How do you say “Burn your bridges” in French?

While English favors the destructive image of fire with 'burn your bridges', French draws on the military engineering concept of severing physical access with 'couper les ponts' (literally 'to cut the bridges'). Both expressions evoke the deliberate removal of any way back across a river, turning a departure into an absolute, irreversible break.

In everyday French, 'couper les ponts' functions across both personal and professional registers. It is routinely applied to relationship breakups, family estrangements, or acrimonious job exits. When the nuance leans specifically toward committing to a bold venture without a backup plan, French speakers sometimes pivot to the literary idiom 'brûler ses vaisseaux' ('to burn one's ships').