Julien Moreau — Voices

France correspondent · Based in Paris

EU industrial strategy, nuclear energy, and francophone Africa economics.

Career

Julien Moreau covers Europe as an industrial project, not a debating society. A Sciences Po graduate who spent his early career as an EU affairs correspondent in Brussels, he learned the Union the way it is actually run: in working groups, trilogues, the 2 a.m. compromises that become directives by morning. He explains a state-aid decision the way a mechanic explains an engine — fitting, since engines are increasingly his subject.

Back in Paris, he took up the two questions defining the European economy: can the continent build again, and power what it builds? His long coverage of France's nuclear renaissance — from the 2010s taboo to the 2020s reactor-building programs — made him the rare EU correspondent equally at home in a turbine hall and a Council chamber. A Dakar posting added the third dimension: francophone Africa, where he covered the CFA franc debates and young entrepreneurs building businesses between two monetary worlds.

What shaped his lens: the conviction that Europe's decline is a choice, not a fate — and that the choice is made in industrial policy, megawatt by megawatt. His defining episode: a 2023 investigation into a single gigafactory project, from the Brussels subsidy approval to the groundbreaking in northern France, showing exactly where European ambition meets European paperwork. "The EU," he likes to say, "is the only superpower that needs a permit to be one."

Based in Paris, he covers EU industrial strategy, nuclear energy, and francophone Africa's economies.

Personal

Julien Moreau grew up in Lyon, the son of a printer and a nurse, in a flat above the print shop where he learned to love ink before he learned to write. He is divorced, with two sons — fourteen and eleven — in shared custody. He lives in Paris's 11th arrondissement and cycles everywhere, through rain and deadlines alike. French is spoken at home; a little Wolof lingers from his Dakar years and surfaces in his cooking, his curses, and the lullabies he once sang his sons, which they still request.

Timeline

2006 — Political science degree, Sciences Po Paris
2007–2013 — EU affairs correspondent, Brussels
2014–2018 — Economics correspondent, Paris
2019–2021 — West Africa correspondent covering francophone economies, Dakar
2022–2025 — Columnist on European industry and energy, Paris
2026 — Correspondent for EU industry and energy, Magna Bureau

Opinion Attention economy

The Attention Estate: Owning the Last Uncolonized Minutes

By Julien Moreau · France correspondent · Paris, September 27, 2026

Attention is the one asset you cannot print, outsource, or recover — and an entire industry exists to extract it. A defense of the interior hour.

There is one asset you cannot print, outsource, or recover once spent.

Not money — the mints handle that. Not time, exactly — time passes whether you attend to it or not. The asset is attention: the undivided minute, the interior hour, the only stretch of reality over which you exercise anything resembling sovereignty. And it is being colonized at a scale no previous generation could have imagined, by an industry whose entire business model is the expropriation of your inner life.

Consider the arithmetic. The average person now spends several hours a day inside feeds engineered — by thousands of well-paid professionals, with the best behavioral science money can buy — to keep them there. That is not leisure. That is extraction. The attention economy does not sell you products; it sells your consciousness to the highest bidder, in parcels of seconds, while you believe you are relaxing.

The philosophical question this raises is older than the smartphone and more urgent than ever: if your attention is the substance of your experience — if, as the old line goes, your life is what you pay attention to — then who owns your life when your attention is owned by someone else?

The colony within

Colonialism, in its classical form, was the extraction of value from a territory by a distant power, with the locals persuaded — or compelled — to participate. The attention economy is colonialism turned inward. The territory is your mind. The distant powers are platforms headquartered thousands of miles away. The extraction runs continuously, and the locals have been persuaded that the occupation is entertainment.

The mechanics are worth stating plainly because they are usually euphemized. Every feed is an experiment in behavioral capture: variable rewards (the slot-machine logic of the refresh), social proof (the like count as a conformity engine), infinite scroll (the removal of every natural stopping cue). None of this is accidental. It is the industrial application of psychology to the problem of keeping a human being from looking away.

And the product being refined is not content. Content is the bait. The product is you, attended — your predicted behavior, your nudged purchases, your voted elections. The platforms know this; their financial filings say it in the dry language of "daily active users" and "time spent." The user is not the customer. The user is the mine.

The scarcity that matters

Here is the thesis: attention is the last genuinely scarce resource, and the twenty-first century's great fortunes — and great thefts — will be measured in it.

