Part IV - The reform agenda for recovered sovereignty
1 - State, administration, and public efficiency
Sovereignty is not decreed solely through political or strategic choices: it is exercised daily through the State and its administration. When the administrative apparatus becomes illegible, fragmented, or detached from the national interest, the authority of the State mechanically weakens. Restoring public efficiency is therefore an essential condition of any lasting refoundation.
Restoration of state authority
The authority of the State does not reside in the multiplication of norms or structures, but in its capacity to decide, to enforce its decisions, and to assume responsibility for them. A weak State is not a discreet State, it is a State that talks a great deal, acts little, and is no longer respected.
Cette perte d’autorité est en partie le résultat d’une haute administration qui, depuis plusieurs décennies, a accompagné, et parfois activement soutenu, le dessaisissement de l’État de ses prérogatives essentielles. Une partie significative des hauts fonctionnaires du régime actuel s’est rendue complice de la dilution de la souveraineté nationale : transfert de compétences sans mandat populaire, application zélée de normes extérieures, contournement répété de la volonté exprimée par le peuple.
This is not a blanket indictment, but a political observation: when an administration ceases to serve the nation in order to serve a system, careers, or external interests, it betrays its raison d'être. Restoring the authority of the State therefore implies a comprehensive review of responsibilities, trajectories, and loyalties at the top of the administrative apparatus, under the direct supervision of an ad hoc strategic committee integrated into the Planning Commission.
Role of the administration in a political transition
In a phase of institutional transition, the administration plays a central role: it ensures the continuity of the State while the political structures evolve. It is not meant to govern, but to loyally execute the decisions taken within the legal framework.
This neutrality cannot however be a pretext for inertia, passive resistance, or administrative sabotage. Loyalty to the nation takes precedence over loyalty to a dying regime, an ideology, or international commitments that have become obsolete. Senior civil servants called to occupy strategic positions will have to demonstrate their explicit adherence to the principle of restored national sovereignty. Any blockage or passive resistance must be considered high treason and sanctioned as such.
Implementation will be gradual: certain sensitive positions will be prioritized, while regular audits and evaluations will guarantee loyalty and efficiency before any extension of the measures to the entire administration. Structural eliminations will only be effective once responsibilities and means have been completely transferred, ensuring the continuity of the State.
Simplification and legibility of public action
French public action suffers from a proliferation of intermediary structures, commissions, councils, high committees, and various bodies, commonly known as comités Théodule. Their accumulation has produced a costly, opaque, and often ineffective system.
A comprehensive national audit is required in order to precisely identify:
- who does what,
- with what means,
- for what measurable results.
Every structure will be subject to a rigorous evaluation, weighing its concrete effects against its cost to the community. The objective is assumed: to drastically reduce their number, eliminate duplicates, dissolve useless bodies, and sanction those that have received public funds without producing tangible effects.
Structures whose activity clearly falls under ideological promotion, militant communication, or the division of the social body must be abolished without ambiguity. These reorganizations will be steered in coordination with the Planning Commission and the relevant ministries, in order to ensure the continuity of essential missions.
Territorial reorganization and genuine accountability
The administrative fragmentation of the territory constitutes one of the main factors of public inefficiency. The stacking of levels (communes, communities of communes, metropolises, departments, regions, euro-regions, European Union) has produced an illegible system where responsibilities are duplicated, diluted, and where no one is genuinely accountable for results.
Communities of communes, metropolises, and regions will be abolished. These structures have progressively transformed certain mayors of medium-sized or large cities into feudal lords with considerably extended powers and revenues, but without clear political responsibility or genuine control. The more levels are added, the more interlocutors are multiplied, the more means are dispersed, and the less effective public action becomes.
The territorial architecture will be deliberately recentered around three legible levels:
- the commune, cell of genuine local democracy and proximate state functions: urban planning, civil registry, municipal police, communal roads, public spaces, etc.
- the department, level of territorial coherence for living environment and personal services: early childhood (nurseries), primary school, middle schools, extracurricular activities, initial vocational training, social action, school transport, sports facilities, culture, departmental roads
- the State, guarantor of national unity, equality, and sovereignty (through the departmental prefect): high school, continuing vocational training and retraining, health (including hospitals), national security, justice, cultural influence
The competences and means of the abolished levels will be redistributed to one of these three levels, according to the nature of the missions concerned. No transfer will be carried out without prior clarification of responsibilities.
