The Heart of Rebels Is Now a Home for the Homeless and the Extremists
After almost a year of living in Dubai, I came back to France for a vacation.
And what a pleasure it is — France on vacation. No taxes to navigate, no administrative battles to fight, most locals conveniently away so the particular brand of everyday racism is at a seasonal low. Just pure pleasure and bliss, punctuated by a homeless person on every corner and a quiet, persistent anxiety about your personal safety in every move you make. But away from all sarcasm — and I mean this — I love France. And it is genuinely painful to watch how fast its descent is accelerating.
The country that was once a living monument to culture, civilisation, and rebellion has become something else entirely. It is now, without much exaggeration, a home for the homeless, for extremists on both ends — far right and far left equally unhinged — while the centre barely has a voice or an existence anymore. It is a country of endless fires, conspiracy theories dressed as politics, corruption normalised at every level, and a legal system so layered with laws and sub-laws that justice has become a genuine mission impossible. There is always a loophole. There is always a way out — for the right people.
I spent time in the mountains. And up there, people were living what looked like real life — sun, fresh air, food grown from actual ground, water from actual lakes, drinking and laughing and playing with the uncomplicated joy of people who are, for now, still oblivious. Oblivious to the three laws that were quietly passed while they were busy being alive.
The first: the approval of a surveillance framework — SREN, including expanded AI-assisted monitoring tools — giving the state broader rights to spy on its own citizens digitally. The second: the lifting of restrictions on certain pesticides long banned for their links to cancer, pushed through under agricultural lobbying pressure while environmentalists were still fighting last season's battle. The logic being, presumably, that a population too sick to organise is a population that doesn't revolt. The third: the removal of mandatory GMO labelling from vegetables, fruits, and meat — a fight French citizens and environmental organisations had been waging for over a decade, dismantled in under a month. Laws that couldn't pass for ten years sailed through Parliament in thirty days while people were distracted by heatwaves and survival.
That is not coincidence. That is governance by distraction — and France has perfected it.
What I appreciate, returning after a year away, is the ability to observe without being absorbed. Not because what happens here won't affect me — it will, it already does — but because distance creates a clarity that immersion destroys. You stop being manipulated by the noise and start seeing the pattern underneath it.
And the pattern is this: in one year, with everything that has happened globally, people have shifted — but only selectively and only on the surface. The deeper architecture of French social thinking remains exactly where it was.
People are still Islamophobic in the most reductive, almost impressively stupid way possible — their entire engagement with Islam reduced to two things: the veil and halal meat. Nothing else about one of the world's major religions, its philosophy, its history, its civilisational contributions, interests them in the slightest. They remain comfortably limited inside that particular smallness.
They still find ways to extend forgiveness and context to paedophiles and rapists — provided they are churchgoing, French, and preferably blue-eyed. The moment the accused is Black, Arab, veiled, or curly-haired, forgiveness evaporates entirely and the case becomes symbolic of everything wrong with French society. The standard shifts depending on the face. This is not subtext in France — it is barely even hidden.
They still believe, with genuine conviction, that a two-state solution in the Middle East is viable and reasonable — a position held comfortably from inside a bubble where no bombs fall, where the war is abstract, where the conflict is something that happens to other people on other continents. What they fail to examine is that their own society is already at war — against its own citizens, against its own minorities, against the human rights and dignity they spent centuries loudly claiming to defend. That war, the internal one, deserves far more urgent attention than any position they hold on Middle Eastern geopolitics from the safety of their mountain holidays.
The double standard is, at this point, almost architectural. Built into the foundation of how the country sees itself versus how it actually operates.
So the vacation continues. The performance of family, of unity, of one house with one set of values, continues alongside it. But the gap — between what France presents and what France is, between who these people say they are and how they actually move through the world — is enormous. And sitting here, watching it from the outside for the first time in years, I am genuinely unsure it can ever be fully closed.
Some things, once you see them clearly, cannot be unseen.
And some descents, once they reach a certain speed, cannot be stopped — only witnessed.