Observation, Action, Happiness

"Frenchwomen, Frenchmen, my dear compatriots. The hour is grave. I have not come tonight to reassure you. I have come to tell you the truth, as I have understood it since my inauguration, and which I had not measured before sitting in this place."

I was on Sparrow Island that night, in my office. The lamp had been on for an hour already, although the night still hesitated above the lake. Outside, the water retained that cold clarity of overly long days. Inside, the screen awaited.

Eva's message had arrived the day before. Three lines, not one more.

— General policy speech by Mr. François Rousseau tomorrow, eight o'clock. Not a simple exercise this time. Watch it live, wherever you are.

Since then, I hadn't managed to think of anything else.

I dreaded this moment, and I was glad that my two children were home that night. First, because I wanted to share it with them. Then, because, in the face of the unknown, a father's first instinct is often to keep his children close.

Thomas had come home from school in the late afternoon, his science notebook clutched against him. He had settled on the office sofa without asking a question. At first, he had opened his notebook on his knees, as if he intended to work. Then nothing more. Not a page turned. Not a word. His fingers remained still on the paper, his gaze lost somewhere between the lines and the window.

Élise, my eldest, had just landed her first job as a biological systems engineer. Her team was developing plants capable of better resisting droughts and naturally restoring soils. She often said that the future of technology would not be made of more metal, but of more living things. She no longer lived at home but returned regularly, as if this cabin remained her home port. That night, she was there too, silent, her eyes fixed on the screen.

Since the election, the country revolved around the same question without ever really confronting it. Was Cobot a tool, a counselor, a threat, a chance? Everyone had their word, their camp, their fear. But the only question that mattered remained suspended, intact: where did this government want to take France?

François Rousseau had not been made by the system. He knew neither its oldest codes nor its most well-learned cautions. Perhaps it was precisely someone like him who was needed to say what others had spent their lives avoiding.

At precisely eight o'clock, the image shifted.

Rousseau was alone, sitting at a table, facing the camera. No overwhelming flag, no solemn decor to distract attention. Only his face, his hands placed in front of him, and this almost too controlled stillness.

His voice had changed. Lower. More muffled. It did not seek to convince. It already seemed to bear the weight of what it was going to say.

I understood from the first seconds that something was amiss.

Rousseau was not quite looking at the lens.

It was subtle. A barely perceptible shift. At times, his eyes would drop slightly, just below the camera, before returning to us. Not long enough to betray reading. Too often to be a coincidence.

A screen, no doubt.

Small. Discreet. Placed off-screen.

Invisible to all those who were content to listen.

He paused.

His eyelids barely moved. His gaze dropped for a fraction of a second.

Then he resumed.

— France lacks neither resources nor talents. It never has. What has collapsed is deeper: it is the conviction that tomorrow could be better than today.

It is this lost conviction that is read, year after year, in our birth rate. The children who are not born today will not contribute tomorrow. They will not care for our elders the day after tomorrow. They will not build the schools, hospitals, businesses we will need.

Our administrations exhaust themselves in reforming without ever really succeeding. Our governments, one after the other, have ended up spending more time in recent decades putting out fires than building something that lasts. And you have naturally stopped believing in promises because for too long, promises no longer bind those who make them.

This is not a formula. It is the real state of the country. We can no longer hide it from ourselves.

I noted almost the entire sentence.

I was used to political back-to-school speeches that, to prepare the ground for upcoming reforms, begin by painting a bleak picture. The more catastrophic the starting point seems, the easier it will be to claim the progress made. But this one did not seem calculated. It was an admission, delivered live and in a calm voice, before nearly thirty million French people.

And, at that moment, my suspicion became a certainty.

These words had not only been prepared. They had been calculated. Ordered somewhere off-screen, then placed in François Rousseau's mouth with almost indecent precision. Cobot was there, without appearing. In the rhythm. In the sequences. In this way of laying out the disaster without raising the tone.

Rousseau was reading them. But he made them his own.

— I will speak to you about the two perils that threaten, more than any other, the future of our children.

His eyes again brushed the bottom of the image.

A fraction of a second.

Then he resumed, without the slightest hesitation.

— The first peril that threatens us is debt.

