Why leave France when you still love it?

I am not speaking only to those who dream of governing France tomorrow. That would be too convenient: nearly sixty-nine million people could then point to a handful of office-holders, say “it is their fault”, and return to their daily lives as though democratic sovereignty never involved the rest of us. These lines are addressed first to my fellow citizens, whether they are on the right, the left, in the centre or at the political extremes; to enthusiastic voters and resigned voters, to weary abstainers, to declared patriots and to people for whom that word has less resonance. They are for those who remain convinced that France is one of the best countries in the world as much as for those who no longer quite recognise the country of their childhood. Today’s, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s governments naturally have their share of responsibility, but they are not the only people to whom this essay is addressed. Above all, it is a conversation with my compatriots, and therefore also with myself.

I want to explain something that took me a long time to understand: why some French people want to leave, why many who would like to leave cannot materially do so, and why I now profoundly understand those who have the means and eventually decide to go. I am not treating all expatriates as a single political bloc. People live abroad for a thousand reasons: a career, studies, love, climate, adventure, a professional transfer, a chosen retirement, or simply the desire to discover the world. On 31 December 2025, 1,784,975 French citizens were registered in the Register of French Citizens Living Abroad. Registration is optional, however, and the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs estimates that roughly 2.5 million French citizens actually live outside the national territory. The ministry itself stresses that these figures must be handled cautiously and cannot precisely measure population flows. They therefore cannot, on their own, tell us why each individual person chose to live abroad.

I will therefore never claim that two and a half million French citizens have “voted with their feet” against French policy. That would be false, and the argument I am making does not need exaggeration. But when we look specifically at certain highly qualified groups, the signal becomes much harder to ignore. The 2025 Ipsos bva barometer for the Fédération Syntec estimated that around 15,000 young graduates of French engineering and management schools begin their careers abroad each year. Among working people and students with a master’s-level education or higher who were surveyed, 57% said they could envisage working outside France within the next three years, including 21% who were seriously considering it. Departures among the graduates concerned had increased by 23% over ten years. At the same time, 70% of respondents thought France was in decline, 74% were worried about its economic situation and 81% about its political situation. Yet 84% also cited at least one advantage of the French ecosystem. That apparent contradiction is important. Source: Ipsos bva/Fédération Syntec, “Baromètre 2025 de la fuite des cerveaux”, survey of 1,008 graduates and students at bac+5 level or higher, September 2025: Ipsos study.

This is the contradictory France I want to talk about: a country one can love passionately, a country that still has immense advantages, remarkable talent and powerful reasons to live in it, yet a country whose own children may nevertheless conclude that the relationship between what it asks of them, what it allows them to build, and what it guarantees in return has deteriorated profoundly. This essay is not born of hatred of France or a desire to see it fail. It comes from a much more painful place, where love remains but doubt gradually takes hold: can we continue living with what we love when we no longer know whether we can still build our lives there?

Loving France does not mean giving the State a blank cheque

I love France. I love its landscapes, its language, its villages, mountains, countryside, heritage and extraordinary diversity, which can make you feel as though you have entered another world after only a few hours on the road. I like understanding what the generations before us built. I am interested in the history of our kings, our Republics, our empires, our victories and defeats, our scientists, explorers, soldiers, engineers and builders. I am also interested in our colonial history without needing to turn historical differences in military, industrial, scientific, administrative or infrastructure development into any hierarchy of human worth, and without needing to erase the violence, domination and injustice that accompanied that history. Loving one’s national history should require neither a golden legend nor self-denial. We should be capable of looking at the past as adults, with its greatness, its faults, its sacrifices, its contradictions and its achievements.

France, to me, is above all not merely the French State. The nation cannot be reduced to Bercy, the General Tax Code, the Official Journal or the government of the day. Governments pass, majorities change, ministers are replaced, and even our political regimes have changed throughout history. The human, historical, cultural and emotional community that we call France existed before them and, I hope, will survive them. That is precisely why I refuse the idea that patriotism and criticism of the State must be opposites. One can love one’s country enough to be extraordinarily demanding of those who administer it, precisely because one retains ambitions for it that are greater than the ambitions to which it sometimes seems resigned. Criticising the State is not necessarily attacking France. It can be the consequence of expecting much more from France.

Deeply loving one’s country has never meant consenting without limit to everything the State imposes. Respect for the flag, our history, our soldiers and those who died for France does not require us to accept being shorn like a cash cow, to resign ourselves to a tax burden we consider excessive, to rules that reach into the smallest details of daily life, or to the feeling that we are viewed first as potential fraudsters from whom every last euro must be extracted. Patriotism is not a blank cheque written to the State. It does not require approval of every public policy, resignation in the face of dysfunction, or the sacrifice of one’s own future as proof of national love. A person can remain deeply attached to France and conclude that he can no longer develop there as he once hoped. When a ship takes on water, some people remain aboard, bail it out, repair the hull and try to bring it back to port; they have my deepest respect. Others, after bailing for years, eventually reach the shore because they refuse to drown with it. Their departure does not prove that they hate the ship. Sometimes leaving hurts precisely because they still love it.

€3,536 billion: let us stop repeating a number no human mind can picture

According to INSEE, French public debt under the Maastricht definition stood at €3,536.1 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026, equal to 117.5% of gross domestic product, compared with 115.7% three months earlier. It had therefore increased by €75.6 billion in a single quarter. Saying 117.5% of GDP means that the stock of debt is roughly 1.175 times the value of all wealth produced in France during one year. INSEE nevertheless points out that the quarterly increase in debt must not be confused with the deficit over the same period, because debt is also affected by treasury operations and other financial transactions. Source: INSEE, “Dette trimestrielle de Maastricht des administrations publiques, premier trimestre 2026”, 25 June 2026: official publication.

To understand why this figure worries me, we must again stop looking at only one quarter. In 2005, public debt was €1,147.6 billion and 66.8% of GDP. Twenty years later, in the first quarter of 2026, it is €3,536.1 billion and 117.5% of GDP. In current euros, the stock has therefore multiplied by just over three, an increase of roughly 208%. It would be fair to object that a nominal comparison over twenty years also includes inflation and economic growth. That is exactly why the second figure matters most: the debt-to-GDP ratio itself rose by 50.7 percentage points, from 66.8% to 117.5%. We are not merely comparing 2026 euros with 2005 euros. The place of debt within our national wealth has itself changed profoundly. Source: INSEE long series “Dette et déficit public”: INSEE historical series.

But let us be frank: €3,536.1 billion has almost ceased to mean anything to the human brain. To restore a comprehensible scale, INSEE estimated the French population at 69.1 million on 1 January 2026. Dividing the debt stock by that population gives roughly €51,174 per inhabitant, including children and newborn babies. This is not an individual bill. No French citizen is going to receive a tax notice tomorrow asking for that sum personally. It is simply an arithmetic equivalent designed to make an otherwise abstract order of magnitude visible.

CALCULATION GUIDE: €3,536,100,000,000 ÷ 69,100,000 inhabitants = €51,173.66, or approximately €51,174 per inhabitant.

Another misunderstanding should be cleared up: a sovereign State does not repay its debt in the same way a household repays a mortgage. Securities gradually mature and are, to a large extent, refinanced through new issues. For 2026, Agence France Trésor presented a forecast State financing requirement of €305.7 billion, including €175.8 billion of medium- and long-term securities reaching maturity. Its programme simultaneously provided for €310 billion of medium- and long-term government bond issuance net of buybacks. In other words, the €175.8 billion reaching maturity is not collected in taxes so that old debt disappears forever. A large part is refinanced through new borrowing, while the current deficit must also be financed.