The department is not an autonomous collectivity: it is a deconcentrated operational arm of the State. It has no own fiscal resources. Its budget is allocated by the State according to the real needs of the territory, coordinated by the Planning Commission. The elected departmental council is abolished or reduced to a consultative role without decision-making power: reporting of field information, identification of local needs, without own budget or executive power.
Les euro-régions et toute référence institutionnelle à l’Union européenne disparaissent de l’organigramme administratif, la sortie de l’UE étant supposée comme préalable et intégrée au calendrier de transition des chantiers stratégiques.
Paris
Paris is not a city like any other. Capital of the State, seat of the national institutions, symbol of the continuity of the French nation for centuries, it cannot be governed like an ordinary commune subject to the vagaries of local elections and the partisan logic of a municipal team.
The Paris city hall will be abolished. Paris will be administered directly by the State via a prefect of Paris with extended powers, appointed by the government, revocable, and fully accountable for his actions before the nation. This is not an innovation: Paris functioned without an elected mayor for nearly a century and a half, from 1795 to 1977. The capital was then better managed, its heritage better maintained, the chain of responsibility more legible. The creation of the Paris city hall in 1977 progressively subjected the management of the national capital to the partisan and electoral logic that has produced the current confusion.
Confusion of responsibilities is today the rule in Paris. Take the example of the Eiffel Tower: the City of Paris owns it, the SETE (Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel) operates it, the State oversees it patrimonially as a listed historic monument. Result: painting works postponed year after year, structural problems reported without response, and three actors endlessly passing responsibility to one another. In the sovereign vision, the answer is simple: it is the State that is responsible, without intermediary.
Parisian heritage belongs to all French people, not to Parisians alone. The Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Invalides, the Panthéon, the Palais-Royal, the Champs-Élysées, the Eiffel Tower: these monuments incarnate national continuity and the influence of France in the world. Entrusting them to a city hall elected on local considerations is an incoherence that restored sovereignty cannot maintain.
The chain of command will finally be legible. Police, urban planning, major works, heritage maintenance: one decision, one responsible party, one authority. The prefect of Paris acts within the framework of national policies defined by the government, under the supervision of the Planning Commission for structuring investments, and evaluated by the HCEP.
The abolition of the city hall does not deprive Parisians of all democratic recourse. A revocatory citizen-initiated referendum is open to Parisian residents alone, according to a mechanism parallel to the national RICs: an overall signature threshold across the entire city, doubled by a minimum floor per arrondissement to prevent the densest arrondissements from dominating the process. If both conditions are met, the referendum is triggered and the Parisian people decide. This mechanism guarantees that the prefect answers both upward - to the government that appointed him - and downward - to the inhabitants who can revoke him. Appointed by the State, revocable by the people: this is the definition of a public official in a sovereign regime.
Dissolution of corporatist orders
Professional orders (order of physicians, order of lawyers, order of architects, order of pharmacists, order of chartered accountants, order of notaries, order of nurses) are dissolved. These structures are indefinitely co-opted oligarchies, which exercise a delegation of public service without genuine democratic control. They set the rules of access to their profession, discipline their members, and defend their sectoral interests under cover of the general interest.
Their legitimate missions are transferred to the reformed Senate: definition of rules of access to professions, standards of competence and ethics, professional discipline, protection of the public. These rules are henceforth defined by representatives who are anchored and independent from the corporations, sitting within the reformed Senate and accountable to it. They are no longer entrusted to private structures benefiting from a delegation of public service without democratic control.
Institutional loyalty to the nation
The neutrality of the administration does not mean indifference. It implies strict loyalty to the nation, its laws, and its legitimate institutions. No body, no administration, no public organism can consider itself autonomous with respect to the national interest. This loyalty excludes any ideological capture of the state apparatus. The administration is in the service of the French people as a whole, not of a supranational project, an imported doctrine, or particular interests.
Duty of exemplarity of elected officials and civil servants
The exemplarity of public officials constitutes a fundamental principle for guaranteeing confidence, transparency, and the continuity of State action. In this perspective, access to positions of responsibility, whether elected officials, senior civil servants, or members of consultative and oversight committees, is strictly framed in order to avoid any conflict of interest or external influence liable to harm national sovereignty.
