Part I - The findings
2 - France is no longer sovereign
For several decades, France has progressively lost control of its essential decision-making levers. This loss was not sudden: it results from a chain of choices, transfers, and renunciations whose effects have accumulated to produce the current situation: a state that governs within a framework it did not choose, on subjects it no longer controls, with margins set for it elsewhere.
The monetary turning point of 1973
The first major abandonment of sovereignty is also the least known to the general public. The law of January 3, 1973, known as the Pompidou-Giscard law, prohibited the Bank of France from directly financing the public Treasury. Before this law, the state financed itself sovereignly: this is how the post-war reconstruction, the Trente Glorieuses, the civilian and military nuclear program, and the major national infrastructures had been financed. After 1973, the state must borrow on financial markets to fund its expenditures. It no longer decides sovereignly on the volume and cost of its financing, it negotiates them with private creditors whose interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the nation. Public debt, until then near zero as a proportion of GDP, begins its continuous rise that has never stopped.
The political turning point of 1983
Ten years later, the demonstration is made publicly. In 1981, François Mitterrand is elected on a voluntarist program of support for the national economy: demand-side stimulus, nationalizations, reduction of working hours. As early as 1983, the government is forced to abandon this program under the combined pressure of financial markets and European commitments. This is what would come to be called the "tournant de la rigueur" - the austerity turn. The political meaning is clear: a government elected on a clear mandate cannot implement it because the essential economic levers escape it. This is not the last time this mechanism repeats itself.
The violation of the 2005 referendum
On May 29, 2005, the French are consulted by referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty (ECT). They reject it by 54.68%. The popular mandate is unambiguous. Three years later, in February 2008, the Treaty of Lisbon - a near-identical text to the rejected ECT - is ratified through parliamentary procedure without the people being consulted. The sovereign decision of the French people is deliberately circumvented. This is not a procedural error, it is a deliberate choice by those who decided that the popular will would not apply in European matters.
Deindustrialization - the human and territorial cost
The consequences of these successive abandonments of sovereignty can be read in industrial figures. In 1980, France had 5.5 million industrial jobs, representing approximately 19-20% of total employment. Today it has fewer than 3 million, representing approximately 10% of total employment. The share of industry in French GDP fell from 24% in the 1980s to 13-14% today. This decline is not the sign of an automation that would have increased productivity while reducing headcount: in that case, the share of GDP would remain stable or grow. It is the sign of a net destruction of the French industrial sector, a direct consequence of free trade imposed without sovereign protection within a European framework that France no longer controls.
These are entire territories that bear the marks, from the former industrial zones of the North, to Lorraine, through the Seine valley, reconverted into economic wastelands that thirty years of urban renewal policies have failed to absorb. These are generations of skilled workers whose expertise disappeared with the factories. These are mid-sized cities that never recovered their activity after the closure of their last industries.
Direct fiscal constraint - the fuel case
The loss of sovereignty is not only economic or institutional, it is fiscal and concrete. European directive 2006/112/EC sets the VAT rules applicable in all member states. Fuels - petrol, diesel, heating oil - do not appear on the list of products eligible for reduced rates. Direct consequence: France cannot go below 15% VAT on fuels, whatever its political will. In times of soaring prices at the pump, a government wishing to relieve its citizens by significantly lowering VAT on petrol cannot do so: not because it does not want to, but because European law forbids it. This is not a matter of political orientation - right or left - all French governments run up against the same constraint. Fiscal sovereignty over a product as central as fuel has been ceded, and it can only be recovered by exiting the European framework.
The assessment
France, today, can no longer be considered fully sovereign. It has not controlled its currency since 2002, nor its monetary policy since 1998. It no longer controls its trade policy since the European treaties. It cannot sovereignly finance its investments since 1973. It cannot apply the VAT rate it deems appropriate on essential products.
The examples developed here are economic: because the figures are precise, the mechanisms documented, the consequences measurable. But the same assessment could be drawn on other essential levers. On immigration - France no longer decides alone who enters its territory, the Schengen agreements, the case law of the ECHR, and the Dublin rules being imposed on it without its being able to modify them sovereignly. On law - the European Court of Human Rights can invalidate laws democratically voted by the French Parliament without the latter having any sovereign recourse. On diplomacy - its commitments within NATO condition its military and strategic choices independently of the will of successive governments.
The loss of sovereignty is transversal, it affects all essential levers simultaneously. This is precisely what the indivisibility of sovereignty means, which the following chapter develops.