This article appears in the September 26, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Cheminade Addresses French ‘Patriots’ Party Conference
How To Break the Financiers’ Grip Over the World
Sept. 17—Jacques Cheminade, a long-time leader of the international LaRouche movement and head of France’s Solidarité et Progrès party, was a guest at the Sept. 13 sovereignty conference in Arras, northern France, organized by Florian Phillipot’s political party, Les Patriotes. The conference was attended by some 3,600 people, with more than 30 guest speakers, including politicians, journalists, historians, philosophers, and authors. Cheminade addressed an audience of over 1,000 on the topic of “How To Free Ourselves from Financial Occupation.”
Phillipot was the former spokesman for the National Front of Marine Le Pen during the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections. However, he left the party when it abandoned the idea of leaving the European Union and NATO, and founded his own party, Les Patriotes. The party regularly organizes demonstrations in Paris and elsewhere against French President Emmanuel Macron’s policies of war, NATO, the euro, and the European Union, to which Solidarité et Progrès activists are regularly invited to address.
Of note is that, during Phillipot’s closing speech, in front of 3,500 people, he said that one of the most important contributions to sovereignty made by Cheminade over the years, was his fight against the world of big finance. In addition, having received Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s a few days earlier, he said that “Western nations must cooperate with the new world order.” Included in his speech was the importance of the emergence of the BRICS and the Aug. 31-Sept. 1 meeting in Tianjin, China of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Below is an English translation of Cheminade’s prepared remarks to the conference. Subheads have been added.
The devil’s greatest trick, Charles Baudelaire tells us, is to make us believe he doesn’t exist. Globalists can make us believe they are sovereignists. Donald Trump’s second election [to the U.S. Presidency] was welcomed by some as the expression of a sovereignist surge. They were right about the intention of a surge in the United States and its people, but they underestimated the ability of the City and Wall Street to control the ongoing financial disintegration.
By underestimating the ideology of those around Trump, whatever his own intentions, we have failed to measure their intention to maintain by other means, military, financial and ideological, the exorbitant privilege of a financialized dollar, the dollar of the world market, to the detriment of the world and to its own people.
I must begin with this observation, because if we do not take it into account, we will be unable to break the financial grip, the financial and cultural occupation of our country that I denounced during all my presidential campaigns. I hope that this observation will be understood, in this moment of peril, by true sovereignists, patriots and citizens of the world, as the great German poet Friedrich Schiller repeated.
It’s a condition of survival. Because France is going through an ordeal that threatens its very existence, while its leaders maintain it in a suicidal war economy by striving to govern us through fear. And the world finds itself under the threat of an escalation towards the use of nuclear weapons.
The forces that dominate Western disorder rely on a militarization that generates, indirectly, a seemingly similar military reaction in others but, as in China for example, for defensive reasons. Our political forces presently in Parliament have all rallied behind the supply of arms to Ukraine and condemned the Russian invasion, the conditions for which they themselves helped to create, either actively or by abstention. This is why breaking the financial grip first requires breaking with the “rules-based order” dominant in the Western world. The “responsibility to protect democracy” is only a false flag to maintain its financial and political domination.
Détente, Understanding, and Cooperation
The positive outcome lies in what happened in Tianjin, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, and then at the BRICS meeting organized by [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva], the President of Brazil. A new world of “détente, understanding, and cooperation” is taking shape. Against [U.S. President] Donald Trump’s tariff war, but going well beyond. A world of peace through an architecture of mutual security and development is taking shape, in which Lula, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin are inviting Western countries to participate, contrary to what the media in our countries tell us, which see it as a conspiracy against the Global West. In this context, new platforms are being created for investment in the real economy—the productive physical economy—based on two new development banks. China has created a state digital renminbi, committed to its projects.
To break the financial grip we are under, the perspective, without naivety or complacency, is to establish cooperative relations with these countries which are trying to assert their own sovereignty, and to cooperate with them in the name of our own sovereignty which is flouted by NATO, the European Union which has become its appendage and a euro which is now the junior partner of the dollar.
