Published
Updated
Reading time: 2min – video: 2min
:quality(50)/2025/12/21/heritages-6947ab8d56f2e437911672.png)
2 minutes
The baby boomer generation has 9,000 billion euros in inheritance, unheard of in history. Their transactions are of great interest to certain political leaders who see them as a potential windfall for the State. Can these inheritances be taxed in France?
This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the report above. Click on the video to watch it in full.
For several months, Jean-Renaud d’Elisagaray, a retired entrepreneur, has had only one question in mind: how optimize the transmission of your heritageto his two children? That day, he had a meeting with an asset manager. Real estate, savings, its objective: to limit taxes on your inheritance. “You don’t just work for yourself, but I’m lucky enough to have had children, so it’s also for them that I worked. So there you have it, I want to give them back the fruit of my work in the best conditions“, declares the retiree.
And he’s not the only one asking this question right now. In the next 15 years, the baby boomer generation will leave an inheritance worth 9,000 billion euros, an unprecedented amount in history. This represents almost three times the French debt. A phenomenon such that it has a name: the great transmission.
Many retirees are wondering at a time when the State is looking for money. “The fact that politically and fiscally, perhaps, it is illegible creates a lot of concern among savers and among people who are in a position to transmit. So indeed, we are in great demand today“, says Kevin Le Nouail, general manager of Auguste Patrimoine.
Some elected officials dream of taxing inheritance more and taking advantage of this great future transmission of wealth. But the government is procrastinating, because the subject remains very unpopular among the French. “It’s true that it sometimes hurts to have to sell, for example, your parents’ house to pay inheritance fees. There is something illogical”, indicates a passerby. “There are perhaps other ways to recover money elsewhere other than focusing on the inheritance part“, suggests another.
But not touching inheritance taxes could in the long term further widen the inequalities between heirs and others, according to some economists. “This will widen the inequalities between heirs and non-heirs. This will impact relationships between generations, the housing market, the job market, etc.“, warns economist André Masson.
France is one of the countries in the world with the heaviest inheritance taxes, along with Belgium and South Korea.
