TotalEnergies caps the pump price, and Le Figaro applauds the profits

According to Le Figaro, in a "décryptage" (an analysis piece) published on 29 October, TotalEnergies is "still more profitable" but is becoming "almost popular". Long criticised for its oil business and its high profits, the group is now said to be praised, not least for capping fuel prices at its petrol stations. The paper credits this image recovery to its chief executive, Patrick Pouyanné. The summary we have does not give the level of the cap, how long it lasts, or the size of the profits: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First point: a cap is only possible if there is a margin. That a company can decide, of its own accord, to limit the price at the pump shows that this price is not a law of nature. The conceptual notes of the Gazette describe this reflex: people say "prices demand it" as if some invisible force settled the matter, when in fact management teams, boards and states decide. Here the fiction collapses on its own: when the group caps prices, it could have done otherwise, and so it must have chosen otherwise at other times.

Second point: the gesture is a very good investment. Popularity regained at a controlled cost, while profits keep climbing, is communications with a high yield. A cap at petrol stations, which are only one link in a chain running from well to refinery, looks like a discount at retail that makes the wholesaler almost likeable. Le Figaro does not tell us what this cap really costs the group compared with what it earns in reputation. Yet that is the only accounting that matters.

Third point: who pays, in the end? Fuel is a forced expense for millions of employees who did not choose to live far from their work. In the logic the same notes describe, profit is born of unpaid labour, of the time worked beyond what covers the wage. Once that surplus is pocketed, the worker finds it again at the till, as a captive consumer of an energy whose rent they finance. The cap gives back with one hand a little of what the system takes with the other, and they are asked to applaud.

That leaves the question the headline dodges: is a group "popular" because it shows generosity, or because everyone has stopped watching the margin? We want to know which wages, which investments and which dividends accompany these profits. Until that answer arrives, TotalEnergies' redemption looks less like a change of nature than a very fine piece of public relations, one that can be welcomed without being mistaken for redistribution.