What is immediately paid and thereby unavailable for any other purpose is interest. In 2025, public administrations spent €64.7 billion on interest. Relative to a population of 69.1 million, this is an arithmetic equivalent of about €936.32 per person per year, or €78.03 per person per month. For a household of four people, the equivalent is around €312 per month of collective wealth corresponding to interest alone. Again, nobody receives that personal bill. The purpose of this conversion is to show what tens of billions of euros of annual interest mean at human scale. Source: INSEE, public-administration expenditure for 2025: official table.

CALCULATION GUIDE: €64.7bn ÷ 69.1m inhabitants = €936.32/year, or €78.03/month per inhabitant and approximately €312/month for four people.

A separate forecast series, cited in 2026 by the Finance Committee of the National Assembly from government answers, put the public-administration debt burden at €66.6 billion in 2025 and forecast €78.3 billion in 2026. This forecast series is not strictly identical to INSEE’s provisional 2025 accounting figure of €64.7 billion, so the conventions must not be treated as interchangeable. They nevertheless point in the same direction: the expected debt burden rises sharply in 2026. On a population of 69.1 million, a forecast €78.3 billion corresponds to roughly €1,133.14 per inhabitant per year, or €94.43 per inhabitant per month; for four people, the arithmetic equivalent exceeds €377 per month. These remain forecast-based equivalents, not individual invoices or final accounts. Source: National Assembly Finance Committee report: parliamentary report.

CALCULATION GUIDE: €78.3bn ÷ 69.1m inhabitants = €1,133.14/year, or €94.43/month per inhabitant and approximately €377.72/month for four people.

Meanwhile, the public deficit was €152.5 billion in 2025 after €169.1 billion in 2024, respectively 5.1% and 5.8% of GDP. Relative to the population, the 2025 deficit is about €2,207 per inhabitant for the year, or almost €184 per inhabitant per month of additional financing requirement. This benchmark must not be added to the interest equivalents as though interest were a separate extra item: interest is already part of expenditure and therefore contributes to the deficit. Source: INSEE, “Le compte des administrations publiques en 2025”, 29 May 2026: official publication.

So I ask you sincerely: does this not bother you? Does it not bother you that, majority after majority and government after government, the people we elect continue to present deficit accounts that we must finance collectively today and whose consequences our children will face tomorrow through interest, refinancing and reduced fiscal room for manoeuvre? If this debt had radically transformed the country, if it had left us spectacularly better infrastructure, a revived industrial base, stronger energy independence, smooth-running hospitals, swift justice, impeccable security and an exemplary school system, the debate would be different. Debt can absolutely prepare the future when it finances productive assets or investment from which later generations benefit. Anger arises when debt rises while some of the services that the scale of our spending should guarantee as excellent seem, at the same time, to deteriorate.

We collect enormous amounts: the return should be exceptional

France is not a country in which the public sphere lacks resources. INSEE recorded compulsory levies of roughly €1,300 billion in 2025, representing about 43.6% of GDP, while total public expenditure remained above half of national wealth. International comparisons vary according to perimeter and year, but the central fact is not seriously disputed: France belongs to the group of advanced economies with the highest levels of taxation and social contributions relative to economic output. The OECD’s Taxing Wages 2026 likewise shows a very high tax wedge on labour for many household configurations. Source: INSEE public accounts for 2025: INSEE; OECD, Taxing Wages 2026.

My argument is therefore not that France should collect nothing, or even that every high levy is illegitimate. A developed country that chooses broad social insurance, education, infrastructure, defence, policing, justice and redistribution necessarily finances them. My argument is more demanding: when a society asks citizens and businesses for such a large share of the wealth they produce, the public services delivered in return should be exceptionally effective, accessible and trustworthy. High compulsory levies create an obligation of result. They should buy us a State that works unusually well, not a permanent explanation of why the next additional contribution is still necessary.

Over twenty years, taxation has not only weighed more: it has also fragmented

Taxes are experienced not only through their aggregate rate but through their complexity. Over two decades, France has accumulated national taxes, local taxes, social contributions, sector-specific charges, environmental levies, duties, surcharges, reductions, credits, exemptions and regimes whose individual justification may sometimes be rational but whose overall architecture becomes increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens and small businesses to understand. INSEE’s long public-finance series shows how compulsory levies have evolved over time, while the OECD’s Revenue Statistics provides an international breakdown of the French tax mix. Sources: INSEE historical series public-finance indicators and tax data; OECD Revenue Statistics 2025, France.

The problem is not merely that taxes exist. The problem is that the system often becomes unreadable enough that people no longer know what they are paying for, how a given levy is calculated, whether it still serves its original purpose, or why two economically similar situations are treated differently. Complexity itself has a cost: administrative work for the State, accounting and legal work for companies, time spent by households, uncertainty before investment, and a sense that the person who does not master the rules is always one form or deadline away from being wrong. A tax system can become oppressive through opacity even when each individual provision is legal and technically justified.

This fragmentation has been documented for years. In 2014 the Inspection générale des finances examined hundreds of small-yield taxes and questioned the cost-effectiveness of retaining many narrow levies. More recently, the Cour des comptes returned to the subject of low-yield taxes, stressing that a tax can cost disproportionately much to administer compared with what it raises and that simplification can require genuine political decisions rather than another layer of exceptions. Sources: IGF report on low-yield taxes 2014 report; Cour des comptes 2025 synthesis on low-yield taxes.

At the same time, public spending has not collapsed; France continues to devote exceptional resources to social protection. DREES data show the scale of social benefits and the central place they occupy in national redistribution. That is not, in itself, a criticism: a society may democratically choose extensive collective insurance. But it reinforces the need to ask whether every euro is allocated to the missions that matter most, whether programmes overlap, and whether citizens can understand the system they finance. Source: DREES, Social protection in France and Europe 2024.

My concern is therefore not a childish slogan such as “all tax is theft”. A functioning nation needs tax. My concern is the gradual breaking of consent when the taxpayer sees the total burden rise or remain exceptionally high, the rules multiply, debt increase, and yet still hears that hospitals, justice, security, schools or infrastructure lack the means to function properly. Fiscal consent depends not only on legality. It depends on intelligibility, fairness and the visible quality of what is delivered in return.

Our healthcare is not free: we pay for it collectively, and we pay a great deal

One of the most persistent habits in French political debate is to call healthcare “free”. It is not free. It is largely socialised: we pay for it collectively through taxes and social contributions so that the financial shock of illness does not fall entirely on the person who gets sick. I strongly support that principle. But calling it free makes serious evaluation more difficult because it hides the resources mobilised. DREES estimates that current health expenditure in France amounted to around €333 billion in 2024, a major share of national wealth. France spends heavily on health by international standards. The legitimate question is therefore not whether we spend, but what access, quality and availability those hundreds of billions actually purchase. Sources: DREES, Health expenditure in 2024; OECD, Health at a Glance 2025: France.

Over the same long period, the hospital has been transformed. France has deliberately shifted many treatments towards outpatient care and shorter stays, which means that fewer full hospital beds do not automatically equal fewer treatments or worse medicine. That distinction matters. Yet the magnitude of the change remains significant. DREES data show that the number of full-hospitalisation beds has fallen by roughly one fifth over two decades while outpatient capacity increased. A serious discussion must hold both facts at once: some reduction reflects medical progress and organisational change, while insufficient downstream capacity can still produce very real congestion when the patient needs a bed now.