Every other scarcity has been engineered away or is being engineered away. Information is abundant to the point of worthlessness. Capital is abundant — there is more of it sloshing around the system than there are good uses for it. Even labor, the classic scarcity, is being automated task by task. But attention cannot be printed, cannot be automated, cannot be delegated. You cannot hire someone to pay attention for you. The undivided minute is the one asset that remains stubbornly, gloriously finite: roughly sixteen waking hours a day, and every claimant in the world competing for a share.

This is why the fight over attention is not a lifestyle issue. It is the central economic and political conflict of the age. Elections are won by whoever captures the feed. Markets move on whoever captures the narrative. Minds — the actual substrate of democracy, culture, and meaning — are captured one scroll at a time. The ancients worried about the corruption of the soul by power; we should worry about its fragmentation by distraction, which achieves the same result more pleasantly.

The user is not the customer. The user is the mine — and the ore is the undivided minute.

What attention is for

The tragedy is not that attention is being extracted. The tragedy is what attention was for, and what is lost when it is gone.

Attention is the mechanism by which experience becomes meaning. The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates — but the unexamined life is precisely what the feed manufactures: a life of reactions rather than reflections, of stimuli rather than thoughts. Psychologists have a term for the deep state that attention makes possible — flow, contemplation, the sustained gaze — and a growing literature on what its absence produces: anxiety, fragmentation, the peculiar modern sadness of having seen everything and experienced nothing.

The religious traditions understood this long before the neuroscientists. Prayer, meditation, contemplation, the Sabbath — every serious spiritual discipline is, at bottom, a technology of attention: a practice for reclaiming the interior hour from the noise of the world. The secular age discarded the disciplines and kept the noise, then industrialized it. The result is a civilization with more information than any in history and less sustained thought than any in memory — a paradox that would be funny if it were not the water we swim in.

None of this is an argument against technology. The printing press was also accused of destroying memory, and it built the modern mind instead. The argument is against a specific business model: the industrial harvesting of human attention for resale. The press sold books to readers. The feed sells readers to the highest bidder. The difference is not one of degree. It is one of direction — of who serves whom.

The estate and its defenses

If attention is an estate — the last uncolonized property — then the question is how to defend it. The answers are unfashionable, which is why they work.

The first defense is friction. The extraction industry depends on smoothness: the seamless scroll, the instant load, the notification that arrives before the thought completes. Friction is the moat. Delete the apps that farm you. Turn the phone grayscale. Make the feed hard to reach and the book easy. Every second of friction is a second reclaimed — the cheapest land reform in history.

The second defense is ritual. Attention, like a muscle, strengthens with practice and atrophies with neglect. The old disciplines — the morning pages, the walk without the phone, the hour of reading, the prayer — are not nostalgia. They are training. A mind that has practiced sustained attention for an hour a day is a mind that cannot be easily harvested; the machinery of capture depends on minds that have never learned to resist it.

The third defense is law. Individual virtue is necessary but insufficient against an industry. The data-extraction economy was eventually met with privacy regulation; the attention-extraction economy will eventually be met with its own reckoning — rules on manipulative design, on infinite scroll, on the algorithmic targeting of children. It will be fought, as all such reckonings are, by the industry that profits from the status quo. It will happen anyway, because the alternative is a generation raised inside the mine.

The unpriced minutes

There is a final irony worth savoring. The attention economy can price your seconds — it does, millions of times a day, in the ad auctions — but it cannot price what attention produces: the thought that becomes the book, the gaze that becomes the love, the silence that becomes the idea. The most valuable things attention makes are precisely the things that cannot be sold. Meaning is the ultimate unpriced good, manufactured only in the undivided minute.

This is the dark joke of the whole enterprise: the industry extracts attention to sell you things, but the things worth having — understanding, love, the sense of a life actually lived — are produced only by the attention it takes away. It is a machine for converting the priceless into the priced, and calling the difference growth.

The estate is still yours, technically. The deeds have not been signed; the occupation is voluntary, renewed every time you reach for the phone. That is the good news and the bad news in a single sentence. No one can reclaim your attention for you. But no one can take it without your participation, either.

The undivided minute is the last property. Hold it like land.

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Opinion EU industry, nuclear & francophone Africa

Brussels, We Love You. Now Please Get Out of the Way.

By Julien Moreau · France correspondent · Paris, September 27, 2026

France has a nuclear fleet, a Cartesian education system, and opinions about everything. Brussels has committees. This, in miniature, is the entire drama of European industrial strategy.

