Between Technological Dependency and Strategic Autonomy : The Palantir Case as a Challenge to French Digital Sovereignty

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines why a state committed to technological sovereignty contracted a CIA-linked American firm to run its domestic intelligence service. The case is France's DGSI and Palantir Technologies in 2016. The central claim is that this outcome cannot be understood as a simple procurement decision without accounting for decades of institutional erosion: organized powerlessness, the deliberate disengagement of the post-colbertist French state from sovereign digital investment, leaving no credible domestic alternative when most needed.The analysis operates across three levels. First, structurally, the thesis reconstructs four decades of neoliberal retreat from colbertist digital governance. Second, at the level of agency, it examines how revolving-door networks and Palantir's incremental institutional penetration consolidated the dependency. Third, discursively, it analyzes how Palantir's audience segmentation, the Cloud Act's legal exposure, and a visibility paradox made the dependency politically manageable.Four alternative explanations, technological superiority, security emergency, American dominance, and bureaucratic rationality are engaged and situated within the organized powerlessness framework rather than dismissed.The thesis argues that digital dependencies are not primarily imported but manufactured domestically through accumulated non-decisions and institutional drift. The organized powerlessness framework contributes to literatures on path dependency, state transformation, and digital sovereignty.