How Did France Travail Let Bogus Training Pass?

There are figures that resist the absurd. At the start of 2026, France had more than 7.6 million job seekers registered with France Travail, all categories combined. The unemployment rate reached 7.9% of the active population in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to INSEE. It is in this context that the show Further investigation on France 2 broadcast, on April 9, 2026, a report that went viral in a few hours: for years, France Travail has referenced, and sometimes even finances, personal development courses offering job seekers the opportunity to meet elves, gnomes, unicorns and dragons.

“We are going to meet the people of the elves”

In the report broadcast on France 2 last week, the undercover journalist films on a hidden camera what looks like a sketch The course, listed on the official France Travail website under the title well-being training, lasts two days and costs €300 per participant. The trainer presents herself as a gebiologist, a pseudo-science debunked by YouTuber G. Milgram a little over a year ago in a video, where he already explained that specialists of the genre were largely subsidized by the State.

Palpation of invisible energy fields, activation of magical codes, invitation to dialogue with Dagda, presented as “a great elven king”, then collective call of a dragon… According to the documentary, the training courses would hold a good place on the France Travail site, and certain advisors would go so far as to advise them to beneficiaries.

A state-funded business

The problem is not only surreal. It is systemic. And it’s been going on for a long time. Already in 2013, a senatorial commission of inquiry into sectarian abuses in the field of health pointed out the inaction of the former Pôle Emploi, accusing it of sticking to “the strict application of the legal nature of these professions”, without assessing their real dangerousness. Thirteen years later, the France 2 broadcast reveals that nothing has fundamentally changed.

Over the documented period, a trainer specializing in these well-being workshops would have received up to €43,000 from France Travail between 2011 and 2020. The promise of talking to dragons is not an accident in a catalog of 400,000 training courses. It is an economic model structured around an institutional flaw. The well-being and unconventional medicine sector benefits from considerable legal uncertainty in France. As soon as a training organization obtains Qualiopi certification or the equivalent, France Travail advisors can direct it to their beneficiaries.

What makes the picture worse is the sectarian dimension of these pseudo-sciences. The movements that revolve around figures like Yann Lipnick are regularly monitored by Miviludes, the interministerial mission of vigilance and fight against sectarian abuses. Some of these self-proclaimed therapists advise their patients to abandon their treatments for illnesses in favor of vibrational practices. Directing a vulnerable job seeker towards this type of structure with the approval of the public service is no longer just absurd, it is potentially very dangerous.

The CEO’s embarrassed response

Faced with the images from France 2, Thibaut Guilluy, director general of France Travail, said he was surprised. He described the training as “frankly bizarre” and “quite far from the objectives” of his organization, before promising its removal from the catalog. The fact remains that others exist, and continue to be well established.