A Plan to Reinvent Paris, and a Judicial System That Failed a Child
France's Haut-Commissariat proposes abolishing the Métropole du Grand Paris, while the murder of 11-year-old Lyhanna exposes a judiciary drowning in backlogs.
👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.
If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.
This week
🏙️A new Paris metropole
🏛️Lyhanna affair causes institutional shame
Bernadette Chirac has passed away
🏙️A new Paris metropole
So, to start the week off: France’s Haut-Commissariat à la Stratégie et au Plan, headed by former Europe minister Clément Beaune, published a policy paper on 4 June arguing that Paris needs a radical institutional overhaul to match its physical reality. The core argument: the périphérique remains a 19th-century administrative wall, and the city-region’s governance is a dysfunctional mess.
The indictment of the current setup is damning.
The Métropole du Grand Paris, created in 2016, has failed on almost every front: a 2023 Cour des comptes report found structural dysfunction, near-zero financial redistribution, and a housing plan that was voted through but never implemented. Seven layers of government (Paris, arrondissements, suburban communes, EPTs, MGP, Region, State) produce paralysis rather than policy, and have failed to serve their citizens.
The proposal is sweeping: abolish the MGP, the three inner-ring departments (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne) and their communes, and merge everything with Paris into a single “Ville du Grand Paris” of 6.9 million people. In their place: 40 named “districts” of roughly 170,000 people each, with identitarian, geographically evocative names rather than numbers, a directly elected Mayor of Greater Paris, and a Grand Paris Council. The Île-de-France region would survive intact for the outer ring.
The fiscal rationale is blunt: Paris and Hauts-de-Seine have a GDP per capita above €100,000, nearly three times the national average, while neighbouring Seine-Saint-Denis has roughly half Paris’s tax base despite far greater social needs. A unified collectivité would force structural redistribution rather than relying on the weak, voluntary equalisation mechanisms that exist today. At its core, this is a forced solution to the Seine-Saint-Denis problem, one that successive governments have acknowledged and none have fixed.
The paper is careful to frame the reform as decentralising, not centralising: districts would gain powers currently held by departments (social welfare, schools, planning pre-authorisation). That framing matters politically. Past attempts to rationalise the Paris city-region have collapsed precisely because suburban mayors read “simplification” as annexation by Paris, and fought back hard enough to water the whole thing down. The district model, with named units, elected councils, and meaningful competences, is designed to pre-empt that objection.
Whether it succeeds is another question. The political ask is enormous: it would effectively end dozens of mayoralties and redraw the map of the most watched piece of political real estate in France ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
It is also worth asking who is really behind this. Clement Beaune is not a neutral technocrat. He was Macron’s Europe minister for several years, ran unsuccessfully in the 2026 Paris municipal election, and is widely seen as positioning himself for the already crowded 2027 presidential election.
Publishing a huge and divisive political proposal like this under the HCSP banner gives the idea institutional cover and Beaune a political barrier to protect himself, but we have to be clear that this reads as much as a political manifesto as a policy document. The author has skin in this game.
However, this context does not invalidate the arguments: the scale of the dysfunction is real, and the international comparison is sobering.
Paris, at 105 km², is dwarfed by Greater London at 1,572 km², Rome at 1,287 km², and Moscow at 2,561 km², and this huge gap is not just a curiosity but an indictment of Paris being left behind.
It goes to the heart of why Paris consistently punches below its weight in global city rankings despite being the EU’s largest metropolitan economy. London’s Greater London Authority, created in 2000 as part of Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, and is the closest model for what Beaune is proposing.
It took a strong political, reformist will, a referendum, and a decade of bedding in, but it is seen as a genuine success and as something that not only improved citizens’ lives but also strengthened London’s power as a city.
Yet despite the clear upsides, none of this discussion is on the French calendar yet, and understandably, many elected officials are unhappy about losing their positions.
Beaune’s paper is explicitly a pre-election trial balloon, not a government proposal, but it has arrived following Grand Paris’ governance being prominently featured in the 2026 municipal campaign, and at a time when the Grand Paris Express megaproject is finally and visibly connecting the banlieues to each other.
The infrastructure is starting to make the institutional dysfunction harder to ignore; we just need the political will to make it happen.
🏛️Lyhanna affair causes institutional shame
The death of an 11-year-old girl in the Gers has opened one of the most damaging institutional crises the French judiciary has faced in years. What the facts reveal is not a single catastrophic decision but a system that processed a child's life through bureaucratic routine and produced nothing.
