Europe’s attempt to draw household savings into defence capital rests on a proposition that sounds simple and is not: that private savings can supplement public expenditure. A retail investor can subscribe to a long-term fund without the corresponding cash ever becoming additional productive capital for a defence manufacturer. It may sit in a liquidity reserve, purchase an existing security, finance an acquisition from a selling shareholder, enter another fund awaiting capital calls, or repay the public institution that seeded the vehicle in the first place. At the other end of the holding period, the same investor may wish to exit while the underlying industrial assets remain economically illiquid for years. The question that matters for European rearmament is therefore not whether household savings can be labelled defence finance, but what happens to the money on arrival: whether it enlarges the pool of capital available to European defence businesses, changes who owns that pool, or simply refinances a public balance sheet that had already done the work. Bpifrance Défense is an unusually instructive case because its own published documentation answers part of that question explicitly, and because the answer is not the one its fundraising announcements imply.