Part IV - The reform agenda for recovered sovereignty

3 - Industry and productive capacity

National sovereignty rests, in large part, on the capacity of a country to produce what it needs. Industry is not merely one economic sector among others: it constitutes the material backbone of a nation's power, strategic autonomy, and resilience. The massive deindustrialization of France is neither an accident nor a fatality; it is the result of precise political and doctrinal choices, whose cumulative effects have deeply weakened the country's productive capacity.

The extent of the disaster

The figures are unequivocal. France had 5.5 million industrial jobs in 1980, representing 24% of total employment and 19-20% of GDP. It has fewer than 3 million today, representing approximately 10% of GDP. Over the entire period 1970-2020, France is the European country that has deindustrialized the most: 2.5 million industrial jobs lost since 1974, and the share of manufacturing industry in value added falling from 25% in 1961 to 11% in 2010. In 2023, France ranks 20th to 25th out of 27 EU member states for the industrial share of its GDP - depending on the calculation method. This ranking says it all.
Globalization alone does not explain this result. The difference between jobs that French companies have offshored abroad and jobs created in France by foreign subsidiaries represents 1.3 million people, or 53% of current industrial employment. In Germany, this figure is 17%. This is not an economic fatality: it is the result of deliberate choices by French companies, encouraged by a fiscal, monetary, and regulatory framework that made offshoring more profitable than national productive investment. The destruction of industry is not only a loss of jobs; it is a loss of innovation capacity, since industry represents 85% of national R&D effort. To destroy the factory is to destroy the laboratory.

Structural causes

For several decades, French industry has been subjected to what is termed "free and undistorted competition", erected as a dogma at the European level. This principle has produced asymmetric and destructive effects: by exposing national industrial sectors without protection to global competition based on disparities in wages, social, environmental, and fiscal standards, it has mechanically favored offshoring, site closures, and the loss of savoir-faire.
To this competition was added the monetary constraint. The euro, designed for structurally different economies, proved durably overvalued for French industry. An excessively strong currency raises the cost of exports, favors imports, and penalizes productions with high industrial intensity. This monetary bias contributed to the progressive erosion of the competitiveness of the productive apparatus, without the State having the necessary levers to respond.
Finally, this dynamic was inscribed within a broader ideological framework, theorized from the 1980s onward: that of the "service society." According to this vision, heavy and manufacturing industry was destined to disappear from developed countries, in favor of tertiarized economies, while production would be relegated to low-cost countries. This doctrine justified policies of industrial disengagement, abandonment of entire sectors, and increased dependence on the outside. The health crisis of 2020, recent geopolitical tensions, and energy shocks brutally recalled that a country that no longer produces no longer decides.

The SME and ETI fabric - backbone of the reconquest

Reindustrialization will not come from large listed groups whose primary logic is quarterly profitability for their shareholders. It will come from the fabric of specialized industrial SMEs and ETIs: human-scale enterprises, often family-owned, anchored in their territory, masters of their savoir-faire in a precise niche. Germany has demonstrated this, not as a model to copy, but as proof that it is possible. Its 1,300 industrial "hidden champions" - SMEs and ETIs that dominate their global niche from their territory of origin in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, or the Rhineland - constitute the silent backbone of the German trade surplus. France has the same enterprises. They lack patient long-term capital, protection against predatory foreign takeovers, and public procurement orders that would stabilize their order books. The tools exist within this project: the universal golden share that protects against any non-sovereign foreign takeover, state aid conditional on the cession of stakes that structurally favors smaller structures, and the patient capital of the Caisse des Dépôts. The task is to deliberately orient them toward this productive fabric.

Definition of strategic sectors

The restoration of industrial sovereignty first requires a clear hierarchy. Not all sectors involve the same level of strategic stakes. The State identifies and assumes priority protection of sectors essential to national independence: energy, defense, transport, health, electronics, critical materials, basic chemistry, agro-industry, and digital and industrial infrastructure. This hierarchy includes an explicit criterion of impact on national sovereignty in order to distinguish vital sectors from secondary ones. It is coordinated with the agricultural and energy sectors to guarantee an integrated approach to material sovereignty. It is not fixed; it evolves according to technological changes, international tensions, and vulnerabilities identified by the Planning Commission.

Relocalisation ciblée et pragmatique

Reshoring can be neither total nor ideological. The aim is not to repatriate all production indiscriminately, but to restore as a priority the critical capacities whose absence directly exposes the nation to major risks. This reshoring is targeted, progressive, and supported by concrete instruments: adapted monetary policy, public procurement oriented toward national producers, selective trade protection validated by the Planning Commission and the reformed Senate, support for productive investment. Support may extend to nationalization, but only after validation by the reformed Senate and coordination with the Planning Commission, when the preservation of a strategic sector, an essential industrial asset, or a critical savoir-faire requires it. These measures are targeted and temporary strategic instruments, and not a permanent policy of industrial dirigisme.

