France accelerates – Facing mounting tensions tied to President Donald Trump and Europe’s push for digital sovereignty, France is building home-grown government technology and setting deadlines to leave US platforms. The government is already moving tens of thousands of staff off
For weeks, the pressure has felt less like policy and more like logistics. In government offices, calls still need to connect, files still need to be shared, and productivity tools still need to work every day. The difference now is where those systems are coming from—and who gets to control them.
In France, that shift is moving fast. Over the last few months. the French government has sped up efforts to develop and deploy its own technology for government officials. The country has positioned itself at the front of Europe’s growing digital sovereignty push. which seeks to reduce reliance on US-based technology over concerns around data security. the Trump administration’s unpredictability. and changing prices.
The argument is blunt. French budget minister David Amiel recently urged the state to “break free” from American systems and use those it can control.
Stéphanie Schaer, head of DINUM, France’s digital transformation ministry, has been describing the change as more than messaging. On the nation’s video-calling platform Visio, she says: “We are not just explaining what we want to do. We already did it in a few matters.”
More than 40,000 French government staff have already started using Visio. The rest are expected to move away from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others by 2027. Schaer frames the point in everyday terms: confidence in day-to-day use. and resistance to being held hostage by a single provider. “We are confident enough to use it every day and we are not dependent on just one actor that will tell us you have to use my video conference. ” she says.
That approach is spreading beyond video calls. Across France’s central government agencies and its wider civil service. officials plan to shift to as many French. European. and open-source technology alternatives as possible in the coming years. Schaer emphasizes a core requirement: control. Data, she says, is stored locally in France, not abroad.
DINUM has been building a suite of productivity tools under the name “LaSuite” since at least 2023. Visio is only part of it. The collection also includes Tchap for instant messaging. Messagerie as an alternative to Gmail or Outlook. Fichiers for documents and file sharing. and text editing software Docs. For spreadsheets, there is Grist.
Some of the software is still in beta and has not been fully rolled out to French officials. Even so, Tchap is already used at scale. Schaer says the messaging app has 420,000 active users, with 20,000 civil servants adopting it each month.
Open-source is central to the strategy. Schaer says: “We are based on open source software. So we don’t develop all the code.” There are public plans for new features. but the code is published on Microsoft-owned GitHub. That detail—open source delivered through an American-owned platform—sits in the background as France tries to balance speed. development resources. and political independence.
What France does require is tighter control over data. All data handled by the alternatives has to be processed in France and stored with providers approved by the country’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI. The same week the EU is watching France’s moves. the Dutch government made a parallel shift by moving its open-source code off of GitHub and onto a Forgejo instance hosted on government-owned servers.
France isn’t building everything alone, either. Schaer says the country plans to reuse work from the community and contribute back. Visio is a clear example of that blend of public ambition and private partnerships: it can host calls of up to 150 people and includes AI transcription of calls. built on technology from French firms Outscale and Pyannote.
Still, government agencies don’t get to opt out of the broader break. All of France’s central government agencies have to come up with plans to move away from US tech—across office software, antivirus, AI, databases, and more—by this fall. And the health sector is already another point of urgency.
On April 23, French officials announced that the country will move its health data platform away from Microsoft to local cloud provider Scaleway, after a years-long decision process.
The timeline matters because it’s designed to change day-to-day behavior inside offices, not just architecture on paper. Visio adoption begins in the present; Zoom and Microsoft Teams are targeted for the end of the decade; and this fall is when the broader retreat from US technology becomes mandatory across central agencies. Underneath it all sits a consistent demand: that the systems running government work should be ones France can steer. with data staying inside the country and providers cleared by ANSSI.
France digital sovereignty DINUM LaSuite Visio Tchap ANSSI Scaleway open source GitHub open source code AI transcription government cloud cybersecurity