Toute personne ayant exercé des fonctions à responsabilité dans une entreprise de grande taille ou stratégique se voit interdite d’accéder à un poste à responsabilité dans le secteur public. Cette disposition, conçue pour prévenir les conflits d’intérêts et les litiges potentiels, garantit que les décisions publiques ne seront pas influencées par des liens financiers ou opérationnels préexistants dans le privé. L’État exige ainsi que ses responsables soient pleinement déconnectés des enjeux économiques personnels qui pourraient compromettre leur impartialité.
An additional criterion concerns international trajectories. Individuals having worked durably abroad (beyond simple temporary missions, internships, or occasional studies) cannot occupy public positions of responsibility. This restriction responds to several imperatives: avoiding a disconnection from national reality, preventing any suspicion of indulgence toward foreign interests, and reducing the risks of pressures or reversals linked to commitments or ties outside the territory. National sovereignty cannot be entrusted to individuals whose loyalty could be called into question by their prolonged experiences outside the country. These individuals may nevertheless occupy non-sensitive or advisory positions, according to their competences.
The question of nationality completes this framework of exemplarity. No position of responsibility in defense, no electoral mandate, and no high-level public position can be held by a person holding dual nationality. Nationality is here assimilated to allegiance: in the event of a conflict of interest or critical situation, it is imperative that the official have free hands and a fully clear mind. This requirement reinforces the coherence of the State and public confidence in its institutions, by ensuring that every strategic decision is taken by a citizen exclusively dedicated to France.
Exemplarity also implies total transparency. Every public official must make a complete declaration of their financial and professional interests upon taking office, then annually. This obligation allows the identification and prevention of conflicts of interest before they arise. Added to this is the full declaration of patrimony upon taking office, then annually as well, strictly consistent with the information transmitted to the tax authorities in order to guarantee the coherence and accuracy of public information and to prevent any drift or illicit enrichment.
Finally, additional guarantees ensure the integrity of officials. The criminal record must be clean to access any public function, and any formal investigation entails an immediate stepping back until the person is definitively cleared. These measures do not aim to set aside competence, but to preserve the credibility, authority, and sovereignty of the State by entrusting responsibilities to individuals who are irreproachable on the legal, financial, and moral level. A rigorous competitive examination or evaluation of technical and managerial competences will be required for any key position in order to guarantee the performance of the State.
Thus, all of these rules create a rigorous but fair framework: it protects the nation, reinforces public confidence in its institutions, and ensures that those who exercise power are deeply rooted in French life and values, entirely free from conflicts of interest or external dependencies.
Campaign financing and prohibition of private lobbying
Campaign financing is public and exclusive. No donation from any natural or legal person is authorized: no company, no association, no think tank, no foundation. Genuine equality between candidates requires it; a candidate without a private financing network has the same means as a candidate supported by powerful interests. The HCEP verifies the entirety of campaign accounts. Any irregular financing entails the invalidation of the mandate and criminal prosecution of the candidate and the financers.
Any private contact between an elected official in office and a representative of organized interests is prohibited. No discreet lunch, no private meeting, no direct communication outside a formal framework. The only authorized route is the public hearing before the competent parliamentary commission: broadcast live, accessible to all citizens, recorded and archived. Any representative of interests who wants to influence a public decision does so in public, before the elected officials and before the citizens. Any undeclared contact constitutes a serious fault entailing the invalidation of the mandate of the elected official concerned and the permanent ban from operating for the lobbying structure.
Strategic State rather than managerial State
Finally, the State must exit its role as a constrained manager to once again become a strategic State. Governing does not consist in administering the existing, but in orienting, planning, and anticipating. A strategic State sets clear priorities, concentrates its means on the essential, and accepts renouncing the superfluous. It assumes clear choices, including when they disrupt administrative habits or entrenched rents. The strategic planning of the State will be directly articulated with the sovereignty reform agenda items (industry, energy, agriculture, defense, digital) and supervised by the Planning Commission, guaranteeing coherence and efficiency.
C’est à cette condition que l’administration retrouvera son sens et sa légitimité : être l’outil discipliné, compétent et loyal d’un État souverain, capable d’agir, de décider et de durer.