[ France ] ID and Healtcare Card: a Risky Merger
Mass surveillance is indeed the objective — pursued through means that undermine everyone's security in the process.
At a war council in June 1940, amid the full collapse of French forces under his command, General Weygand made a single intervention — duly recorded in the minutes: an armistice was necessary, he argued, because the State must retain enough security forces to suppress any insurrection. History only repeats itself because the same people remain in power.
The tired refrain of merging the French national identity card with the carte vitale1 refuses to die. Sold under the banner of cutting redtape and cracking down on fraud, the idea was floated as early as 2019 and has since enjoyed the backing of every government — Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier, and Bruno Retailleau, then Interior Minister, all championed it.
This is the public being taken for fools. First, because legally resident foreigners in France are entitled to a carte vitale but not a national identity card — they are not French citizens. There is therefore no logical connection between drawing social benefits and holding French nationality. Far from closing a loophole, this merger would open one: it would create an unlawful breach of equality, since any legal resident — French or not — holds identical social benefit rights. A parallel system would then have to be built just to paper over the contradiction the reform itself created.
Second, the merger is entirely redundant as an anti-fraud tool. The relevant data has nothing to do with the national identity card; it is structured around the social security number assigned to every beneficiary, regardless of nationality. A genuinely effective measure would be to refuse benefit payments to accounts held outside the European Union or the SEPA zone. Those not resident within it would simply be required to open a non-resident bank account. Clean, targeted, and legally coherent — everything this proposal is not.
