October 17, 2026, will go down in history less for what it was than for what it will make possible. In fact, social unrest never makes sense on its own. 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1968, 2005, 2023: the same anger…
In 2002 (24 years ago), the broad outlines of the world in 2026 could be discerned from gradual trends; yet we failed to take them into account at all. Today, too, we can foresee what might happen in 24 years…
It sometimes happens in the history of nations that the privileged come to understand that what they regard as rights is nothing more than the remnant of a doomed order, and that it is better to renounce them in a…
There are moments when everything seems lost and when there would be every reason to despair: the climate appears irreversibly disrupted; biodiversity is disappearing at breakneck speed; AI seems out of control. War is at Europe’s borders. In France, the…
In France, people often speak—often lightly—about reducing public debt. No one truly grasps how necessary this is or how difficult it will be. If nothing is done, the public debt—which stands at 117.6% of GDP—will continue to rise and will…
For at least a century, one word has constantly recurred in the rhetoric of all those preparing to become dictators: the word “system,” used to designate their enemies. Before coming to power, Mussolini lambasted and denounced the Italian “sistema politico,”…
We mistakenly reason in terms of the whole and the average, without realizing that what really matters lies in the extremes and their frequency. Yet today, “standard deviations”—which measure the dispersion of data around the mean—are increasing in nearly every…
Listening to the debates in France today—which, for the moment, resemble those that preceded the election of a village mayor in 1920 more than a presidential campaign in 2026—I get the feeling that too few candidates understand, or are willing…
If we want to avoid stumbling over an obstacle, it’s best to walk with our eyes open. Yet when we suggest adopting the same attitude toward the future, we’re labeled pessimists or Cassandras—and all too often discredited. Today more than…
