:

Inaptocracy: a system of government in which the least capable of governing are elected by the least capable of producing, and in which the other members of society, those least able to provide for themselves or to succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscation of the wealth and labor of a steadily shrinking number of producers.