France's next revolution isn't against a monarchy. It's against the twenty-year-old Excel macros keeping every ministry on Microsoft.
France just unveiled its 2026 digital sovereignty plan. Yet in March 2025, its Ministry of Education signed a €152 million Microsoft contract running through 2029, nearly one million workstations locked in for four more years.
This isn't hypocrisy. It's something much harder to fix.
The reflex read is that Education is dragging its feet, or that the sovereignty push is performative. Neither is right. The real obstacle is older, deeper, and invisible outside public sector IT.
Germans have a word for what actually kills these migrations: "Fachverfahren". The bespoke, mission-critical applications that run a modern state. Municipal tax. Civil registry. Judicial records. For two decades these were hardcoded to Windows: ActiveX controls, registry hooks, Visual Basic macros buried in legacy Excel spreadsheets.
You cannot migrate a workstation to Linux before you have rewritten the software that runs on it. If a clerk cannot process an enrollment because the regional tool has no Linux API, the migration stops. Instantly.
Munich learned this the expensive way. Its LiMux project reached 15,000 desktops before the city council voted to reverse course in 2017. The obstacles weren't Linux, they were Exchange integration, Office interoperability, and the long tail of specialized software nobody had budgeted to rewrite.
Germany took the lesson. Schleswig-Holstein is now migrating 30,000 seats in deliberate sequence: application layer first (ODF mandatory since August 2024, LibreOffice, Open-Xchange), operating system only after. Slower. Boring. It will work.
Denmark is testing a third path. Statens IT is piloting a hardened Linux build at the Road Traffic Authority. 600 employees replacing Windows, Office, and Teams in a single stroke. If the pilot holds, the target is 15,000 government users across state agencies.
France is playing an altogether bigger hand. DINUM, the state's own digital directorate, warned since 2021 that Microsoft's tools fail France's "Cloud au Centre" sovereignty doctrine. Now every ministry must submit a transition plan by autumn 2026. A scope measured in millions of workstations, not hundreds. A state bumping into twenty years of legacy stack in real time, on a scale nobody else in Europe has even attempted.
The hardest part of digital sovereignty isn't geopolitics or licensing economics. It's decoupling twenty years of software from its runtime: one API, one macro, one registry hook at a time.
