Editorial. France’s Debt Is Not a Slip-Up. It Is the Lubricant.

Debt is not a derailment. It is the lubricant.

We are invited to treat it as a disease, an accident, a failure of management, a “whatever it takes” that simply went wrong.

A convenient illusion.French debt is not grit in the machinery. It belongs to the machinery; in truth, it is the machinery.

For half a century at least it has been the oil that keeps the gears from seizing. Without it the country would have to choose. The country has chosen not to choose.

Since 1974, not a single balanced budget. Not one. Every shock — oil, the 1981 stimulus, 2008, 2020 — merely added another layer.Even the years of growth were never used to settle accounts, or even to reduce them. Stimulus at the bottom of the cycle; amnesia at the top.

Hemiplegic Keynesianism, as I have often written.The formula is exact. We live above what we produce, invest beyond what we save, protect more than we adapt, and redistribute what we no longer quite possess.

And we borrow the difference in order to last politically.€3,536 billion. 117.5 per cent of GDP. A deficit around 5 per cent. Public spending at 57 per cent.

The Dead grows faster than the Living. It is Ionesco: Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It. Only this time we do not get rid of it. We feed it. We nourish the corpse and grow accustomed to the smell.

The Left dreams of cancelling the central bank’s claims as one might tear up a scrap of paper. Accounting naivety. Debt is not paper. It is the name given to a durable discrepancy: between what France manufactures and what it consumes, between what it invests and what it promises, between the market it tolerates and the market it refuses. Between what the technocrats pretend to achieve and the mediocrity they actually deliver.

Cancelling the claim does not reopen a factory, does not revive productivity within sectors, does not rebalance manufacturing against the glut of services, and does not reconcile a country with profit, competition, or the penalties of failure. It merely shifts the cost and sustains the fiction of a hidden treasure — that myth so dear to the Left.

The irony is that the system needs to be denounced in order to endure. Denunciation is vice paying homage to virtue. So long as we cry scandal, we may continue. We talk, we take offence, we commission reports from the Cour des comptes, we promise “control,” and the present arrangement — this shameful yet silent mutualisation with Germany — survives until its limits.

Berlin may have no wish to enforce. French transgression suits Germany. An indebted, vociferous and geopolitically diminished France is no longer a serious rival.While Paris gnaws its bone on credit, Berlin pursues an older priority: recovering a status that defeat had taken from it. France in the kennel, Macron who “keeps quiet” with undoubted talent, the French voice lost in the corridors of Bercy and Brussels: an arrangement with its advantages.

Germany hunts the prey; Macron’s France, meanwhile, chases the shadows of a narcissism still juvenile, yet already rather invasive.

The euro long served German industry. The discipline it implied is one France never truly wished to imitate. And Germany does not necessarily have an interest in demanding it to the end. Macron did not invent the system. He incarnates it. Elected for a productive shift, he has managed the stock. He is in the kennel and he gnaws his bone. At the European level he no longer exists. France still speaks, but its word weighs only as much as its signature on the markets.Its own signature would be worth little if French debts were not countersigned by Germany. Our OAT rates are 50 per cent higher.

The heart of the problem is not technical. It is cultural and historical.

The 1945 compromise — social security, dirigisme, visceral mistrust of “big capital” — has never been liquidated. The market was accepted as a fact, rarely as a principle. We call ourselves liberal for the sake of individual autonomy and reject the market as a mode of allocation. We wanted the voyage on the great globalised ocean without either the means or, quite frankly, the desire. We stepped into the world ring backwards and took a thorough beating.

Without consensus on capitalism, without agreement on globalisation, no supply-side policy can hold. Every reform is a betrayal, every external constraint an aggression.

So we buy civil peace. We buy time. We buy the absence of choice.The Dead continues to devour the Living. Not by cosmic fatality. Because we have grown used to it. Because denouncing the debt allows us not to touch the model that produces it.One day the lubricant will run out. Or the creditor will tire. Or Germany will decide the game is no longer worth the candle. Until then we continue. We take offence. We survive. It is very French. And that is precisely why it lasts.