David Lisnard and Romain Marsily on France’s AI challenge, Digi Mart USA News (France): Facing artificial intelligence, David Lisnard and Romain Marsily defend an ambition that goes beyond the technological question: preserving human freedom, regaining national sovereignty and restoring France’s sense of the future. The article was first published in JDNews.
The essay opens with the image of a young man walking in an exoskeleton under his father’s emotional gaze. The scene took place on May 27 at Wandercraft, the Paris-based robotics company that makes the device.
The walker is named Oscar, and his father, Jean-Louis Constanza, is the co-founder of the company, a pioneer in medical exoskeletons.
Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes and a presidential candidate, co-wrote the short essay with Romain Marsily, managing director of his party, Nouvelle Énergie. They offer a fresh reading of Magnifica humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, published 135 years to the day after Rerum novarum, the text by his predecessor Leo XIII that launched the Church’s social doctrine.
Following the pope, they ask: “What type of human is a technological civilization producing?” The danger, they answer, lies less in a machine reasoning like us than in “the man who would give up thinking because the machine does it for him.”
Against the old nightmare of the rebellious robot, the authors set a more insidious peril: a machine dangerous through “excess of service,” which spares us effort, boredom and inquiry until it creates a “comfortable dependence.” Jean-Louis Constanza proposes adding three commandments to Asimov’s famous laws of robotics: “You will push your human to move every day, to learn every day, to socialize every day.” Against transhumanism, which would treat old age and death as manufacturing defects, the authors stress that “man is not a biological draft awaiting industrial improvement.” They refuse to let machines make the dead speak, because mourning is “the painful learning of the truth of absence.”
The encyclical also draws on two well-known biblical figures: Babel, the tower of forced unity, and Nehemiah, who rebuilt Jerusalem by assigning each person the section of wall facing their own home. As non-dogmatic liberals, Lisnard and Marsily draw from this a defense of subsidiarity against technocracy, which they see as most typified by the French administrative state.
They equally reject entrusting the arbitration of facts to “a ministry of Truth whose officials would be algorithms” or to the Arcom regulator, whose overreach they criticize. In their view, fighting disinformation does not justify an Orwellian “thought police.”
Work, they argue, is not merely a cost that machines would erase: it teaches effort and constancy, and there is no leisure without labor. Facing robots, they reject universal basic income and taxation of machines, slogans that they say prepare “our next servitudes.” To avoid this, France must overcome its twin weaknesses of productive powerlessness and regulatory excess.
Sinking into protectionism or relying on late regulation would amount to organizing our own dependence. If France does not take the turn toward AI and robotics, they warn, subjugation under Chinese and American control will likely become permanent.
Sovereignty, they write, is not a “campaign marketing concept without imagination”; it depends on factories, electricity, engineers and capital, not incantations or “long-winded grand plans.” They put forward concrete proposals: replace the precautionary principle in the Constitution with a principle of responsibility; require reversibility in public procurement; and capture the “switching layer,” the routers that distribute queries among models and through which data flows.
France, with abundant, low-carbon and inexpensive nuclear energy, holds a considerable advantage. Lisnard and Marsily praise Operation Prometheus, a project of Gaullist scale to give France an AI laboratory capable of rivaling OpenAI or Anthropic within three years.
The estimated cost is 620 billion euros, including about 130 billion euros of public money, or 1.5% of GDP per year. An AI that is “human, free and sovereign,” the two men summarize, “is a national recovery program.”
As Charles Gorintin, founding adviser to Mistral AI, writes in the new journal Civilisation: “Retreating means condemning yourself to Japan’s situation in 1853 facing Commodore Perry. Cannons always end up winning over swords.” The book’s final pages stress an idea that still resists the machine: the will.
“The machine can do a lot. But it cannot want in our place.” A few months before the election, the authors say, this amounts to a statement of principles.
