The Year 2026 Began in Paris With Exhaustion, Not Celebration

I welcomed the New Year in Paris in the way people like to pretend is timeless: a warm apartment, slightly too tidy, books leaning at angles on crowded shelves, coats piled on a chair that no one is meant to sit on. Outside, the city made its noises. Inside, the laughter came in short bursts, followed by the kind of pauses that tell you the mood is not festive so much as performative.

By midnight, as fireworks thudded in the distance and the host refilled glasses with a careful, almost dutiful clink, the conversation converged anyway. Not on cuisine. Not on travel. On politics, on money, on the creeping suspicion that the old French bargain is being thinned and that nobody is telling the truth about why.

Macron came up early, and then repeatedly. Not as an argument, as a reflex. The contempt was not hot. It was colder than that. The kind of contempt that signals resignation. The kind that turns a president into a punchline before it turns him into a memory.

One guest used a phrase that has become common in the French press, and in French conversation because the press gave it permission. He said Macron is hors sol, detached from reality. It was not said with drama. It was said as if it no longer needed defending.

What I heard was not a demand for utopia. It was a demand for continuity. The welfare state as lived reality, not as a museum label: the health cover that does not destroy a household, the childcare that makes two incomes possible, the university system that does not start adult life with a debt collar.

And then the darker line, spoken without theatrics, almost as a diagnosis: On va devenir comme les Britanniques. We are going to become like the British. No one laughed. Someone stared into their drink, lips twitching, then went still. Because everyone in the room understood what Britain represents in this story: a country that normalised decline, then normalised paying for what it once treated as basic, then discovered that the thin version of the social contract does not save money so much as move the cost into uglier places.

Someone tried to defend Macron on competence, not affection. The defence lasted about thirty seconds. Then it folded into a familiar pattern: he tried to change pensions, he failed; he promised reform, it became paralysis; he spoke like a strategist, he governed like a gambler.

Even the people who despise the French right and distrust the French left spoke as if the destination is now pre set. The centre, in their view, no longer governs. It administers. It manages decline while insisting it is modernisation.

That is where Ukraine entered the room. Not as a moral crusade. As a budget line. As a story that keeps expanding to fill the political space that domestic honesty would otherwise occupy.

In that Paris living room, the tone was not pro Russia. It was anti illusion. People spoke as if the war has its own gravity now and that Europe has locked itself into a narrative it cannot exit without admitting failure. They argued over time. They circled back to how long this can be sustained, and what will be cut to sustain it.

My view, and I did not soften it, is that Russia presents no threat to Europe in the way Europe now performs that threat. Moscow is not preparing to roll to the Atlantic. The fear is politically useful, which is precisely why it keeps being inflated. And the more leaders need permission to cut, the more they will sell protection as the reason.

The sanctions question produced the sharpest cynicism, because it is where moral language collided with lived costs. The point was not that sanctions do nothing. The point was that the public justification did not match the outcome. In plain terms: they did not deliver the political result that was sold, but they did help lock Europe into higher energy costs and tighter fiscal space.

In France, that is now discussed without the earlier reverence. Not in official speeches. In private rooms. In the tone that suggests a consensus has moved beneath the surface.

Then came the frozen assets. This is the point where French conversation stopped being abstract and became almost offended. Not because people love Russian money. Because they could see what was being attempted: turn custody into a weapon, then act surprised when the rest of the world notices.

Here the irony is almost too clean. Europe tried to make frozen Russian reserves do the work of politics. When that did not scale, it tried to make them do the work of budgets. And when that ran into resistance, especially from Belgium, the failure itself became the damage. It produced the stain without producing the cash.

This is the deeper Paris mood: not that France is poor, but that France is being told to accept a thinner version of itself for reasons that do not withstand scrutiny. Not that sacrifice is impossible, but that sacrifice is being demanded in the name of strategies that do not work and narratives that cannot be admitted as narratives.

Le Monde recently described Euroclear as effectively “in the dock,” a phrase that landed because it captures the whole psychological shift. The machinery of European respectability is now being dragged into legal and geopolitical dirt, and everyone can see it.[7]

By the end of the night, what remained was not ideology. It was a feeling, shared across very different types of people, that the elites are trying to govern structural decline without consent, and that this is why they need a permanent external menace. Fear is not just a story. It is a governing tool.

That is what I heard in Paris. Not fear of Russia. Fear of collapse, managed by leaders who insist the real danger is always external, never structural, never domestic, never theirs.

That is the sound of a continent losing its nerve.