In Rennes, overindebtedness is judged on Tuesdays and lived every day

According to Le Monde, overindebted people appear almost every week before the judge for protection disputes (juge des contentieux de la protection) at the Rennes court. Their stories, the paper writes, speak of precarity, fed by life's accidents and made worse by rising prices. One of them sums it up: "The economic climate means that at any moment, I can wobble." We do not have, in this dispatch, the details of the cases, the sums involved or the decisions handed down. What follows is therefore our reading, not a report of the hearings.

Still, that sentence on wobbling says the essential. A divorce, an illness, a contract that ends: we call these "accidents of life", as if life were a dangerous road and nobody were responsible for the bend. Yet these accidents do not fall at random. They land harder where there is no cushion: short hours, part-time work, rent that swallows half of the income.

Look at the kitchen, not the courtroom. When the price of rent, energy or the weekly shop goes up, someone has to make up the gap. Our working notes on social reproduction make the point: the work that makes and maintains people (feeding, caring, raising children, looking after the elderly) is largely unpaid or badly paid, and above all carried by women. When public services retreat or the cost of living rises, this work does not vanish; it shifts into households. In practice: you skip a meal, juggle between two overdrafts, delay the bill. This juggling act has a name, and it is often called "good money management".

And housing? For owners, a home is an asset that yields returns; for those who live in it, it is a roof. When rents rise, wealth moves from tenants to owners, mechanically. The indebted household finances that transfer on credit, sometimes quite literally. Nothing in the dispatch specifies the share of rent in the debts heard in Rennes; that is a question to ask, not a certainty to assert.

There is also the double day. Alexandra Kollontai was already describing the wage-earning woman who remains responsible for the home and the children: capitalism turned her into a worker without lightening her domestic load. A century later, a woman alone with children after a separation combines the single wage, the pay gap and the household administration. If the accident strikes, she is the one with no margin at all.

The judge, for his part, can only reschedule debts. He has no hand on wages, rents or prices. Overindebtedness is treated as an individual failure, managed file by file, when it is mass and structural. As long as we treat the symptoms in the courtroom, the wobbling will return every week, on the same bench, with different names.