At the end of the first quarter, public debt in the Maastricht sense stood at 3,536.1 billion euros. Related to the gross domestic product, it represents 117.5% of our national wealth¹. A year earlier, it amounted to 3,345.4 billion euros, or 113.9% of GDP².

It is therefore growing faster than our wealth itself.

The public deficit, meanwhile, exceeds 5% of GDP. In the year 2000, our debt represented 60% of our national wealth³. Since 2008, our deficit has widened almost without interruption, year after year. And if we do nothing, if we continue as before, this debt could reach 127% of our wealth by 2030. It could even reach 203% by 2050⁴.

These are not abstract figures.

It is a future already spent. It is a debt that will be paid by children who are not yet born, for choices to which they will never have consented.

These figures, Rousseau did not know by heart.

No one knows by heart such a succession of amounts, percentages, deadlines. No one pronounces them with this clarity without having them in front of their eyes.

He was reading them. Word for word.

On this small screen that the camera refused to show.

And behind this screen, in silence, stood the true intelligence of the speech.

— I know what this figure represents, concretely, for each of you.

Fewer hospitals that stand. Fewer renovated schools. Less margin, tomorrow, to respond to the next crisis.

It is also something else. It is our best researchers, our engineers, our brightest talents, trained by the French Republic thanks to everyone's effort, who go elsewhere to seek the laboratories, teams, and funding that we are no longer able to offer them.

A nation that indebts itself without limit is no longer quite a free nation.

It borrows its freedom, year after year, from those who do not yet have the right to vote. And, for lack of means, it lets go those who could have built its future.

He paused longer.

This time, his eyes left the camera for two whole seconds. Two seconds, on screen, is almost an absence.

Then he raised his head.

When his voice resumed, it had a particular clarity. As if he had just found his words. Or as if he had just received them.

— The second peril that threatens us is even more serious because it cannot be repaid. It cannot be renegotiated. It cannot be erased by a vote or a law.

I am talking about the disruption of our planet, and the nine limits that the global scientific community has identified as the boundaries of life on Earth.

France has just experienced the hottest June ever recorded since records began in 1947. The afternoons of June 24 and 25 set sad records, with more than 38.5 degrees on average across the entire territory. Also, the night that separated these two days will remain the hottest ever recorded: 21.6 degrees on average, nationwide⁵.

This is not an anomaly.

It is a signal.

Of these nine planetary boundaries, seven have already been crossed.

Climate change. Biodiversity loss. Disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Land-use change. Ocean acidification. Disruption of the freshwater cycle. Introduction of new entities into the biosphere: plastics, pesticides, endocrine disruptors.

Only two have not yet been crossed: ozone layer depletion and increased aerosols in the atmosphere.

These are physical thresholds. And a physical threshold, unlike a budgetary threshold, cannot be renegotiated.

He did not raise his voice.

Perhaps that was the most worrying. He no longer sought to convince. He laid the facts before us, one by one, like objects too heavy to be moved.

— This is the confession I had to make to you.

We have before us a financial debt that mortgages our near future, and an ecological debt that mortgages our future altogether.

The serenity with which Rousseau made this observation reminded me of Benjamin Franklin and his famous phrase: "Nothing is certain except death and taxes." Two centuries later, debt and planetary disruption seemed to have joined the list.

— No government before us has had the courage to put these two realities side by side, in the same sentence, before you.

We must take strong measures. We will do so.

And we will act on both at once because you cannot save a country by ignoring one to address the other.

He paused.

His eyes brushed the screen for a fraction of a second, then he raised his head.

— Here is the course we have set for ourselves.

A simpler state. Health that prevents instead of repairing too late. An economy that creates, that invents, that dares. A country capable of spotting its talents before they become invisible, before they give up, before they leave.

Finances managed with rigor because we must face public spending.

Decisions made, henceforth, within the limits of this planet.

And new indicators to no longer reduce a country's success to its sole gross domestic product. For a country can produce more while making its inhabitants more alone, sicker, or more anxious. True success is not there. After all, the primary mission of a country is not to produce always more, but to allow those who live there to lead as happy a life as possible.

These are the projects we are opening.

Here is where we begin.

His eyes descended again.

Briefly.

But I now saw the movement even before it happened.

— In the face of debt, there is no miracle solution. You do not repay it by looking at it. You repay it by creating more value than we have created in the last twenty years.

This means encouraging, without complex, those who take the risk of entrepreneurship because the jobs of tomorrow will not be born alone. They will be born from laboratories, workshops, businesses, ideas that we will have made possible.

For this, we will reform our labor law.

Its complexity was not born of cynicism. It was born, often, of good intentions piled on top of each other for decades, until it became a burden. A burden for those who hire. A trap, sometimes, for those this law claims to protect.

We will simplify it.

Without giving up the protections that make sense. Without opposing employees to companies. But with this simple conviction: a country that no longer hires soon no longer has the means to protect anyone.

He did not change his tone. Not really.

Yet something in the speech had shifted. He was no longer just talking about repairing. He was talking about choosing.

— In the face of climate, we no longer have the luxury of endless debate.

We will engage in the gradual exit from fossil fuels. We will develop our decarbonized electricity production. And we will make sobriety not a slogan, but a method.

Reuse rather than discard. Renovate buildings that let heat escape in winter and accumulate it in summer. Plant trees in our cities so that the streets stop becoming furnaces. Paint roofs white that absorb the sun.

These are not symbolic gestures. These are concrete decisions.

On the transport side, which alone accounts for 34% of our greenhouse gas emissions⁶, we will make the train more accessible. Rail must no longer be a luxury compared to the plane over medium distances. We will also encourage widespread carpooling, wherever it can replace solitary, costly, and environmentally absurd journeys.

Of course, none of these measures would suffice, on its own, to save the country.

But taken together, applied consistently, on the scale of an entire nation, they can change a trajectory.

There was a silence.

Then this look, one last time, very brief, downward.

Rousseau raised his head to conclude.

— My project is a society where you finally have the information that allows you to judge what we do in your name.

For centuries, we have tried to make power fairer.

Perhaps it is time, now, to make citizens freer."

I remained still for a few seconds.

Then I turned off the set.

The screen went black, but no one moved.

Thomas was sitting exactly as at the beginning of the speech. His notebook closed on his knees. His hands flat on it. He had not turned a page, not crossed his legs, not sought my gaze. All this time, he had watched Rousseau as one watches something one is not yet sure of understanding, but knows is important.

Next to him, Élise kept her arms crossed. She too was staring at the now black screen, but with that concentrated expression I had known since childhood: when an idea came to shake everything she believed was certain, she always started by letting it settle.

Thomas always waited for something to be truly over before speaking.

Carefully, he placed his notebook on the floor.

His eyes remained fixed on the black screen.

Then he asked:

— But dad... if we fix all that, will people be happy?

Élise smiled at her brother.

— Maybe you can't make someone happy in their place. But you can build a country where it's easier to be.

I did not answer.

Not right away.

On the corner of the desk, Lia slept, curled against a pile of files, indifferent to debt, climate, promises, governments. One of her ears twitched in her sleep, then nothing more.

I lowered my eyes to my notes.

The two debts, side by side. The planetary limits. The figures. The measures. Rousseau's words lined up on the page with an almost too neat precision. Yet I already knew that it was not that which would remain.

What would remain was the first sentence.

I have not come tonight to reassure you.

It had been launched without precaution before thirty million people, and something, since then, could no longer be put back in its place. It was no longer a program we were asked to judge. It was not even a government that had to be approved or fought.

It was a way of living together that had just been reopened, before our eyes.

I finally raised my head.

Thomas was still waiting. Without impatience. As if, deep down, he already knew that adults did not always have answers.

Élise, she, was finally looking at me. Not to have me settle the debate, but as if she was trying to know if I believed in it.

— I don't know, I finally said.

My voice seemed lower than expected.

— That's exactly what we're going to find out.

Thomas nodded, once. Not like a reassured child. Rather like someone who accepts an uncomfortable truth because it at least has the merit of not lying.

Élise gave a slight smile.

— Then, for once, maybe we'll measure something other than growth.

No one answered.

Outside, the night had finally fallen over the lake.

The following days would answer for us.

The first measures. The first decisions. The first angers.

And very soon, we would know if what had just been promised could stand anywhere other than in front of a camera.