Forthcoming · Published in French
For a new French industrial revolution
France no longer manufactures enough — not for lack of capital, talent or technology, but because it stopped organising production as a political act.
About the book
Nine per cent of national wealth produced in factories, last in the G7 behind Spain, half the country’s plants lost between 1995 and 2015. Only one sector runs a structural surplus: defence, the world’s second largest exporter.
That exception is no accident. Since 1961, France’s defence procurement agency has practised what the country no longer does anywhere else: public orders sustained over time, national origin of manufacturers required by contract, critical assets shielded from foreign acquisition. The book’s thesis is to extend that grammar to the rest of the productive base.
Faire draws from it a doctrine — a strategist state that sets the course and protects capital without substituting itself for entrepreneurs — and seventy proposals, eighteen of them flagship, each individually costed. The book addresses itself explicitly to those who will have to decide in 2027.
Four foundations
01
French households hold more than €6 trillion in financial assets outside real estate, two thirds of it poorly remunerated — savings that today finance other states’ debt rather than French factories. A Productive Sovereign Fund, a capitalised subsidiary of the Caisse des dépôts whose capital is made inalienable by law, takes the first loss and mobilises €30 billion a year with no new budgetary spending.
02
Ukraine served as the revelation: Caesar howitzer output rose from two to twelve units a month, yet subcontracting SMEs still work on three-month purchase orders, and dependencies on titanium, propellants and rare earths remain unaddressed. Hence an industrial programming law modelled on the military one, a redesign of foreign investment screening, and an assumed commercial rearmament.
03
A reversal of the dominant narrative: artificial intelligence strikes qualified services first — consulting, banking back-office, routine legal work, audit, support functions — exposing close to three million people in France. Industrial reality resists. The book sees this as the workshop’s opportunity, on one condition: building Industry Bridges before the flood.
04
Eighteen per cent of industrial value added is levied in France against ten on average in Europe; production taxes stand at 3.3 % of GDP against 0.7 % in Germany; environmental authorisation takes seventeen months. The answers: a return to the European average, a nine-month golden rule, and Productive Innovation Zones.
The costing, central scenario
850,000
jobs over ten years
+2.3 pts
of GDP over ten years
€34bn
annual trade balance improvement
5 to 1
return on direct instruments
Key facts
Structure
24 chapters in five parts
Proposals
70, of which 18 flagship
Appendices
Two costing appendices, three scenarios
Positioning
Neither Colbertist nostalgia nor laissez-faire