Emergency departments tell an especially tangible story. DREES records close to 14 million emergency-department visits in 2002, almost 20 million in 2021 and 20.8 million in 2023. The order of magnitude has therefore increased by about half since the early 2000s. Even between 2013 and 2023 alone, annual visits rose from 18.8 to 20.8 million. And when we look not merely at how many people walk through the door but at how long they remain there, deterioration becomes concrete: in 2013, half of patients receiving a complete emergency treatment episode had left within 2 hours 15 minutes; in 2023 the median exceeded 3 hours 10 minutes, 55 minutes longer. The proportion staying more than eight hours rose from 9% to 15%; among people aged 75 and over, from 24% to 36%. Sources: DREES long series and Emergency Survey 2023, including long-term emergency data, 2023 survey and June 2026 analysis.

The problem often begins before the hospital. In 2023, 21% of patients questioned in emergency departments said one reason for attending was difficulty obtaining an appointment elsewhere, compared with 14% in 2013. Another indicator points in the same direction: between 2012 and 2021, once DREES adjusts medical density for population ageing and therefore healthcare needs, the standardised density of general practitioners fell from 155 to 139 per 100,000 inhabitants, a 10% decline. The picture must also be updated honestly: medical demography has recently begun improving, with DREES counting around 101,000 GPs at the beginning of 2026, up 1% in a year after several years of decline. That improvement does not erase the accumulated trough or territorial disparities that have made access much more difficult in parts of the country.

This is why the word “free” irritates me when it is used to end the conversation. I do not deny the enormous advantage of a system designed so that illness should not financially ruin the person it strikes. I am simply saying that a theoretical right to care is complete only if care remains physically accessible. An appointment can be reimbursed at 100% and still be 100% useless if nobody can see you when you need treatment. France has not stopped treating people over the past twenty years; far from it. It has changed the hospital model, expanded outpatient medicine and continues to devote enormous resources to health. But when full beds fall significantly, emergency visits rise sharply and waiting times lengthen, it is legitimate to ask whether the French promise of access to care still has the same force everywhere.

Even reimbursements should be described without mythology. Since 15 October 2023, Assurance Maladie coverage for many dental procedures was reduced from 70% to 60% of the statutory tariff. The official ameli.fr site still stated in February 2026 that many reimbursable dental consultations and procedures are generally covered at 60% of the statutory base, outside special situations. That means the share of the statutory base not covered by mandatory insurance rose from 30% to 40%; it does not mean that the patient necessarily pays the whole 40% out of pocket, because supplementary insurance may cover some or all of it. Accuracy matters even when criticising the system.

But the issue that troubles me most now goes beyond the reimbursement percentage: what use is a perfectly reimbursed appointment if it cannot be obtained when needed? In OECD comparative data based on the Commonwealth Fund international survey, 43% of French respondents who had seen a specialist reported waiting between two months and less than one year, compared with 22% in Germany, 15% in the United States, 15% in the Netherlands and 12% in Switzerland. These are self-reported survey data rather than an exhaustive administrative census, so they describe patient experience within a standardised comparative framework. Even with that limitation, the gap is disturbing. Source: OECD, Health at a Glance 2025, figure 5.13, Commonwealth Fund 2023 data.

I also speak from personal experience. After a cardiac problem I was supposed to receive follow-up and encountered a wait of roughly six months for the appointment I was seeking. In that situation, a patient does not reason like a health economist, calculate hospital-performance indicators or wonder where France ranks internationally. My reaction was far more basic: “Six months? I have 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 experienced waits of several months for certain medical appointments.

The emergency-department issue is more troubling still. A prospective study published in JAMA Internal Medicine followed 1,598 patients aged at least 75 in 97 French emergency departments. Among patients admitted to hospital, those who spent the night in the emergency department before obtaining a ward bed had in-hospital mortality of 15.7%, compared with 11.1% among those transferred to a ward before midnight; after statistical adjustment, the relative risk was estimated at 1.39. The study demonstrates an association, not proof that a trolley, staff shortage or any single variable directly caused each death. The result is nevertheless serious: among the older patients studied, an overnight emergency-department stay was associated with higher mortality and morbidity.

That is why I no longer accept that every criticism of the French system should be dismissed with “yes, but America”. The American healthcare system is extremely expensive: health spending reached about $5.3 trillion in 2024, around 18% of GDP and $15,474 per person. But the caricature that only rich Americans have health insurance is also false. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 92% of the population, around 310 million people, had health coverage for all or part of 2024, while 8% were uninsured; employment-based insurance remained the most common form, ahead of Medicare and Medicaid. Those figures do not make the American system fair or desirable in every respect. They simply show that reality is more complex than the slogan usually deployed in French debate.

The right question, then, is not whether our system is “better than America”, as though that ended all reflection. The right question is how a country that devotes roughly €333 billion a year to health can still leave some citizens with the anxious feeling that access to a specialist or rapid care has become a territorial lottery. A healthcare system must be judged simultaneously on financial accessibility, medical quality and its real ability to deliver care at the time the patient needs it. Care that is free at the point of use but impossible to obtain is not a complete victory; immediately available care that is financially inaccessible is not one either.

Even the school system tells a long-term story

Hospitals are not the only field in which twenty years tell us more than the argument surrounding the latest budget. Education deserves the same caution, because no single indicator can summarise the intelligence of a generation or the work of hundreds of thousands of teachers. The international PISA survey nevertheless allows us to compare certain skills with a relatively stable methodology. In mathematics, the major PISA domain both in 2003 and in 2022, France fell from 511 points in 2003 to 474 in 2022, a decline of 37 points. Over the same period, the share of pupils performing below level 2 rose from 16.6% to 28.8%, while the share of top performers at levels 5 and 6 fell from 15.1% to 7.4%. France remained around the OECD average in 2022. The 2022 round also came after the pandemic, a context it would be absurd to ignore without pretending that it alone explains the entire twenty-year trajectory. Source: French Ministry of Education, Repères et références statistiques 2024, PISA mathematics results: official report.

Why include this in an essay about people considering leaving France? Because a family does not choose a country only by comparing tax rates. It also looks at what will become of its children, the quality of their education, whether healthcare will be available when needed, everyday security, the ability to work and travel, the stability of the rules, and the degree of confidence it can place in the future. Each indicator taken separately can be qualified. Put together over fifteen or twenty years, however, they create a feeling that is much harder to dismiss: paying more while sometimes waiting more, giving things up more often and worrying more about what comes next.

Solidarity: protecting the vulnerable without discouraging effort

The debate over social benefits illustrates the French difficulty of holding two truths together at once. As a landlord, I personally examined the file of a prospective tenant whose supporting documents showed more than €2,000 per month in combined social benefits. This did not come from a viral post or a story repeated 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 is an individual experience, not a national statistic, and that is exactly how it should be read.

I could use that example to claim that, in France, it is generally more profitable not to work. It would be spectacular, but national data do not support such a blanket statement. DREES shows that in January 2025, for its standard case of a single working-age, non-disabled person renting privately and with no earnings, social benefits totalled €873 per month: €572 in RSA minimum income and €301 in housing assistance. With full-time employment paid at the net minimum wage, disposable income for the same standard case reached €1,673, including €1,426 in wages and €246 in the in-work activity bonus. For a single-parent family with two children, DREES estimated disposable income at €1,720 without employment and €2,544 with one minimum-wage job. Source: DREES, Minima sociaux et prestations de solidarité, 2025 edition.

Recognising those figures does not end the debate because a person does not live inside two columns of a spreadsheet. Working means getting up at a fixed time, travelling, sometimes buying and maintaining a car, paying for fuel, arranging childcare, accepting a hierarchy, having less free time, taking responsibility and facing fatigue and professional uncertainty. The real policy question is whether the gap between supported inactivity and employment remains sufficiently large for the additional effort to be immediately and durably worthwhile, especially once work-related costs are included. Asking that question is neither an insult to poorer people nor a rejection of solidarity. It is a legitimate question about the design of solidarity and economic incentives.