Training and reconstitution of competences

Reindustrialization has a prerequisite that political discourse systematically neglects: savoir-faire. A factory cannot be reopened without the skilled workers to run it. Deindustrialization has destroyed technical competences that take ten to fifteen years to reconstitute; a toolmaker, a foundryman, a precision boilermaker cannot be improvised. This reconstitution of competences is a workstream in its own right, addressed in direct connection with the heritage and training workstream via the partnership between the National Public Heritage Establishment and the Compagnons du Devoir, whose heritage training sites constitute precisely the learning ground for the high-level technical trades that reindustrialization requires.

Reindustrialization trajectory and human reservoir

Reindustrialization is not a slogan: it is a quantified, programmed, and assessable objective. Under the current regime without sovereignty, the net rate of industrial job creation stands at around 28,000 jobs per year (DGE 2024 data). Under the sovereign regime with the tools mobilized by the project - monetary sovereignty, universal golden share, Planning Commission, systemic retention effect, targeted protectionism, oriented public procurement, patient capital from the Caisse des Dépôts - the target trajectory is a progressive rise toward 200,000 net industrial jobs per year at cruising speed.

Nature of this objective: assumed target, not trend projection

This figure is a trajectory target, not a projection derived from econometric modeling. It corresponds to 7 times the current rate of net industrial job creation. It is deliberately ambitious: it is the coherence of all the levers mobilized by the project that justifies this ambition, not a historical trend. No comparable country has achieved such a shift through public policy in the contemporary era. The project therefore assumes a wager on rupture, whose justification is the simultaneous convergence of all sovereign levers, and not the extrapolation of a recent past.

Ten-year ramp-up trajectory

Reaching cruising speed is progressive over ten years, constrained by the physical pace of capacity reconstitution (training, industrial land, equipment, logistics chains). The cumulative total over twenty years represents approximately 1.8 to 2 million net industrial jobs created, or approximately two thirds of the historical regression recovered in one generation. The objective is not a round number: it is a lasting inversion of the long-term trend.

HCEP monitoring and revision clause

La trajectoire est suivie annuellement par la HCEP qui publie un rapport public sur le rythme effectif de création d'emplois industriels. Tout écart significatif de plus de 30% sur deux années consécutives entre la trajectoire cible et la trajectoire observée déclenche une évaluation complète par la HCEP, avec obligation de réponse du gouvernement sous six semaines selon le mécanisme prévu dans le chantier institutionnel. Si la trajectoire observée dépasse la cible, l'objectif est revu à la hausse ; si elle est durablement inférieure, les causes sont identifiées publiquement et les politiques correctives sont arbitrées sans complaisance.

The human reservoir: where do the workers come from?

This target raises an obvious material question: where do we find the additional 2 million skilled workers over a 20-year horizon? The objection "we will not have enough hands" is legitimate. It is also partially well-founded. But it neglects three concrete reservoirs that an assumed national policy can mobilize.
A significant number of workers are currently employed in sectors with low added value or in structural decline: platform services (delivery, ride-hailing, microtasks), retail trade in restructuring, intermediate administration in the process of rationalization by the project, redundant public services being eliminated. The order of magnitude mobilizable over 15 to 20 years is in the range of 1 to 1.5 million people.
These workers are not condemned to precarity. An active reorientation policy - paid qualifying training, support over two to three years, guarantee of reclassification into a growing industrial sector - is consistent with the long-term service obligation that the State owes its citizens. This is not a punishment: it is an offer of transition toward work of higher added value and greater collective utility.
France has approximately 2.5 million unemployed (across all categories) and several million people distant from employment not counted in official figures. A significant portion is already qualified in industrial or technical trades - former skilled workers, technicians, engineers whose sectors have disappeared or been offshored. For these profiles, a simple skills update (6 to 12 months of targeted training) is sufficient to make them immediately employable in the restored sectors. The order of magnitude mobilizable is 500,000 to 1 million over 10 to 15 years.
This population has been treated for forty years as a social cost to be managed through unemployment benefits and the RSA. It is in reality an immediately productive resource, underexploited by the inability of previous public policies to identify and mobilize available competences. The national mapping of residual savoir-faire, coordinated by the Planning Commission with departmental prefectures and former industrial basins, is a priority workstream of the transition.
Approximately 700,000 young people enter the labor market each year. Today, a small proportion orients toward technical and industrial sectors, due to accumulated cultural devaluation since the 1980s and the absence of visible career prospects. The project reverses both of these factors: technical sectors become visibly promising, industrial wages rise under the effect of trade protection and patient capital, and public discourse values productive trades on a par with intellectual functions.
The effect on incoming cohorts is progressive but cumulative. With 100,000 to 150,000 young people per annual cohort oriented toward industrial sectors (compared to approximately 50,000 to 70,000 today), the annual flow of entrants approaches half of the target of 200,000 net jobs per year, the remainder coming from reorientation and the mobilization of qualified unemployment.
Massive training is not left to existing training centers alone, which are undersized and sometimes disconnected from real industrial needs. It relies on three articulated levers: - the Compagnons du Devoir, for traditional technical trades and heritage, in an extended partnership with current production sectors - a national network of restored technical training centers, co-piloted by the Planning Commission and departmental prefectures, with direct participation from industrial companies in the relevant basin - an accelerated recognition of prior industrial learning, for workers from equivalent sectors abroad or from related sectors.
Training in context on the heritage sites of the EPNP (Notre-Dame, Versailles, major sites) serves as a training base for high-level technical trades, as detailed in the culture and heritage workstream. This is the same logic applied: one trains by producing, one produces by training.
The sum of the three reservoirs - reorientation (1 to 1.5 million), mobilization of qualified unemployment (500,000 to 1 million), additionally oriented incoming cohorts (50,000 to 80,000 per year additional, or 1 to 1.6 million over 20 years) - comfortably exceeds the 2 million net industrial jobs targeted over a 20-year horizon. The constraint is therefore not the human reservoir itself: it is the training and support capacity to stagger these flows without waste or destruction of existing competences. This is an operational challenge, not a demographic wall.

