France can no longer avoid an honest debate about welfare dependency. Solidarity is necessary in any civilized nation. But solidarity and permanent dependence are not the same thing. When public assistance becomes structurally detached from a credible path back to autonomy, work and responsibility, it no longer protects society: it weakens it.
This article is an open letter to political leaders. It argues that the issue is not the existence of social assistance itself, but the absence of a coherent doctrine. Too many schemes have been layered over time without strategic review, without clear conditions, and without a serious long-term evaluation of incentives, side effects and budgetary sustainability.
A system built by accumulation
Successive governments have often added new benefits or new exceptions to respond to urgency, electoral pressure or media emotion. The result is a fragmented architecture that ordinary citizens barely understand and that public administrations themselves struggle to explain clearly. This creates opacity, waste and mistrust.
Those who finance the system increasingly feel that the effort is endless and badly supervised. Those who depend on it can feel trapped in a mechanism that manages poverty rather than helping people leave it behind. In both cases, confidence erodes.
The key principle: solidarity must lead back to autonomy
The purpose of assistance should be to protect people during hardship while restoring, whenever possible, the conditions of self-sufficiency. That means better targeting, stronger support toward employment or training, clearer rights and duties, and a refusal to normalize long-term inactivity when work remains possible.
A sustainable welfare state should defend the vulnerable, not organize social immobility. It should not punish effort by making re-entry into work administratively or financially irrational.
What should be changed?
France should simplify the system, make benefits more transparent, fight fraud consistently, and reorient part of public spending toward pathways back to work, entrepreneurship and local economic activity. Public solidarity must remain strong, but it must again serve a national objective: dignity through protection, and autonomy through responsibility.
The central question is therefore simple: do we want a welfare state that rescues people from difficulty, or one that slowly installs dependence as a permanent social horizon?