The society I hope for must be able to catch people when life knocks them down. Illness, disability, an accident, unemployment, separation or a personal catastrophe can break a life, and a civilisation is judged partly by how it treats the most vulnerable. But the same society must also allow work, training, responsibility, effort and initiative to improve a person’s life substantially. Social protection should be a net that prevents someone from hitting the ground, not a ceiling that makes climbing back up pointless. Between abandoning the weakest and designing a system that discourages effort lies a vast field of public policy that deserves better than caricature.

Housing provides a contradiction that summarises part of my unease. We rightly complain that rents are too high, yet French tax doctrine allows the administration, when it establishes that a rent is notoriously below normal rental value without circumstances independent of the owner’s will explaining the difference, to increase the declared rental income by the amount of the benefit granted. That is precisely what I faced: because I had chosen to rent several properties substantially below market rates, partly to help tenants and partly because I considered myself free to accept lower returns on my own property, the tax audit reassessed the three previous years and the properties concerned by that analysis. The rule exists; I do not deny it. But its logic appears profoundly contradictory to me. If an owner, without fraud or hidden consideration, voluntarily earns less in order to keep a rent affordable, why should the State tax him as if he had collected income he never received? A system that condemns high rents while fiscally penalising an owner for staying far below market can end up discouraging the very behaviour it says it wants. Source: BOFiP, BOI-RFPI-BASE-10-10, rules on reduced and abnormal rents: official doctrine.

When taxpayers feel hunted while the State struggles to control itself

Beyond the amount of money involved lies something more personal: the way a citizen feels looked at by the State. When I see the resources the tax administration can mobilise to detect a declaration anomaly, I cannot help comparing that technological efficiency with the slowness I perceive when it comes to simplifying a procedure, abolishing one that has become useless, or searching with the same determination for public spending whose effectiveness is no longer demonstrated. I am not arguing that anti-fraud enforcement should be disarmed. I am asking that the administration apply to itself the same standards of modernity, precision and results that it applies to the taxpayer.

The DGFiP’s “Foncier innovant” programme, for example, uses artificial-intelligence algorithms on public aerial imagery from IGN, the national geographical institute, to detect certain constructions or swimming pools that may not have been declared. DGFiP states that an official then systematically checks each anomaly before any follow-up or taxation. In 2025, 52% of professional cases closed by DGFiP services and more than 54% of individual cases had been targeted using artificial intelligence and data mining. The Ministry of the Economy also states that these techniques helped recover €2.8 billion that year. Sources: DGFiP, “Foncier innovant” dossier; Ministry of the Economy, 2025 tax-audit results.

I do not blame the State for fighting fraud. A fraudster shifts onto honest taxpayers a burden he refuses to bear himself, and it would be absurd to demand greater fiscal justice while asking the administration to ignore cheating. But I want to express clearly the feeling that this asymmetry can create. Over time, a citizen who works, invests, owns property, rents homes and runs projects can feel hunted down, as though the system were searching every corner of his assets for the last euro that might be missing from the administration’s accounts. That is a political judgement and a personal feeling, not a legal description of tax control. But the feeling exists, and dismissing it contemptuously would be dangerous.

My question is therefore extremely simple: where is the “Foncier innovant” of public waste? Where is the artificial intelligence tasked with finding, with the same meticulousness, every obsolete procedure, every administrative duplication, every subsidy whose usefulness is no longer demonstrated, every public IT programme whose budget explodes, every underused building, every structure whose original purpose has disappeared and every programme whose actual effectiveness no longer matches its cost? Why does the State give me the impression of being extraordinarily modern when searching for an anomaly in my property, but so much more hesitant when looking for its own anomalies? It is this asymmetry, more than the existence of control itself, that erodes trust.

The same feeling appears in relation to regulatory accumulation. In a June 2023 report on “normative sobriety”, the French Senate referred to around 44 million words of regulations and denounced regulatory proliferation that increasingly puts the law beyond the practical reach of businesses, while also noting that even the exact stock is difficult to measure comprehensively. A rule is not bad merely because it exists. Electrical standards prevent fires, health rules save lives, environmental rules can prevent irreversible damage and planning law can prevent chaos. The issue is not “rules versus freedom”. It is accumulation, complexity, instability, proportionality and whether a reasonable citizen can realistically know what is required of him.

We continue, however, to live under the principle that no one is supposed to be ignorant of the law, while the body of applicable rules has become materially impossible for a normal human being to read, master and memorise. Running a business no longer means only knowing one’s trade, customers and market. It can feel as though one must simultaneously become a lawyer, tax specialist, planner, accountant, environmental expert and administrative professional. I am not asking for a world without rules. I am saying that an incomprehensible, unstable or disproportionate rule can eventually produce the opposite of the order it was meant to create.

And I listen to my fellow citizens. I hear their anger, exhaustion and sometimes despair when they describe daily life on radio programmes or in ordinary conversations: workers considering leaving because they feel they cannot take any more; people saying they will do only a few undeclared hours because they believe much of every extra euro earned disappears; small self-employed workers tempted to keep marginal activity outside the official system because they feel additional work feeds the system more than it improves their lives; families for whom fuel prices now reduce travel, leisure or holidays. I also hear a vocabulary that should worry us: some say they have to “go underground”, hide a small service, sale or side activity, as though ordinary neighbours, tradespeople, employees, pensioners and families had become economic clandestines merely to find a few dozen or few hundred euros of breathing space at the end of the month. That does not make undeclared work lawful. It tells us something about the erosion of consent.

When filling the tank also becomes a tax question

Fuel deserves careful numbers because it has become one of the most immediate symbols of this exasperation. In its weekly statement for 21 August 2026, the Directorate-General for Energy and Climate reported a national average diesel price of 223.12 euro cents per litre, or €2.2312, compared with 159.67 cents in the corresponding period of 2025: an increase of 39.7% in one year. At the time of writing, the official pump-price feed, supplied by filling stations and updated every ten minutes, also showed prices commonly above €2.20. For someone living far from work, a tradesperson, sales representative, home-care nurse or rural family, these are not geopolitical abstractions. They are tens of euros extra every time the tank is filled. Sources: Ministry for Ecological Transition, weekly petroleum-price statement of 21 August 2026, official petroleum-price page, and real-time fuel-price dataset.

Here precision matters. At €2.2312 per litre it would be false to write that the State was already taking “more than one euro in tax” on every litre of diesel. The exact figure is almost as striking: the same official document gives a pre-tax price of 125.18 cents and an all-tax price of 223.12 cents. The difference is therefore 97.94 cents of taxation per litre, close to one euro and around 44% of the final price. On a 50-litre fill, that is an arithmetic equivalent of almost €49 in taxation. The normal 2026 excise on B7 diesel is 60.75 cents per litre in most metropolitan regions, and VAT at the standard 20% rate also contributes to the final price. Sources: customs duties in force from 1 August 2026, French Customs; Ministry for Ecological Transition, 2026 energy-tax guide.

The Strait of Hormuz is not a convenient invention. Its closure and conflict in the Middle East produced a real oil shock. The French Treasury notes that roughly 20% of world oil production passes through the strait and that Brent had jumped by more than 40% in March after the conflict began. It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that Bercy created that global rise. But the opposite claim would be equally misleading: Hormuz explains the shock to crude oil; it does not compel France to keep all fuel taxation unchanged when that shock reaches the pump. Tax is a national policy lever within the constraints of European law, and the Government made a political choice not to cut it across the board. Source: Direction générale du Trésor, 17 July 2026: Treasury analysis.

