France's Sharp Rise in Poverty and the Limits of Repair

France's poverty rate climbed to 16.3% of the population in 2025, a jump of 2.7 percentage points in a single year and the strongest rise in Europe over the past decade, according to figures cited in a Le Monde op-ed by precarity specialist Florian Guyot. This happened even though France devotes one of the highest shares of national wealth to social spending anywhere in the world.

For Guyot, that paradox is not about a lack of resources but about a system built mainly to repair damage after it has occurred. Successive shocks—pandemics, heatwaves, factory closures and urban unrest—have produced a public debate that reaches for simple answers: blaming migrants or condemning capitalism wholesale. He argues that the more insidious simplification is to treat social questions as security problems, such as classifying tenants with unpaid rent as squatters or labelling jobless people as welfare dependents.

His alternative is to move beyond the twentieth-century welfare state toward a 'society of foresight' in which prevention takes priority across all public and private action. The opening argument is economic as much as moral: prevention is cheaper and more effective than repair. He cites James Heckman's work showing that a quality early-childhood programme returns roughly 13.7% per year to society.

How Guyot's 'Society of Prevention' Would Reorder French Social Spending

Why high social spending and rising poverty coexist

Guyot's central claim is that France is spending heavily but on the wrong end of the problem. The op-ed describes a repair-oriented model in which institutions pay for the consequences of school failure, addiction, eviction and poor health instead of preventing them. That is an interpretation rather than a verified accounting, but it directly addresses the paradox of rising poverty alongside high social expenditure.

The Heckman return as a fiscal argument

The piece uses the often-cited Heckman estimate of 13.7% annual return on early-childhood programmes to argue that prevention is not generosity but good management. If such returns are achievable at scale, the implication is that early-childhood investment, eviction-prevention and health-determinant programmes could ultimately reduce the repair costs the state now bears.

The political cost of securitising social policy

Guyot warns that framing vulnerable people as security threats—unpaid tenants as squatters, the unemployed as assisted—avoids the fact that society itself creates precarities. His proposed 'society of foresight' is therefore as much an institutional and political shift as a budgetary one: replacing blame with prevention, and making fraternity a governing principle for the twenty-first century.

What a Prevention-First Agenda Looks Like for French Policymakers

  • Budget for prevention, not just repair. Use the 13.7% annual return cited from James Heckman to make the case for early-childhood spending when competing against late-stage social repair programmes.
  • Change eviction practice. Instead of moving quickly against tenants with unpaid rent, invest in preventing evictions, as Guyot explicitly contrasts the two approaches.
  • Avoid securitised language. Policymakers and local authorities should stop framing housing arrears and unemployment as public-order issues and treat them as social-policy failures.
  • Track France's poverty rate as a policy indicator. The 2025 level of 16.3% and the 2.7-point one-year rise give a concrete benchmark for judging whether future prevention policies are working.