Message from a French friend who has seen socialism.
I am writing this to you with affection.
Not to lecture you.
To keep you from repeating our suicide.
In the 1970s, France still made people dream.
The Trente Glorieuses were not a slogan.
They were a machine.
We were building the Concorde.
We had nuclear power.
We had an industry.
We had a pride in making things.
We still had a place in the century.
A Frenchman and an American produced roughly the same thing.
In 1980: $12,565 per head in our country.
$12,575 in yours.
Almost a draw.
We were in the game.
Then we handed over the keys to the house to two people: François Mitterrand and Jacques Attali.
Attali is somewhat the French George Soros.
Less the checkbook.
More the orchestration.
Adviser glued to Mitterrand for ten years.
Sherpa in the shadows.
Theorist of world government, of “nomads,” of governance without a people.
The man who loves humanity in general and treats the nation as a relic.
Mitterrand, for his part, installed the software.
1981.
Nationalization of five major industrial groups.
Nationalization of thirty-six banks, plus Paribas and Suez.
Retirement at 60.
A 39-hour week paid as 40.
A fifth week of paid vacation.
Wealth tax.
The Auroux laws.
A rise in the minimum wage.
Hiring of civil servants.
Stimulus through spending.
Within a few months, the state became France’s default software.
The franc was devalued three times.
Capital fled.
In 1983, they pretended to step back. The “austerity turn.”
But the software was already engraved.
You could change prime ministers.
You no longer changed operating systems.
Then, the long descent.
Not a spectacular crash.
Worse.
A sagging.
Year after year.
Government after government.
Even the right never uninstalled the program.
It administered it.
It dressed it up.
It called it something else.
The reflex stayed the same: a problem appears, you create a benefit, a regulation, a committee, a tax.
You no longer create wealth.
You redistribute it.
Until there is hardly anything left to redistribute.
Look at the figure.
In 1980, we were on equal footing with you.
In 2025, French GDP per capita is $48,986.
Yours is $90,027.
You produce almost twice as much per person as we do.
Even in purchasing-power parity, the decoupling is clear.
The average income of a French adult was worth 85% of American income in 1982.
70% in 2018.
We were 13th in the world in 1980.
24th today.
This is not a cyclical gap.
It is a civilizational decoupling.
Forty-five years of socialist software.
And the gravest part is not the figure.
It is the spirit.
We are no longer capable of creating companies.
You have 700 unicorns.
We have about thirty.
And a quarter of those that remain have already moved their headquarters to you.
Everyone has become a mental communist.
Not with a flag.
With a reflex.
People no longer know how an economy works.
They believe wealth is a stock sitting on a table, that it would be enough to slice it better.
They no longer see the flow.
They no longer see the risk.
They no longer see the person who creates before sharing.
It is not that they are wicked.
It is colder than that.
They received a software.
Often out of generosity.
Often because the word justice sounded better than the word responsibility.
The result, today, has a face.
A character like Macron.
Completely out of touch.
Elegant.
Empty.
A product of the same pipeline.
The same floor above the country.
Since 2017, French public debt has gone from €2,281 billion to €3,345 billion.
A thousand billion in debt.
Without having created any form of value to match it.
Just the software that keeps running.
We borrow.
We redistribute.
We communicate.
We call it a startup nation while the builders leave.
France did not build a Concorde.
It built an addition.
My American friends.
You are the United States.
You are still the hope of the West.
You are the lungs of the West.
Do not fall.
Ban socialism.
Not only the word.
The software.
The one that promises justice and manufactures dependence.
The one that speaks in the name of the people and ends up despising them.
The one that today marries something else: Islamo-leftism.
That alliance of a guilty state and an identity that does not want to assimilate.
The same contempt for reality.
The same need for an abstract victim so as not to have to hear the neighbor.
We already ran the experiment for you.
The result is before your eyes.
Keep your builders.
Keep your mental borders.
Keep the right to create.
Keep your keys.
The 21st century will belong to those who build.
Not to those who divide up what they no longer have.
Yours sincerely,
a Frenchman who has seen.
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