The Government itself explains the trade-off. In a response published by the National Assembly on 7 July 2026, it argued that a general VAT reduction on fuel would cost several billion euros and benefit wealthier households more because they consume more fuel, and therefore favoured targeted assistance and electrification. That budgetary and redistributive argument can be defended. But I am also entitled to see in it exactly the problem described throughout this essay: when public finances are so constrained that the State considers itself unable to give up several billion euros of revenue even while millions of people face diesel above €2.20, the State’s dependence on tax revenue becomes part of the social problem. Source: National Assembly, written question no. 15193, Government answer of 7 July 2026: official answer.

The formulation I consider fairest is therefore this: the Strait of Hormuz explains an essential part of the surge in the underlying product; the decision not to absorb a broad part of that surge through taxation belongs to French policy. That does not make the State solely responsible for a litre at €2.23. It means the State has a lever, knows its budgetary cost and chose not to use it generally. For a family cancelling a weekend or a visit to relatives, or for a professional refusing a job because travel has become too expensive, that economic nuance remains correct but does not make the tank any cheaper.

Listening to this anger does not excuse fraud. Undeclared work, concealed income and deliberate non-payment of legally due contributions remain offences, and the burden they remove is partly shifted to people who follow the rules. But stopping at that legal response would also miss the point. When citizens no longer ask how to contribute fairly but how to escape, reduce their traces, work less officially, consume less or leave the country, the problem reaches beyond individual fraud. It touches consent itself. A democracy cannot permanently rely on fear of enforcement alone; it needs a sufficiently large majority to continue believing the rules are legitimate.

When ordinary citizens spontaneously start using the vocabulary of clandestinity to describe how they economically survive in their own country, perhaps it is time to ask not only how to control them better, but why they have come to want to hide.

CAMPING LA RESSOURCE: I wanted to pass on practical knowledge and learned to build administrative files

CAMPING LA RESSOURCE was meant to be my practical answer to the criticisms I was making. After the pandemic crisis, in 2021, I imagined a place where household autonomy would no longer be merely a concept explained in a book or video but something people could touch, observe and reproduce: producing part of one’s electricity, controlling energy use, recovering water, growing food, practising permaculture, reducing waste, understanding alternative construction methods and decreasing dependence on external infrastructure. On roughly three hectares, this “living showroom” was to become an open-air laboratory, not promising autarky but helping families regain some control over the most basic needs of daily life. I described the project, its history and obstacles in detail in my article “La France contre ses entrepreneurs”, published on 12 January 2026.

The idea was simple: transmit useful knowledge and allow every visitor to leave with something that could genuinely be applied at home. I did not expect the State to build the campsite for me, guarantee its success or protect me from entrepreneurial risk. It was my responsibility to invest, self-build, find partners, take the risk and make the idea viable. Then momentum collided with what I progressively experienced as a wall of regulation, taxation, procedures and authorisations: referrals between bodies, environmental examination, dozens of documents, successive approvals, difficulties obtaining bank finance, and later an associative solution blocked by the tax analysis of whether it qualified as being in the public interest. Those steps and obstacles are documented in the same public dossier.

The process also forced me to revise my own figures. Some early estimates of development taxation led me to envisage amounts above €100,000. A detailed calculation published later, based on a revised configuration and phased build, produced more than €33,000 of levies envisaged before the project effectively began, including around €30,000 of development tax in the scenario described before laying the first stone. The later figure is less spectacular than the initial estimate; it is more precise and defensible, which is why I retain it. The detailed calculations and phasing are available in the project dossier.

More than €30,000 before receiving the first customer and collecting the first euro does not become insignificant merely because the initial estimate was higher. A large group may treat that as a line in a budget; for a small project financed from personal resources it can decide whether a phase begins, is delayed or is abandoned. The consequence is that a project designed as an integrated whole can be broken into smaller phases, delayed, redrawn and repeatedly re-authorised so that the creator can self-finance step by step. There is an irony I find difficult to miss: I wanted to build a campsite about autonomy and became a specialist in administrative dependence; I wanted to build structures and learned to build files.

I wanted my property to make me free; it has also become part of my chains

The casual phrase “if you are unhappy, just leave” ignores what departure means when an entire economic life has been built in one country. At twenty, with a suitcase, a few clothes, few assets and few commitments, changing country can sometimes be decided within weeks. With homes, land, loans, contracts, an activity and projects, the same choice is completely different. A life no longer fits in the boot of a car, and leaving is no longer simply a matter of buying a ticket.

I devoted a considerable part of my life to building a property portfolio because I wanted to progress, change social class, stop depending eternally on a salary and create an economic freedom that nobody was going to hand me for free. I went without things, took risks, worked and invested in the belief that one day those assets would give me greater choice over my life. One of the most painful ironies of that journey is that I made myself, at least partly, a prisoner of my own investments. What was meant to give me freedom has also become one of the reasons leaving is not as simple as people imagine.

If I decided tomorrow to sell certain properties quickly, capital-gains tax could apply depending on their situation. Under the ordinary regime for taxable property gains, full exemption from income tax is generally reached after 22 years of ownership, while full exemption from social contributions is reached after 30 years. The administration also specifies that taxable gains are in principle subject to 19% income tax and 17.2% social contributions before holding-period allowances and any other exemptions. Source: impots.gouv.fr and the official guidance on real-estate capital gains.

In my own acquisition calendar, waiting for the complete disappearance of that taxation on certain investments would take me roughly to the age of seventy. I built assets in order to gain freedom and discovered that those assets can also prevent me from leaving quickly without surrendering a portion of the fruit of decades of effort. I am not saying this is legally unjust. I am saying it helps explain why many people who sometimes dream of leaving ultimately remain where they are. Chains do not always look like handcuffs. They can be a mortgage, a flat, a plot of land, a business, children, elderly parents or simply an entire life built somewhere.

Even after a lifetime of work, the State still waits at the inheritance

Alongside the difficulty of leaving, my family faces another quieter rupture: inheritance. My parents worked throughout their lives, paid income taxes, social contributions, consumption taxes and the many levies that accompany an economic life in France. Their assets did not fall from the sky. They are the result of decades of work, saving, choices, sacrifice and management. They have reached a simple conclusion: rather than continuing to deprive themselves in order to preserve until death capital of which a portion might then be taxed at transfer, they prefer to sell during their lifetime, use their money and spend it as they choose while they are still here to enjoy it. It is their money, their life and their remaining years. I understand that decision deeply.

The rules are revealing enough without caricature. In a direct parent-to-child inheritance, each child normally benefits from a €100,000 allowance on what he or she receives from each parent. Above that, the taxable share is subject to a progressive scale from 5% to 45% depending on brackets; reaching the highest bracket therefore does not mean the entire inheritance is taxed at 45%. A surviving spouse or PACS civil partner is exempt from inheritance tax. Sources: Direction générale des Finances publiques, inheritance guidance on impots.gouv.fr and BOFiP on the €100,000 direct-line allowance.

A simple example shows the order of magnitude. If one child receives a net share of €300,000 from one parent, no previous gift has reduced the available allowance and no special exemption applies, the €100,000 allowance leaves a taxable base of €200,000. Applying the progressive direct-line scale produces roughly €38,194 of inheritance tax: about €403.60 on the first 5% bracket, €403.70 on the 10% bracket, €573.45 on the 15% bracket and €36,813.60 on the remaining portion taxed at 20%, for a total of approximately €38,194.35. This is an illustrative case, not a reconstruction of a particular succession; real outcomes depend on the assets, previous gifts, number of heirs, exemptions and many other variables. Yet it is easy to understand why families can experience the transfer as “paying one last time” after income, consumption, saving and property have already borne many levies during life.