The political fallout is now moving faster than any inspection report can contain, and the death of Lyhanna has done what few cases manage in French public life: producing a moment of genuine, cross-party institutional shame.
Who was Lyhanna?
Lyhanna was an 11-year-old schoolgirl from Fleurance, a town of 6,000 in the Gers, southwest France. She disappeared on 29 May after CCTV footage showed her getting into a car driven by Jérôme B., a 41-year-old local man.
Her body was found on 5 June in an abandoned agricultural silo in Puycasquier, around 15 kilometres away.
Cause of death has not yet been established, but the primary suspect, Jérôme B., has been placed under formal investigation and denies any involvement in her death. He refused to answer any questions at his first hearing before the investigating judge.
The suspect had been the subject of four complaints and two reports to authorities before Lyhanna's disappearance, including a rape complaint filed in August 2025 that was transferred between prosecutors' offices and never acted upon.
He was never placed in police custody.
Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin appeared on TF1 this past Friday to acknowledge that the judicial system had failed to protect the child, to present his personal apologies to her family and to the French public, and to admit that the handling of prior complaints against the suspect amounted to “an immense failure.”
That a serving garde des sceaux delivered that kind of on-camera mea culpa, unprompted by a parliamentary inquiry or a court ruling, is very telling about the severity of the failure, and the shock that has taken over the discussion of this tragic event.
The facts are damaging precisely because they are procedural rather than exceptional, and because Darmanin had issued a circular in January specifically prioritising sexual violence complaints involving children. For reasons nobody can explain, this was not acted upon.
There are, he acknowledged, three million complaints currently backlogged in French police stations and gendarmeries, of which 70,000 involve rape or sexual assault.
The system did not fail Lyhanna through malice. It failed her through routine and bureaucratic backlog. That distinction matters less to the politicians already shaping the case into a campaign argument. Bruno Retailleau, LR president and increasingly the right’s most credible presidential contender, moved quickly.
His proposal for a disciplinary court to replace the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature’s (CSM) sanctioning function is intended both to provide stronger punishments and also to resonate with the public.
The disciplinary court would be a citizens’ panel chosen by lot, sitting alongside magistrates and independent figures, chaired by a non-magistrate, open to referrals from citizens, hierarchical superiors, and the justice minister.
Whether the proposal is serious judicial reform or scaffolding for a presidential platform, it has landed at a moment when the institutional defence of judicial independence sounds, to many ears, like corporate self-protection.
The magistracy’s representative bodies have pushed back. The union warned against scapegoating before the inspection reports are finalised, and highlighted that there are currently “four times fewer prosecutors in France than in Europe”.
Both the national conference of prosecutors general and the national conference of public prosecutors reminded ministers in a joint statement that they had already flagged the backlogs as alarming, and that prioritisation of domestic violence and drugs cases was itself creating delays elsewhere.
That pushback is legitimate. It is also, for now, losing the argument in the court of public opinion.
President Emmanuel Macron, speaking from his trip in Montenegro, condemned the “unacceptable” situation and said he would not hear arguments about resources. "It is clear that there has been a dysfunction”
The inspection report is due in a fortnight, and whatever it finds, the political damage to the government and trust in the judiciary has already been done, and the reform pressure, whatever form it eventually takes, is not going away.
It’s why Darmanin has urgently summoned all public prosecutors in Paris to a meeting on Monday morning to get to the bottom of the failures.
A “marche blanche” will take place this Sunday, with 5,000 attendees expected.
Bernadette Chirac has passed away
To finish the week: Bernadette Chirac, former First Lady of France and one of the important figures in Fifth Republic political history, died peacefully on the evening of Friday, 6 June, surrounded by her family. She was 93.
Born Bernadette Chodron de Courcel in Paris in 1933, into a family of military men, diplomats and industrialists ennobled under the Second Empire, she met Jacques Chirac at Sciences Po in 1951 and married him in 1956.
Bernadette was never simply a political spouse, but was a successful politicienne in her own right. Elected to the Corrèze general council in 1979, she held her seat for 36 years, building an independent political base that her husband had originally engineered to keep her occupied, and which she turned into something he came to admire.
She was also president of the Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris for over two decades, making the annual Pièces Jaunes campaign a fixture of French public life. Her role and her work was shaped in large part by the suffering of her elder daughter Laurence, who battled severe anorexia for much of her life before dying in 2016.
Sharp, often caustic, and entirely uninterested in playing the decorative role the Élysée and other politicians often expected of her, she outlived her husband by nearly seven years.
And after the death of former President Jacques Chirac in September 2019, Bernadette did not appear in public again.
Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:
And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:
