Valérie Pécresse already has a very long political career behind her. She is the perfect embodiment of the classic French political elite and as such often criticized as “the product of the system.”

The closer one gets to the source of policy, the less explicitly things are expressed, so I did not expect to find so direct a formulation in print. All the same, it is now worth digging into what is really intended by this conceptual guiding light of ‘resilience.’

To a certain extent, Aupetit embodies for the French faithful the inability (or unwillingness) of the Church hierarchy to offer proper answers to larger problems.

Pre-pandemic, I flew at least one long-haul flight a month and regularly clocked 150,000 air miles annually for the previous twenty years. It was novel for my wife to see me ‘in a flap’ over simple things like checking in online and fretting over the contents of my bags.