Transmission can of course be planned within the law. Each parent can generally give up to €100,000 to each child within the direct-line allowance without gift tax, with the allowance renewable every fifteen years. A couple may therefore, subject to their circumstances and previous use of the allowance, transfer up to €200,000 to each child in this framework. Since 1 January 2026, manual gifts concerned by the rules must in principle be declared online, including when no tax is generated.

One clarification is essential: selling an asset while alive does not make it disappear from the estate. If my parents sell property and the proceeds remain in their bank accounts on the day of death, those liquid assets form part of their estate and are taken into account for inheritance purposes. Their decision is not based on the belief that selling magically removes money from inheritance. It is a decision to stop depriving themselves solely to preserve intact capital they cannot take with them, and to use legally during their lifetime the fruit of their own work.

And, quite frankly, how could I blame them for thinking this way? For decades their generation was told to work, save, buy a home, prepare for retirement, build assets and, if possible, leave something to the children. Then the final stage of life arrives and the transfer itself can still be taxed above the statutory allowances. Legally, inheritance tax is not “theft”; it is established by law and applies to a transfer of wealth. But morally and psychologically my parents have come to experience it as one final deduction from a lifetime of work, as though after decades of taxes, saving and sacrifice the State were still waiting at the threshold of family transmission. The legal classification is clear; it does not erase the feeling that, for them, this is one levy too many.

I therefore understand why they say: “We worked for this money, we went without things to earn and preserve it, and we paid what the law required throughout our lives. Now, while we are alive, we want to use it as we choose.” That is not fraud or concealment. It is the lawful exercise of the right to dispose of one’s property while alive. Something profound changes when a family that once thought primarily about transmission begins asking a different question: not only “what will we leave?”, but “why should we keep depriving ourselves today to preserve for tomorrow capital we will no longer enjoy and part of which may be taxed on transfer?” At that point the issue is no longer only a tax rate. Trust between citizen and State has deteriorated enough to alter family behaviour itself.

My parents left

And then there is something much more important to me than my taxes, my flats, my projects or my political disagreements. There are my parents. My elderly parents whom I love, the people who watched me grow up, educated me, protected me and accompanied me, who worked and did everything within their power to give me an education, make my childhood happy and allow me to develop. My father is now 89 and my mother 82. These two people around whom an immense share of my memories has formed made a decision I would once have found difficult to imagine: they decided to leave their own country. By the time you read these lines, they are no longer living on French soil.

I am probably the first person to regret their 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 on the State. Quite the opposite. He was a customs controller. He served the French administration throughout his career, progressed within it, experienced more than twenty transfers, always tried to be exemplary at work, was professionally distinguished on several occasions and received marks of recognition that went as far as thanks from ministers whose names most of us no longer know. He belonged to a generation of men for whom doing one’s job properly in the service of the State was neither heroic nor exceptional; it was simply a conception of duty. The same was true of his brother, who fought and distinguished himself in Indochina before being killed in Algeria, in a war whose political choices and outcome left a wound in my family that never completely closed. And it is precisely this man, my father, after an entire life in France and in the service of the State, who decided at the age of 89 to expatriate and spend the years that remain to him elsewhere.

At 89, departure no longer has the face of adventure. At twenty or twenty-five, changing countries can be a promise: learning a language, discovering a world, building a career and turning uncertainty into momentum. At 89, leaving means abandoning a lifetime of habits, rebuilding landmarks, learning new reflexes, adapting to another environment and moving away from part of what is familiar at the very age when one might legitimately wish everything to become simpler. My mother accompanies him. She is 82. They are leaving together after living their lives in France, after working there, contributing there, paying taxes there, raising their children there, loving, ageing and accumulating decades of memories there.

I will never turn my parents into a national statistic. Their departure does not explain by itself the roughly 2.5 million French citizens living abroad, and it tells us nothing about the motives of all the others. But when an 89-year-old man who served the State during his working life decides he would rather spend his final years elsewhere, technocratic expressions such as “territorial attractiveness” suddenly take on a much more concrete meaning. It is no longer a curve in a report or an international tax comparison. It is my father and my mother, two people I love and whose decision I understand in all its human weight.

So before accusing a French person who leaves of cowardice, ingratitude, selfishness or lack of patriotism, perhaps we should begin with a simpler and more human question: what happened to you, what did you experience, what did you wait for and hope for, that finally led you to think your life would be better somewhere else? Their answer may not convince you. You might have made a different choice in the same situation. But at least you will have tried to understand before judging.

The country where I often look over my shoulder

Security is another fracture in my relationship with the country. Looking only at one-year variations is not enough to understand what feeds that feeling: increases of 4%, 5% or 8% can remain abstract until one examines the longer trajectory. Over the twelve months from May 2005 to April 2006, the Ministry of the Interior recorded 421,095 intentional offences against physical integrity. Almost twenty years later, the Government told the Senate that police and gendarmerie services had recorded 818,233 acts in that administrative category in 2024. Between those two official snapshots, the recorded volume therefore rose from roughly 421,000 to more than 818,000 acts, an arithmetic increase of about 94%. Sources: Ministry of the Interior, 8 June 2006, official archive; Government response to the Senate on insecurity and crime, 2024 figures.

I nevertheless refuse to write that “violence has doubled in twenty years” as though those two figures alone could prove the real evolution of every type of assault. The Ministry itself warns that the older long-term series derived from the historical “état 4001” crime-recording system are not fully comparable over decades. Changes in legal classification, recording practices, victim reception and willingness to report complicate twenty-year comparisons. This reservation is especially important for domestic and sexual violence, whose recording has changed profoundly as victims have been more strongly encouraged and supported to speak. The precise conclusion is therefore narrower: the volume of violence recorded by the security services has changed scale, while part of that rise also reflects offences that were formerly silent, unreported or differently coded now reaching official statistics more often. Source: Ministry of the Interior answer to the National Assembly on long series for intentional assault, published 3 June 2025: official answer.

Even if the twenty-year comparison is set aside and only the redesigned, more robust series since 2016 are retained, the signal remains substantial. The first 2024 statistical picture counted 4,305 victims of attempted homicide, compared with 2,259 in 2016, close to a doubling; the 2025 assessment then recorded a further annual increase in the indicator. The final SSMSI review for 2025 states that recorded physical violence had risen since 2016 at an average pace of about 8% per year; recorded sexual violence by about 11% per year, and rape and attempted rape by about 15% per year. In 2025, security services recorded 473,000 victims of physical violence and 132,300 victims of sexual violence. Homicides did not follow the same trajectory: 975 victims were recorded in 2025, stable compared with 2024. One methodological point matters: the 818,233 “acts” in the 2024 administrative aggregate and the 473,000 “victims” of physical violence in 2025 are not directly comparable values from the same series. They use different units and statistical scopes. That is exactly why I want neither minimisation nor caricature. Different indicators tell different stories, but several categories of recorded violence have risen over the decade at rates far beyond the few percentage points visible in a single year. Source: SSMSI, 2024 first statistical picture and 2025 statistical review, 9 July 2026.

My relationship with violence is not that of a commentator who has merely read statistics. I worked as a security officer and then a team leader in Auvergne. I suffered two assaults while on duty serious enough to require hospital treatment and, in total, two surgical operations, one of them cosmetic in nature, with consequences that remain today. I also knew security officers professionally who never returned home, including men killed in knife attacks while doing their job. Despite experience, when I am in certain large cities at certain hours I still sometimes look behind me, stay close to a wall and instinctively observe groups, hands, exits and distances. This is not proof that every French person should live in fear. They are simply reflexes a man can keep after learning physically what an assault means.

