“Is it the role of the Senate to investigate private associations and unsubsidized engagement?”

Tocqueville saw in free association the true school of freedom. Nearly two centuries later, I was summoned before a senatorial commission of inquiry on the grounds that I have been running, since 2004, a civic training school financed by five thousand private donors. The Political Training Institute has never requested nor received a single euro of public money. No donor exceeds 10% of the budget. More than 4,000 young French people were trained to understand their institutions and get involved in them.

And yet, this is what a commission of the Republic deemed worthy of investigation. Not the associations which depend 80% on subsidies. Not the foundations for which a third of the budget comes from Matignon. Not the structures whose opacity the Court of Auditors regularly points out. No: private associations, ordinary donors, unsubsidized citizen engagement.

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The hearing will take place at the Palais du Luxembourg. Built by Marie de Medici, transformed into a prison under the Terror, where Danton and Camille Desmoulins waited for the scaffold, which became the seat of the Senate under Bonaparte. Four centuries during which people came, within these walls, to tremble, to plot, to die, and finally to deliberate. The Republic has since significantly softened its methods. Today, we summon, we question, we listen: it’s better this way.

Let’s say it straight away: the commission of inquiry is a valuable institution. It is through it that Parliament controls public action, enlightens citizens on the use of public funds and holds the executive accountable for its choices. If I present myself without hesitation, it is because I believe in it. But like any institution, it can deviate.

That the senatorial left has chosen, in 2026, to investigate the private financing of associations, is its right. But let’s look at what it doesn’t look at: public subsidies from associations.

The constitutional revision of 2008, by granting parliamentary groups an annual “drawing right”, caused continued inflation: six commissions of inquiry under Sarkozy, 17 under Hollande, 25 under Macron’s first mandate, and already 18 in the Senate since 2022. Inflation rhymes here with weakening. We launch a commission less to understand than to present a scene, more to expose adversaries than to enlighten the legislator.

Let’s compare. The Watergate commission brought down a President of the United States. The one on September 11, co-chaired by a Republican and a Democrat, produced a unanimous report which structured twenty years of American anti-terrorist doctrine. The Leveson investigation overhauled the regulation of the British press. The Bundestag works for the long term. Three traits are common to them, which ours have lost: investigating the state, seeking bipartisan consensus, producing real consequences.

This drift is not only denounced on the right. In a recent study published by the Foundation for Political Innovation, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, former socialist Minister of Justice, warns of the trivialization of a tool whose strength lay in its exceptionality. He recalls this warning from Joseph Barthélémy, written in 1932: “The parliamentary inquiry should rarely be used. She is often sterile.”

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That the senatorial left has chosen, in 2026, to investigate the private financing of associations is its right. But let’s look at what she’s not looking at. In February 2025, the Court of Auditors published a damning report on public funding of associations in the immigration sector alone: ​​2.3 billion euros in 2023, an increase of 23% in four years. And the list could grow: regional festivals singled out, associations with dubious accounts, foundations where the leaders use public funds largely.

The order of magnitude is dizzying. The French voluntary sector receives around 50 billion euros in direct public funding each year: 23 billion in subsidies and around 27 billion in public orders. These flows are broken down into 96 budgetary programs for the state alone, and the 2026 budgetary yellow only documents the payments for 2024. The deputies vote without visibility on the current financial year.

There is no shortage of business. The Marianne Fund, created after the assassination of Samuel Paty, is the subject of a judicial investigation by the PNF for embezzlement of public funds. The former director of Equalis, more than 90% financed by public funds, has just been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to repay 440,000 euros: monthly salary of fifteen thousand euros, company vehicle, Parisian apartment confiscated. Coallia, the first beneficiary of “Immigration, asylum and integration” credits with 148 million euros in 2023, ahead of France Terre d’Asile (69 million) and the French Red Cross (46 million), is under investigation for alleged fraud to the tune of 12 million. None of these files triggered a senatorial commission of inquiry.

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The National Assembly, in April 2026, adopted the report of the commission of inquiry into public broadcasting: four billion euros of public money each year, six months of hearings, one billion savings recommended. This is a good commission of inquiry. It does its job: clarifying the use of public funds.

And it is at this moment that we choose to scrutinize the associations which ask nothing from the State and to investigate structures which have their accounts certified. Inversion of priorities, and confusion over a simple distinction that some pretend to ignore: the gift is not the subsidy.

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When the State subsidizes, it decides for you. When a citizen gives, he himself chooses the cause he wants to support. And he seriously puts his money into it: the tax deduction capped at 66% means that a French donor pays at least a third of the donation on his already taxed income. This is not a state expenditure, it is a choice of the taxpayer. Confusing the two means no longer distinguishing civic freedom from administrative control.

Let the Republic also look at its own accounts. Let parliament, after this investigation into private financing, open another into the public financing of associations which intervene in the political debate. With the same seriousness, the same scope, the same powers. Many of the beneficiaries are administrative extensions or activist relays disguised as independent organizations.

As for the Political Training Institute, it will continue what it has been doing for 21 years: training French youth to understand their country. With the help of 5,000 citizens who believe that it is still worth it, in the France of 2026, to support the civic training of new generations. This commission of inquiry will have at least had one merit: giving us the opportunity to remind ourselves of this.