Patriots and citizens of the world: sovereignty is not the defense of a fixed identity, it is a spirit of discovery and justice, communicated by a memory, with roots—but living roots—in sources maintaining an orientation toward the future. There is no solution that leads to the past. It demands to build a new architecture of peace through mutual development and security, on a global scale and to the advantage of each nation, regardless of its size.
I would like to bring together, without any provocative spirit, what Pope Paul VI said (advised by Jacques Maritain) in his Populorum Progressio encyclical [of March 26, 1967]: “the new name for peace is development,” and the “new polyphonic society, in which every voice will be heard,” which Vladimir Putin has talked to us about, and which our media reduce to a mere demagogic couplet. Xi Jinping insists on the common destiny of humanity. We can welcome it with cynicism or skepticism, but the countries of the Global Majority, who are uniting without uniformity, have noted the unprecedented development of China. And when they compare it to what our Western countries have offered to them, they make their choice.
We must no longer saturate ourselves with financial fictions and indulge in image addictions, but see the best of our past with the eyes of the future. True sovereignty is driven to dialogue with perseverance in order to nourish its action. What should be the reason for France’s existence has become the reason for the world’s existence. The Talmud tells us: “Where there is no man, strive to be one,” rendering justice, as Christianity and all humanisms tell us, to the least of our kind.
It is by starting from this question of principle, betting that man is naturally inclined to the good and does not need enemies to exist, and by associating ourselves with those who claim to share this conviction, that we will have the means to free ourselves. It will not be a road strewn with roses, but Charles de Gaulle taught us in London how to work with allies.
Let’s return to Donald Trump. We must credit him for wanting peace to win the Nobel Prize, do good business, and undoubtedly out of human conviction. However, peace cannot be built on the shifting sands of financial capital that foments war. Peace cannot be built by supporting those who push for war, in the offices of JPMorgan Chase or in Palestine. Donald Trump’s United States is dedicated to cryptocurrencies delivered by private operators, not just Tether or Circle, effectively privatizing the issuance of the dollar in a vast casino whose billionaire croupiers are the new financial overlords of Tech surrounding Trump: Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Alex Karp, Paul Atkins, Scott Bessent, and Stephen Miran.
The New ‘Financial Feudalism’
The GENIUS Act, passed in the U.S. Senate, grants private interests the right to issue stablecoins, at par with the dollar and guaranteed by Federal Reserve Treasury bonds! Worse still, a complementary text prohibits the state itself from issuing these stablecoins! In short, the issuance of currency is handed over to private interests, in a new financial feudalism worse than that condemned by the program of our National Council of Resistance [against the Nazi occupation of France in World War II]. Their plan is to build a huge Ponzi scheme, to the detriment of the rest of the world and their own people. Donald Trump himself and his family are playing this great speculative game to make their fortunes. Their British associates are participating, like cats watching their birds, and the young people of the world are succumbing to an ideology where it is gambling and not human labor that generates profit. This is what we must break with to ensure our national sovereignty.
Let’s add that it was Charles Kushner—the father of Jared [Kushner], Trump’s son-in-law who, with his friend [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, is managing the horror of Gaza from the White House—it was this Charles Kushner, not so diplomatic and a great speculator, who was appointed U.S. ambassador to Paris. They don’t even hide the fact that they want to humiliate us in their “great game.” And it is under these conditions that [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen accepted that the member countries of the European Union pay 800 billion euros to the American defense industry to arm Ukraine! And that the Coalition of the European Willing is showing off its warmongering muscles, while remaining dependent on Trump’s choices.
The truth is that everywhere, re-militarization under the financial yoke and the placing of societies under the tutelage of a criminal oligarchy are being imposed. NATO has become “global” since the Madrid Conference of June 2022. It deals with the economy and intervenes from as far away as the Pacific, under the domination of the “external integrator” as Charles de Gaulle had characterized it at that time.