I therefore reject two symmetrical forms of propaganda: the claim that the whole of France has become unliveable, and the claim that any citizen who expresses insecurity is merely imagining a problem that does not exist. A national average never erases the individual experience of a victim, just as one individual experience can never summarise an entire country. We should be capable of holding both truths at once.

Those who accept the possibility of giving everything for the country

For all this anger, there is a France for which my gratitude is immense. I think of soldiers, police officers, gendarmes, firefighters, healthcare workers, security officers and all those whose profession sometimes literally requires them to move towards danger when the natural reflex of a human being would be to move away from it. I also think of the women and men working in the shadows within the DGSI, DGSE, DRM and all the services that contribute to our security. The public will never know most of their successes precisely because success often means preventing something that, thanks to them, never happens. We discuss politics freely, criticise our institutions and argue on social media while others monitor terrorist networks, interference operations, military threats or hostile interests of which most citizens will never know anything.

One public testimony particularly marked me. In a July 2026 LEGEND programme devoted to French special forces, Charles d’Azérat, a CPA 10 officer and author of À cœur ouvert, recounted the story of a serviceman who had already been wounded several times. At around two hours and six minutes into the interview, he said that the man had been wounded three times for his country and nearly died from the third wound while his wife was pregnant. According to that account, his insurance would have offered him €514,000 in the situation described, while his pay was put at around €2,500 per month. Yet he is said to have chosen to preserve his ability to serve and eventually returned to combat. I do not have access to that man’s insurance contract; the amounts, circumstances and choice are therefore those reported in this public testimony, no more. Source: LEGEND, “Forces spéciales françaises : 150 otages libérés, les récits inédits des 3 plus grandes missions”, 1 July 2026, approximately 2 h 06 into the programme.

The arithmetic alone gives a sense of the choice described: €514,000 ÷ €2,500 = 205.6 months of the stated monthly pay, and 205.6 ÷ 12 ≈ 17.13 years. At the remuneration mentioned in the interview, the amount therefore represented more than seventeen years of monthly pay, without accounting for inflation, future promotions, taxation or other components of remuneration. According to the testimony, the man’s response was that one does not refuse the honour of fighting for one’s country.

Who would I be to condemn a man who, after three wounds, a near-death experience and a family to support, chose the €514,000? Nobody. Such a man would already have given France infinitely more than the vast majority of us. That is exactly why the opposite decision, if events occurred as recounted, strikes me as extraordinary. In a world where we calculate every salary rise, every mortgage payment, every pension point and every euro of assets, here is a man who reportedly judged the possibility of returning to serve his country to be worth more than the equivalent of seventeen years of the pay mentioned.

The story also leads to a difficult question: what does a soldier feel when he accepts the risk of dying for France while, like any other citizen, he may personally disagree with economic, industrial, diplomatic or social decisions made by those who govern the country he protects? Institutionally the answer must be unequivocal: a political disagreement is never for the soldier to settle by force of arms. Article L. 4121-2 of the Defence Code recognises servicemen’s freedom of political opinion while regulating its expression through the duties attached to military status. Articles 15 and 20 of the Constitution make the President of the Republic commander-in-chief of the armed forces and provide that the Government determines and conducts national policy and disposes of the armed forces. Subordination of military force to legitimate civilian authority is one of democracy’s fundamental safeguards.

Precisely because the soldier obeys legitimate democratic authority, the responsibility borne by that authority is all the greater. How can a country ask some of its citizens to accept the ultimate sacrifice if those who decide their deployment give part of the population the impression that they do not protect with comparable determination our industry, sovereignty, technologies, economic independence, public finances or national cohesion? Defending France sometimes requires the courage to risk one’s life. Governing it should require, in another register, moral and political responsibility proportionate to what can be demanded 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 if he personally considers that some public policies weaken that same Nation? What passes through an analyst’s mind when he identifies an economic interference operation at the same time as an industrial capability he considers strategic disappears? His personal opinion cannot become clandestine political action, and thankfully so. An intelligence officer serves the republican State; he does not become its arbiter. In his life as a citizen, he retains what remains available to all of us, within the constraints of his status: to think, to vote and to express himself lawfully. Serving the Nation perhaps requires precisely that ability to distinguish France, which outlasts governments, from those who temporarily administer it. To those women and men, to servicemen on operations and to all those who carry wounds in body or mind that we will never see, my gratitude remains profound 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 battlefields, and I refuse to instrumentalise them politically by pretending they would all share my opinions if they were alive today. That would be unworthy. They died under different regimes, in different wars and for different causes, some celebrated by history and others judged today with much greater severity. But whatever the historical and political debates, the individual sacrifice remains: behind a date printed in a schoolbook there was always a human being.

That man was often very young. He had a mother, sometimes a wife or fiancée, perhaps children, perhaps a letter in a 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 carried out the orders he had received, or simply because when everything collapsed around him he refused to abandon the man fighting beside him. I think of those who died in 1870, in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945; of Resistance fighters and Free French forces; of those who fought in Indochina, Algeria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Sahel and so many operations whose names many citizens no longer even know.

A nearly unbearable thought follows: if they could look at the country for which they died, what would they think of us? I do not know their answer and above all have no right to speak in their name. Some would probably hold views of France completely opposed to mine. But we at least have a duty to ask whether what we collectively make of this country is worthy of the price so many others paid before us. Respect for the dead does not consist in artificially recruiting them into contemporary political battles. Perhaps it begins by never forgetting that what we now consider acquired was sometimes paid for with lives.

We, the voters: are we really innocent?

That leaves the most uncomfortable question: our own responsibility. By continually pointing at “politicians”, we sometimes forget that democracy also gives us a share of sovereignty and therefore a share of responsibility. There is a brutal saying that a people gets the leaders it deserves. I do not use it to demean anyone; I use it because of the difficult question underneath it. If the people are sovereign when they choose, can they later declare themselves entirely foreign to the consequences of those choices?

CEVIPOF’s Political Trust Barometer published in February 2026 offers a striking picture. In France, 82% of respondents still considered democracy a good system of government, while only 20% trusted the National Assembly and 15% political parties. The same work reports that 76% considered political leaders “rather corrupt”. That 76% is a measure of perception; it is obviously not the proportion of elected officials convicted of corruption. Source: CEVIPOF, Sciences Po, Political Trust Barometer, wave 17, February 2026.

The survey also found that 43% considered that nothing advances in a democracy and that less democracy and more efficiency were needed; 36% approved the idea of a strong leader who would not have to concern himself with Parliament and elections; and 20% would favour the military running the country. These figures do not mean that France is about to become authoritarian tomorrow morning. They do show that a sizeable share of the population is beginning to oppose democracy and effectiveness, which should worry precisely those who want democracy to survive.

This is at the heart of my book Les limites de la démocratie. I develop two simple concepts there: the “filter”, meaning a regime’s ability to bring sufficiently capable leaders to power, and the “switch”, meaning its ability to remove them peacefully when they fail. The book is not a call to abolish democracy. It asks how democracy can be preserved when a democratic system can itself repeatedly generate choices that weaken the country. A detailed presentation is available on Delta-Sierra: Les limites de la démocratie. One question summarises part of the problem: is democracy a principle for living together, or a suicidal pact under which a people must accept its destruction provided that destruction has been voted for?

This does not mean that a minority should overthrow by force a majority whose choice it dislikes. It means only that a decision does not miraculously become rational because it received more ballots. A majority can be wrong, favour immediate benefits over future costs, demand ever more expenditure while refusing the taxes required to finance it, want lower debt while opposing every saving that affects its own interests. When we simultaneously demand more services, lower taxes, greater redistribution, no saving that touches us and less debt, we create a predictable political incentive: promise today what helps win an election and postpone the cost until tomorrow.