The facts are these: while Germany was switching off its reactors — a decision history will study with the fascination of a pathologist — France kept the atom, and the atom kept the lights on. Our electricity is among the cleanest and cheapest in Europe, which in Brussels counts as a suspicious achievement. The taxonomy wars — is nuclear green? — consumed years of summits that could have built actual power plants. Cartesian logic suggests: if it emits no carbon and powers the factories, it is green. Brussels logic suggests: another working group. We love Brussels. We do. But the working groups do not generate megawatts.

Meanwhile the industrial strategy unfolds in its usual two-step: Paris proposes, Berlin disposes, and the compromise pleases no one at the speed of a TGV. The Americans subsidize with the Inflation Reduction Act — vulgar, effective — and European industry quietly relocates across the Atlantic. The Chinese subsidize everything, elegantly and at scale. Europe responds with a regulation. It is not nothing, our regulation. It is simply not a factory.

“Washington subsidizes. Beijing subsidizes. Brussels regulates. Guess which one builds factories.”

Consider Flamanville — the EPR that was supposed to be the future and became, instead, the most expensive civics lesson in Europe. Ordered in 2007 and connected to the grid some seventeen years later, at roughly four times the original budget: this is what happens when a country that understands physics forgets, temporarily, how to build things. The causes are French in the most precise sense — a lost generation of welders and engineers, a supply chain dismantled during the years when the atom was politically unfashionable, a regulatory apparatus of exquisite thoroughness. EDF has since been renationalized, the grand carénage refurbishment of the existing fleet grinds on, and six new EPR2 reactors are promised with the solemnity of a man proposing marriage for the third time. The atom, I repeat, was never the problem. The problem was everything around the atom.

Meanwhile, across the Rhine, the pathologist's fascination continues. Germany switched off its last three reactors in April 2023 — Isar 2, Emsland, Neckarwestheim 2, names now spoken in Berlin the way one speaks of exiled relatives — and has spent every cold snap since importing French nuclear electricity to keep its own lights on. Savor the Cartesian beauty of it: France sells Germany the electrons that German principles forbid Germany to produce. The interconnectors hum with the sound of ideology meeting arithmetic, and arithmetic, as always, wins on points. We do not gloat. Gloating is unseemly. We invoice.

The invoice, however, is the smaller story; the exodus is the larger one. French industrial electricity — regulated, nuclear-backed, among the cheapest in Europe — is now a competitive weapon, and German industry knows it. BASF is building its great new Verbund in Zhanjiang, China, for ten billion dollars; the chemical giants and the carmakers shop for factory sites the way tourists shop for hotels, and the American offer — the Inflation Reduction Act, three hundred sixty-nine billion dollars of gloriously vulgar subsidy — keeps winning. Europe's answer, the Net-Zero Industry Act, is a perfectly drafted, impeccably intentioned document that has never employed anyone. Washington writes checks. Beijing builds everything. Brussels, I say with love, writes.

And Beijing — let us be clear-eyed, as Descartes demands — is not merely subsidizing; it is out-building everyone on every front that matters. Two dozen reactors under construction, the commanding heights of batteries and solar manufacturing, CATL and BYD setting the terms of the electric age: while Europe debated whether the atom was green, China simply built the green things, at a scale no committee can match. Our transition consequently runs on Chinese hardware, which means Europe's energy independence has a supply chain shaped like a dependency — we replaced the Russian pipeline with the Chinese container ship and called it strategy. Descartes would have questions. So do I.

“The continent does not need France’s permission anymore. It needs France’s seriousness.”

Which brings us to the uranium, and therefore to Niger, and therefore to the part of this column where the theatricality must stop. France's reactors have long run partly on Nigerien uranium — the mines of Arlit, the decades-long Orano presence — and the 2023 coup in Niamey, followed by the rupture of the old arrangements, was not merely a diplomatic embarrassment; it was an energy-security event wearing a political costume. The Sahel's new rulers want partnerships without tutelage; the old Françafrique machinery — the summits, the garrisons, the unspoken understandings — is being dismantled in public, sometimes gleefully. This is painful, and it is clarifying: Africa's population will double by mid-century, its cities are the future's great markets, and Dakar and Abidjan will take French capital seriously exactly to the extent that French capital takes them seriously. The era of the pré carré is over. The era of the contract has begun.

And then there is francophone Africa — the relationship Paris conducts with the awkwardness of a family reunion where everyone remembers the past differently. The old arrangements are ending; the new ones must be partnerships or they will be nothing. The Sahel wants investment without tutelage; Dakar and Abidjan want French capital that behaves like capital, not like history. France knows this continent better than any Western power — the languages, the networks, the unspoken rules. Knowledge is only useful if it comes without condescension. The theatricality is French. The stakes, this time, are African. We would do well to listen more than we declaim.

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