Comment by selfhoster1312

> this needs a very un-French form of government to get it to work

I'm usually not one to defend french culture, but i believe your interpretation is wrong. What went wrong in this case is the americanization of the french administration: make everything complex, remove all local government branches and workers who can help you, remove every sensical administrator from their position, ignore all the privacy laws that were passed after Vichy and the nazi/IBM databases, "just make all the NUMÉRISATION".

The french government didn't have a proper national ID system until the nazi administration (Vichy) who invented the CNI and the Ausweis. There was strong sentiment against this well into the 70s and the Loi Informatique et Libertés, and it's only the more recent startup generation that started undoing all our ancestors hard fought battles against data collections/centralization.