The distant sovereign function is not a subsidy. It is water every day, a sea that is a border, a hospital that operates, a ship that arrives in time. The rest — the rent, the speech, the communications plan — is not the trade of the Empire.
Indian Ocean
Mayotte
Mayotte does not need yet another communications plan. She needs water every day, a border that truly exists, and a cadastre that at last allows building.
One multiplies desalination units rather than waiting for a single plant blocked in court. One stops the leaks that swallow nearly a third of the water produced. One adds reservoirs, and one couples each station to its own energy.
The sea around the island becomes a border again. Surveillance is permanent, people are saved, and impunity ceases for those who turn the 101st département into a back door. One builds prisons and a hospital on the spot. One titles the land, so that the roof, the pipe and credit cease to be fictions. Reconstruction after Chido serves infrastructure first, before speeches.
Indian Ocean
Réunion
Réunion must cease to be an island that waits for the ship. She becomes again the French bolt of the Indian Ocean. One sizes there a true naval and air hub, able to maintain ships on the spot, to watch the southern route and to receive regional freight without sending everything through Europe.
Electricity leaves fuel oil by an assumed mix: hydro, solar, biomass, storage, and a small nuclear plant if the figures hold. The island must stand alone when the sea closes. One reopens the small lines to freight. One develops aquaculture and farming that feed the Réunionnais first. One stops paying twice for imported food, when the land and the lagoon are there.
Amazonia
Guiana
Guiana is not a forgotten fringe. She is France in Amazonia, the space gateway of Europe, and a border of three hundred kilometres that one has too long pretended to keep.
One at last gives Dégrad-des-Cannes the size of a strategic harbour. One legalises and traces gold, so that the clandestine ceases to be more profitable than the legal. Illegal gold mining is treated as organised crime. Kourou must no longer burn fuel oil to send rockets: the energy of the Space Centre becomes the first industrial works of the territory.
The roads, the river, the sensors and light aviation make the forest readable. The space base is no longer a Parisian enclave set on the mangrove. It draws workshops, training and Guianese subcontracting.
Antilles
Guadeloupe and Martinique
In the Antilles, the 'dear cost of living' is not a geographical curse. It is a rent of importation, an octroi de mer badly calibrated, and harbours too weak for the war the narcotics traffickers are already waging.
One breaks the monopolies. One reforms the octroi de mer so as to tax imported superfluity, and not the local producer. The army, the hospitals and the canteens buy first what grows and what is fished here. The geothermal of Bouillante is no longer an exception: one makes of it a know-how exportable in the Antillean arc.
The harbours of Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre become dual: trade by day, naval support by night. Sargassum ceases to be a plague of which one complains. One treats it, one valorises it, or one stops pretending.
Antilles
Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy
These two islands live under the cyclone and under the border. One links them by electricity so as to extinguish the emergency diesels. One holds a shelter harbour able to receive and to repair. One rebuilds to a single cyclone standard, quick to instruct and impossible to botch.
In Saint-Martin, the French part ceases to be the valve of the Dutch part. Controls bear on persons, identities and goods. Saint-Barthélemy does not need to be taught luxury. She needs the State to do its only trade: to protect the island when the sky and the sea break loose.
Pacific
New Caledonia
Nouméa is the first overseas harbour of France and the sentinel of the Pacific. One does not manage it as a sub-prefecture after a riot. Public order is no longer negotiable at every crisis: the forces are pre-positioned, justice is swift, impunity ceases.
Nickel is processed on the spot if it holds without an eternal subsidy. If not, one stops paying a rent that enriches neither the Caillou nor the mainland. The EEZ and the seabed remain French, whatever internal status the Caledonians choose. The water, the floor and the sky are not sold cheap.
The island leaves coal and fuel oil by solar, wind and hydroelectricity. If the grid requires it, a dispatchable and sovereign power takes over.
Pacific
French Polynesia
Polynesia is an archipelago-country. What holds her is not a speech on autonomy: it is fresh water on the atoll, the cable that does not break, and a ship able to arrive in time.
One installs desalination where the lagoon no longer suffices, and one feeds it with the sun. One redunds the submarine cables. Papeete becomes again a naval base that maintains, patrols and radiates in the Pacific. The fishery of the EEZ feeds the archipelagos first.
Fuel oil ceases to be a Polynesian fatality. Every inhabited island has its mix, its stock, and the capacity to hold three weeks alone.
Sovereignty
Wallis and Futuna, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, the TAAF
The small territories are not footnotes. In Wallis and Futuna, the continuity of life holds by the runway, the generating set, the water and the doctor. One guarantees them before inventing a master plan.
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, facing the winds and the cold sea, shifts to wind and storage, so as to cease importing to the last drop.
The French Southern and Antarctic Lands are not a postcard for researchers. They are a title of sovereignty, an EEZ to be enforced, and a French science in the Southern Ocean. One holds there the fishery, the station and the flag — or one admits that one no longer has a sea.
The water, the floor and the sky are not sold cheap. Who holds Mayotte, Kourou, Nouméa and the Southern Lands still holds a France. Who abandons them has only a hexagon left, and soon no sea.