Part IV - The reform agenda for recovered sovereignty
15 - Overseas territories, sovereignty and national continuity
For too long, France has governed as if its national reality were limited to the Hexagon. This reductive vision has progressively marginalized the overseas territories, which are nonetheless constitutive of the French nation. Public action there has been intermittent, defensive, often belated, almost always insufficient. The result has been a widely shared feeling of abandonment by the central State, compounded by a growing distrust toward institutions perceived as distant, indifferent, or powerless.
This abandonment is not only social or economic. It is political, strategic, and symbolic. By allowing durable imbalances to take hold - exorbitant cost of living, degraded infrastructure, insecurity, extreme logistical dependencies - the State has allowed the belief to form that certain territories counted less than others. Yet a nation that hierarchizes its territories always ends up weakening its own sovereignty.
The refoundation imposes a clear break: France must assume all its territories, or renounce claiming to be sovereign. The foundation of this refoundation rests on a simple but too often betrayed principle: the absolute equality of all French people, everywhere on the territory. There are no peripheral French people, no secondary identities, no adjusted citizenships. An inhabitant of Mayotte, Wallis-and-Futuna, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon, Saint-Martin, or Saint-Barthélemy is the strict equal of a Réunionnais, a Guianese, a Corsican, a Breton, or a Parisian.
This equality is not only legal: it is political and material. It requires equitable access to public services with quantified convergence objectives in health, education, and energy, real convergence of energy prices and essential goods, effective protection of public order, and a visible, constant, and assumed presence of the State.
Special statuses
Special statuses, when they sustain fragmentation, confusion of responsibilities, and inequality of treatment, must be democratically re-examined. For inhabited territories currently operating under a particular regime - New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis-and-Futuna - the question of statutory evolution is put to a referendum, within a clear national legal framework, not as a constraint but as a clear proposition: full and complete equality within the nation, with the reciprocal commitments that this implies.
Local monitoring - transitional and measurable
To guarantee that measures are adapted and effective, each overseas territory has temporary participation bodies. Local consultative councils composed of 10 to 15 elected representatives identify priority needs and propose recommendations to the central government: they automatically dissolve once the quantifiable equality objectives are reached. Regular citizen audits every two to three years signal dysfunctions and measure progress toward real equality. Monitoring commissions composed exclusively of civil servants and local experts follow the effective implementation of services and infrastructures according to metropolitan standards: they too automatically dissolve once the territory reaches the defined objectives - equality in access to services, convergence of essential prices, security, and presence of the State. These structures are transitional, operational, and measurable, without permanent decision-making power. Their sole objective is to allow the State to act effectively and to guarantee the material and political equality of the territories.
Mayotte - the example of an assumed collapse
Mayotte today constitutes one of the most glaring examples of the collapse of State authority. The massive illegal migratory flows from the Comoros no longer fall under a simple migratory phenomenon: it is a political and strategic instrumentalization. The persistent incapacity to control maritime borders has disorganized Mahorais society, saturated public services, endangered the security of inhabitants, and discredited the word of the State.
The response is clear, immediate, and assumed. The protection of national territory cannot be negotiated. The permanent deployment of a French Navy squadron around Mayotte, supported by aerial assets and reinforced surveillance capabilities, is carried out within the national and international legal framework and becomes the norm for as long as the situation requires. This is not a symbolic gesture: it is the normal exercise of sovereignty. In parallel, the Comoros, which indirectly benefit from this situation while contesting French sovereignty over Mayotte, cannot continue to act without consequence. Proportionate and legally framed diplomatic and economic sanctions apply for as long as organized departures and political complacency persist. Sovereignty is only credible if it is defended.
New Caledonia and Polynesia - sovereignty is not negotiable
In New Caledonia, institutional ambiguities have opened a space for foreign interference. Powers such as China, and more indirectly Australia, have exploited the political, economic, and identity fragilities to advance their strategic interests in the Pacific. The Caledonian question is therefore not only internal or memorial: it has become a major geopolitical stake. Allowing grey areas of sovereignty to take hold means accepting that other powers dictate the future of French territories. French sovereignty is not negotiable. Internal political debates are legitimate, but they are inscribed within a clear framework, secured and assumed by the State: reinforced military, diplomatic, economic, and administrative presence.
French Polynesia, by its strategic position, falls under the same requirement. France cannot claim to be an Indo-Pacific power while leaving its territories exposed to external pressures without a clear operational and legal framework.
Assuming the world's largest maritime domain
Thanks to its overseas territories, France possesses the largest exclusive maritime domain in the world. This reality confers an immense responsibility: a navy capable of ensuring the effective protection of these spaces, the fight against illegal fishing, the securing of maritime routes, and the prevention of any attempt at appropriation or intrusion. Maritime sovereignty is exercised in compliance with international law but without concession on national integrity. The fleet is sized for reality, not for display, and every violation or intrusion will be neutralized according to clearly established national and international procedures.
A refoundation through equality, not through forgetting
Refounding the relationship between France and its overseas territories is neither imposing nor conceding. It is restoring a broken national coherence. French power, its strategic depth, its cultural diversity, and its international credibility rest in large part on these territories. France will only be fully sovereign when it assumes all its territories as one and the same nation, without periphery or exclusive center. Placing every French person on an equal footing, wherever they live, with concrete and measurable means for public services, energy, education, and security, is not an abstract ideal: it is a material, political, and strategic condition for the exercise of sovereignty.