Critical value chains and industrial dependencies

Industrial sovereignty is not measured solely by the presence of factories on the territory, but by the mastery of value chains in their entirety. Final production located in France but dependent on foreign components, raw materials, or technologies remains vulnerable. The objective is to identify critical dependencies at each link in the chain (extraction, transformation, components, software, maintenance) and to progressively reduce those that compromise national autonomy. The Planning Commission monitors this reduction, prioritizes vulnerabilities, and proposes corrective solutions in consultation with industrial and agricultural actors.

Critical materials and industrial sovereignty

Dependence on critical materials is one of the most underestimated strategic vulnerabilities of the French economy. Rare earths, lithium, cobalt, gallium, germanium: these metals are indispensable to virtually all modern industrial technologies, from defense electronics to batteries, through permanent magnets, semiconductors, and energy production equipment. Without them, no sovereign reindustrialization is possible.
Dependence on China in this area is massive and documented: 70% of global extraction and 85 to 95% of refining and processing. This concentration is not the result of chance but of a deliberate strategy pursued over several decades. In November 2025, China ceased supplying rare earths to its usual customers, and European companies suspended their production due to supply shortages. This is not a risk hypothesis. It is a documented fact.

French assets - a real potential still poorly known

France is not without resources in the face of this dependence. It possesses a set of concrete assets that justify an offensive sovereign strategy on critical materials.
The first asset is the lithium of the Allier: one of the five largest deposits in the world, discovered thanks to an existing kaolin quarry in the Massif Central. Exploratory drilling is underway. This deposit represents an opportunity for direct sovereignty over batteries and electric vehicles, two strategic industrial sectors for the coming decades. Its medium-term exploitation, framed and piloted sovereignly, must be prepared now.
The second asset is the broader mining potential of the metropolitan territory and the overseas territories (Brittany, French Guiana, Polynesia), which contains modest rare earth deposits in metropolitan France but potentially significant ones in our overseas territories. This potential is still insufficiently characterized. The major mining inventory launched in 2025 by the BRGM (53 million euros over five years, financed within the framework of France 2030) covers approximately 60 critical substances compared to 22 in the previous inventory of the 1970s-1990s. Current detection techniques allow exploration of depths and areas inaccessible at the time. The Hulot law, which prohibits the exploration and exploitation of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons, does not concern critical metals: the inventory is therefore perfectly legal and underway. Its results, expected progressively over five years, constitute an indispensable sovereign base for any future exploitation decision.
The third asset, and the most strategically significant in the long term, is the potential of polymetallic sulfides in the volcanic zones of our maritime domain. These hydrothermal deposits form around underwater volcanic chimneys at depths of 1,000 to 4,000 meters. They contain copper, zinc, gold, silver, cobalt, and rare earth group metals, with concentrations superior to those of many mines currently exploited on land. France possesses precisely the volcanic zones most favorable to their formation (Wallis-and-Futuna, the Antilles, Saint-Paul and Amsterdam) within an EEZ of 11 million km². The sovereign position is clear: massively advance research to obtain precise answers on technical feasibility, environmental impacts on hydrothermal vent ecosystems, and real industrial potential. No exploitation decision can be taken before having these answers. But financing this research is an absolute priority; allowing other powers to map our seabed in our place would be a major strategic fault.
The fourth lever is sovereign recycling: the short-term operational response. Rare earths are present in end-of-life electronic equipment (low-energy bulbs, screens, electric vehicles, defense equipment). A national critical metals recycling sector, actively developed under the supervision of the Planning Commission, reduces dependence on imports without waiting for the results of mineral exploration. This is the fastest path toward partial sovereignty over these materials.

