What kind of principles are you referring to? Being themselves a massive hardware/software arms dealer so they don't have to buy from the US? (see Amesys scandal during the arab spring)

To be fair though, the French government does have a huge dependency on USA corps. French government is mostly equipped with Microsoft Windows including the army, which was another huge scandal when this contract was passed a few years back.

France, after decades of "neutral" stance during/post cold-war is now back with the NATO psychopaths, and driving military interventions to protect dubious regimes/interests across the globe.

Meanwhile, the ONLY nationwide independent newspaper (Mediapart) reveals huge numbers of outright nazis in the army, but that's not a problem to the people in power. Dozens and dozens of officers sign a petition and go live on TV to defend a military coup d'État against our (really fucked up) colonial republic and most political parties from left to right lick their boots. Only Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a centrist politician presented as a leftist despite not being against money and private property, opposes them publicly. That says a lot about how french politics shifted to the far-right since 1968

With the army rebelling, you'd think the police would remain the docile watchdogs they usually are? That they'd continue to silently beat down and murder the men of color and protesters around the country, maintaining the omerta? No, they're out there on the streets demonstrating, even going en masse in front of the presidential palace to threaten the elected psychopath Macron. They're now also publicly beating down or mudering feminists (see March 8 2020) and old people (see Zineb Redouane, Geneviève Legay, etc), publicly administering some of the baton-grenades-flashball formula ten years ago was only applied in the non-white ghetto suburbs.

But besides the usual murders committed by police worldwide, french police has been involved in murdering protesters, without ever being held accountable, which is quite unusual for a pretend-democracy. To my knowledge in the USA, police doesn't dare murder protesters, and instead leaves this task to the fascist militias. Here, Vital Michalon, Malik Oussekine or Rémi Fraisse are just "things that happen" when you take part in a demonstration. But if that were criticized from within, they'd have to react, right? Ask the VIGI police union members who've been suspended and harassed for denouncing their higher-ups covering up police abuse and rampant racism.

But surely a historical nazi Unterseeboot used as a police sign (as in Lorient) is a scandal, right? Well not really, because there was not EVER a denazification in France. Racial hierarchies, political repression and homophobia were already very widespread under the French colonial republic long before the Nazis came to power. After Paris was liberated by the Spanish antifascist troops (contrary to popular beliefs, the Americans did NOT liberate most of Paris), the nazi-collaborator State apparatus mostly stayed in place. Notably, the police prefects who organized the "counter-insurrection" in Algeria were previously working for the nazi regime, and were never held accountable for anything.

Don't even get me started on the policy of murder, robbery and exploitation of Françafrique and the dark alliances between secret services and businesses around the Jacques Foccart ("Mr. Africa") networks and how that has benefited (and continues to benefit) proto-fascist CEOs like Bolloré and the nuclear/military industrial complex.

And if you think the universities are somehow a safe haven because after the bloodshed and deaths of May 68, the government would never dare attacks the universities, think again. Not only is the police attacking any form of university occupation, the whole intelligentsia is now on TVs everywhere denouncing the "islamo-leftists" and maneuvering to restore in the universities the good-old values of capitalism, authoritarianism, patriarchy and white-supremacy.

Anyway, that's just a short overview. There's a lot more that's broken with France. And i know there's a lot worse happening elsewhere on earth and we french folks (especially we whites) are very privileged on a global scale, but please never take France as a moral compass. As pleasing as they sound, human rights have NEVER been applied in France (though it's a good export product).

As a conclusion, i'll leave here some quotes from the human rights declaration of 1793, which despite being adopted by referendum as part of the 1st republic constitution, was never applied:

"The law ought to protect public and personal liberty against the oppression of those who govern. (...) Resistance to oppression is the consequence of the other rights of man. (...) There is oppression against the social body when a single one of its members is oppressed: there is oppression against each member when the social body is oppressed. (...) When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties."