How do you say “The elephant in the room” in French?

The English idiom 'the elephant in the room' relies on a surreal, humorous visual: an enormous creature taking up space while everyone politely ignores it. It combines two key ideas, that the issue is colossal and obvious, and that there is a collective conspiracy of silence around it. Historically, French has never had a single idiomatic image that simultaneously captures both the immense scale of the problem and the deliberate avoidance.

In everyday French, speakers naturally pivot to expressions that describe the tension rather than the spectacle, such as 'le sujet qui fâche' (the touchy topic that upsets people) or 'un non-dit' (a shared, unspoken taboo). While the literal calque 'l’éléphant dans la pièce' is increasingly common in boardrooms and media thanks to English influence, traditional French speakers still gravitate toward descriptive phrasing or related idioms like 'crever l'abcès' (to lance the boil) when it comes time to finally address the issue.