The politician who exploits that temptation bears immense responsibility. But voters who reward it cannot always regard themselves as completely unrelated to the result. Popular sovereignty cannot mean that the people are fully sovereign on election day and absolutely innocent as soon as the consequences appear. This does not make every citizen personally responsible for every public decision. It means that an adult democracy also requires some responsibility from those who choose.

When staying ceases to be self-evident

For a long time I chose to stay and act. To vote, persuade, write, publish, create an association, put forward proposals, petition institutions and go before the courts when necessary: I believed, and still believe, in the power of these civic paths. My time in political life grew from the conviction that even modest individual action can move an idea or improve a decision. I met brilliant, cultivated, honest and extraordinarily committed people, and I refuse to erase them from my memory. I also encountered smaller ambitions: the post sought for itself, the office preferred to the mission, the absolute moral standard imposed on opponents and the suddenly much more nuanced standard when it must apply to one’s own side.

Violence, however, is not an answer 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 regulation and a bomb does not rebuild industry. The recovery I hope for must remain democratic, constitutional and republican. Other people choose to live with the system: they pay, adapt, consider that its advantages still outweigh its defects and judge the overall social contract acceptable. Millions of French people live that way, and their choice is as legitimate as mine.

There remains another decision, quieter than revolution but intimately radical: to leave. To leave because a human life cannot be stretched indefinitely; because one no longer wants to wait another twenty years to discover whether the country will finally move in the hoped-for direction; because one rejects violence but no longer wants to devote an entire existence to constantly fighting a system in which one no longer believes. Then come concrete acts: selling what can be sold, closing what must be closed, organising one’s life, packing cases, embracing the people one loves and looking elsewhere for what one no longer manages to build here. I now understand that decision profoundly, not because it is the only respectable choice, but because I finally understand what can lead a person or a family that far.

Hope can also become a prison

A line from The Matrix Reloaded has stayed with me for years: hope is described by the Architect as at once the source of humanity’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. The film was released in 2003. I will not use a work of fiction as an economic argument, but the idea resonates with me because hope genuinely has been an immense force in my own life.

Hope pushed me into politics, into writing, investment and CAMPING LA RESSOURCE, and made me believe that at my own level, through books, articles, projects, videos and commitments, I could contribute something to a larger effort. Without hope, we build nothing. Nobody invests years in a project while convinced it will fail, writes thousands of pages while believing nobody will ever use them, or commits to public life while believing in advance that no improvement is possible.

But hope can also become a prison when it persuades us continually to postpone our own life. We wait for one more election, then another government, another reform, another promise of simplification, a budget that will finally balance “in a few years”, another plan for hospitals, security or industry. Each time we tell ourselves that perhaps this time will be different, perhaps the long-awaited change is finally beginning, and hope gives us the strength to wait again. Yet while we wait, one thing never stops: life. The years pass. Our parents age. We age. Some projects become harder and some possibilities disappear.

We do not have an unlimited number of decades. That is why one thought now seems almost brutally true to me: I still hope for France, but I no longer agree to put my own existence on hold until that hope is fulfilled. This does not mean ceasing to wish for the country’s recovery. It means that at some point a human being may decide not to index the rest of his life to a national reform whose arrival he cannot know will be in five years, twenty years or never.

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

When I look at the blue, white and red, I do not see only a State, a government or an administration. I see history, my parents, those who died, the mountains I have walked, the houses I restored, the assets I tried to build, the campsite I still dream of creating and the memories of an entire life. But I also see a State I trust less spontaneously when it tells me the next expenditure will repair what the previous ones did not. I see a tax administration capable of using artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in my property while public debt exceeds €3.5 trillion. I see a healthcare system to which we devote hundreds of billions while sometimes learning that a specialist appointment is months away. I see a body of regulation that the Senate itself measures in tens of millions of words. I see a majority of highly qualified graduates surveyed by Ipsos considering working abroad. And now, above all, I see my own parents with their suitcases packed.

I nevertheless refuse to say that France is doomed. It still has extraordinary engineers, researchers, scientists, workers, craftspeople, entrepreneurs, farmers, soldiers, police officers, gendarmes, healthcare workers, passionate teachers and civil servants who perform their duties with an admirable sense of public service. Our country lacks neither intelligence, courage nor human resources. What it too often lacks, in my view, is a lasting ability to choose, prioritise, arbitrate, simplify, sanction failure and accept an elementary truth: a real reform necessarily causes someone to lose something. As long as we want to reform only what affects our neighbour, nothing sufficiently deep will change.

I dream neither of a country without a State, nor of a society without solidarity, nor of a France without taxation. On the contrary, I would like to recover a State that is powerful where its power is irreplaceable, solidarity robust enough to catch those whom life knocks down without exhausting those who finance it, and taxation whose necessity a taxpayer can understand without feeling that he alone must always account for himself. Nor do I want to weaken democracy. I would like us to trust it enough to examine its own weaknesses lucidly before its failures give others the pretext to offer something infinitely worse.

One request seems almost elementary: stop automatically making people who leave feel guilty. Departure does not mean they love France less than those who remain. Some have simply ceased to believe they can build the life they want there; others have decided that the time remaining to them is too precious to wait indefinitely for an improvement always hoped for and continually postponed. My own parents left. I regret it deeply because they are my parents, because I love them and because no economic or political argument makes distance more pleasant. But I understand them just as deeply.

Perhaps the most serious signal for a country is not that one citizen decides to leave. The real alarm sounds when love of country is no longer enough to retain someone who spent years still 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 question will never become the question of millions more French people. Avoiding it requires abandoning the old habit of wanting to reform everything that does not touch us personally. Those in power must answer for what they decide; voters must look squarely at the consequences of the choices they reward; legitimate beneficiaries of a system cannot forget the resources needed to finance it; each of us must accept that an economy can one day reach our own interest and that an additional service always has a price. Saving democracy also requires enough confidence in it to examine its weaknesses without mistaking lucidity for an attack on the democratic principle itself.

And perhaps I must acknowledge something harder still. From the first lines I have tried to distinguish France from the French State, my country from its governments, the Nation from Bercy, the tax administration, regulations and successive policies. Intellectually that distinction remains correct: a country more than a thousand years old cannot be reduced to a government, an administration, a budget or a tax audit. But with every passing year the exercise costs me more. The State, taxation and political decisions cease to be abstractions when they enter our work, projects, assets, healthcare, security and ability to build a future. After repeated confrontations with what I regard as dysfunctions of the French State, and with what I see as a lawful but morally excessive taking of the fruit of labour, it sometimes becomes terribly difficult to keep my anger within the boundaries of the State and prevent it spilling over onto France itself. That may be what frightens me most: not ceasing to love my country, but having to make an ever greater effort to protect that love from the anger inspired by those who administer it.

My country, my beautiful country, country of Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte and 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 at what I think we are doing to you. It is also why I now understand those who, after hoping, waiting, working, paying, building and enduring, one day finally leave.

David Salvan, Coutansouze, Allier

🇫🇷 It is not our role to be spectators of decline. It is our role to change course democratically, before markets or the street do it in our place.

In echo

“Farewell my France... You are no longer the France 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 every kind of trafficking, unemployment, Islamism, polygamy, laxity, permissiveness and the broken family... Farewell my France reduced to a state of emergency, my deconstructed France at war with itself. I nevertheless want to remain optimistic and believe in your awakening. But who will save you?”

Presentation text published by Éditions du Rocher for Marcel Bigeard’s Adieu ma France, 2006.

There remains, finally, this definition of “inaptocracy”, reproduced here as a political aphorism:

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