National industrial policy

Industrial refoundation requires an assumed industrial policy, piloted by the State and articulated with the new institutions. This policy breaks with the dogma of public neutrality and laissez-faire. The State is not destined to produce everything; it sets a course, secures the conditions of production, and guarantees that industrial choices serve the national interest rather than exclusively financial or extraterritorial logics. Innovation and R&D are integrated as strategic levers of sovereignty: an industry that innovates is an industry that cannot easily be replaced.

Articulation between civilian industry and defense

Industrial sovereignty implies a close articulation between civilian industry and defense. The great industrial powers have always known how to circulate innovations, competences, and capacities between these two spheres. A solid defense industrial and technological base irrigates the entire productive economy, while a high-performing civilian industry strengthens military autonomy. This synergy is a determining factor of power, resilience, and strategic credibility.

The productive sovereignty indicator and its monitoring

Reindustrialization is not an end in itself. Its ultimate objective is the progressive restoration of France's capacity to cover its own consumption through its own production, where such coverage is physically and economically possible. Certain imports are structurally irreducible - raw materials geologically absent from the territory, agricultural products not cultivable in our climates, fossil fuels pending transition to algofuels. For everything else, France must tend toward the elimination of all avoidable dependence.

A combined global and sectoral indicator

The Planning Commission, in conjunction with the HCEP, monitors two levels of indicators annually: - a global national coverage indicator: ratio between French production and French consumption of manufactured goods, corrected for clearly identified irreducible imports. This is the political steering indicator, published annually and accessible to all. - sectoral indicators: one indicator per strategic sector (food, energy, health and pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, electronics, construction materials, chemicals, textiles, automotive, digital). The list of monitored sectors is revised every five years by the Planning Commission.
Sectoral monitoring serves to detect targeted decouplings: a stable overall rate can mask the degradation of a critical sector, compensated by the progression of another. It is the sectoral decoupling that must be identified and addressed, not the average.

Trajectory: monotonic growth as a principle

The objective is not a fixed final figure but a monotonically growing trajectory. Each year, the national coverage rate - global and sectoral - must progress or at minimum remain stable. A decline is an alert signal that automatically triggers an evaluation procedure. This logic of trajectory rather than numerical target avoids two pitfalls: the demagoguery of the round figure ("90% made in France") that proves untenable under analysis, and the slackening once a target is reached. Productive sovereignty is a permanent discipline, not a finish line.

Automatic triggering of HCEP evaluation

The alert mechanism is graduated: - Any decline recorded over one year, global or sectoral, automatically triggers an HCEP note: a short public analysis of the causes of the decline (cyclical shock, sector failure, shift in consumption, etc.) - A decline of more than two percentage points over one year, or any decline recorded over two consecutive years, triggers a full HCEP evaluation, with an obligation for a public government response within six weeks according to the general mechanism detailed in the institutional workstream.
These evaluations are not sanctions: they are requirements of transparency. The government remains sovereign in its response: it may accept the HCEP's recommendation, deviate from it, or reject it. But it does so publicly, setting out its reasons, before the nation which draws the political consequences.

Suspension clause in the event of major crisis

The monotonically growing trajectory is a permanent principle. It nonetheless admits an explicit clause of temporary suspension in the event of a major crisis recognized as such by the reformed Senate: pandemic, national natural disaster, armed conflict, structural energy crisis. This recognition of crisis cannot be decided by the government alone: it requires an absolute majority vote of the reformed Senate, public and reasoned. The suspension is limited to the duration of the crisis and its direct consequences, and is accompanied by a return-to-trajectory plan that is itself evaluated by the HCEP.
This clause prevents a temporary crisis from being used as a grounds for the project's failure. It also prevents "crisis" from becoming a permanent pretext for loosening sovereign discipline. Both pitfalls are neutralized by the same requirement: the crisis must be publicly recognized, reasoned, and the return to trajectory must be scheduled.
Industrial reconquest is therefore not a sectoral project: it is a national project. It conditions France's capacity to decide freely, to protect its population, and to carry weight in a world that has once again become brutally conflictual. Without industry, there is neither lasting sovereignty nor real independence.