Our party, Solidarité et Progrès, campaigned since 1986 against the Single European Act, which, by allowing the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital in the European Common Market at that time, inaugurated our submission. From that date, we condemned the system of suicidal betrayal developed by Henri Chavranski at the OECD, Michel Camdessus at the IMF, and Jacques Delors at the Brussels Commission, all social Christians who had established this financial system antagonistic to the values they proclaimed.
It is, faithful to the fundamental sovereignist impulse, to the new resistance based on the new direction that our international policy must take, that we should immediately undertake a certain number of initiatives that bring about change wherever we can, reflecting our new commitment.
In the political logic of leaving the European Union, the euro, and NATO, we must regain control of our credit issuance so that it can fund schools, public hospitals, laboratories, and the re-industrialization of France. This means breaking with Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, but also repealing our laws of August 4, 1993, and May 12, 1998, which are the real handcuffs that bind us. The first prohibits the Banque de France from “authorizing overdrafts or granting any other type of credit to the Public Treasury or any other public body or enterprise,” and the second prohibits “the Governor [of the Banque de France] and the members of the board from requesting or accepting instructions from the government or any other person.”
The alternative is to establish a true National Bank, administered by representatives of the productive forces, and not, as in the socialist nationalizations of 1981 (when the left was still trying), managed by public administrators with the same training and ideology as their predecessors serving private interests. What is now called the Banque de France is nothing more than a central bank administered by financiers, under the control of globalist and pro-European financial inspectors. A true national bank, a source of credit for physical infrastructure and the development of our national production, not for aid to companies whose majority of activities are carried out abroad, is a categorical imperative, with its corresponding national credit system.
A Shared Awakening for the Future of France
There must be a separation between, on the one hand, deposit banks, or commercial banks as they are called across the Atlantic, relays of public credit and deposit management, and on the other hand, investment functions on the financial markets, operations which are essentially speculative and which must not be supported under any circumstances. This is the “Glass-Steagall” [Franklin Roosevelt’s U.S. Bank Act of 1933] with French characteristics, the equivalent of which we adopted at the Liberation and which was gradually eliminated thereafter.
Objection! Some might say, your system would be inflationary and would encourage indebtedness. To which one can respond that it is the system of central bank independence that has created the current inflationary Ponzi pyramid, based on the increasing issuance of money towards fictitious capital, escaping the human economy, the productive physical economy, and fueling speculation on money itself, interest rates or luxury goods, which have become the basis of the CAC 40 [French stock market index].
Let us add that if, on a European scale, we obviously need common projects, this must be done on the scale of reinforced cooperation between sovereign nation-states, in the approach which was that of de Gaulle’s Fouchet Plan of 1962:
• We have a common organization without a single currency, we all agree and we are doing the project together, with possible delegations of sovereignty;
• or one or more countries do not agree but let the others do it without a veto;
• or even one country does not agree and has an absolute right of veto.
It’s a choice. We can also have no common organization at all and operate together on a case-by-case basis. “Frexit” must in any case be prepared, taking our pilgrim’s staff throughout Europe, because a new order will be needed according to the parameters I’m trying to define here, to avoid the blackmail of chaos and debt used to frighten the French and keep them in servitude, whether voluntary or not.
This path, once again, is not easy, but it would be far more dangerous to remain as we are. It requires the commitment of as many of us as possible, with the goal of cooperation and not domination, a win-win objective both on a global scale and on that of our country.
Provided that we put the cause of France before that of our egos, a leap forward becomes possible in the current conditions: the more the danger grows, the more that which saves also grows.
I wouldn’t be with you today if I didn’t believe in a shared awakening. That’s why I wrote a book that you can find here, which contains a series of proposals aimed at maintaining a mobilizing dialogue. You will find, for example, appendices on our “difficult sovereignty,” and on “economic sovereignty and human work,” as well as a reflection on “the public domain at the heart of the nation-state France.”
Finally, and above all, I am here because I believe we are capable of sweeping our own doorstep and bringing about one of “those luminous awakenings which fortunately come, although at too long intervals, to save our country.”
