French deindustrialization is no longer an abstract and debatable concern. It’s a massive fact: the share of manufacturing in our GDP has fallen to around 9.6%, when it is still around 18% in Germany, 15% in Italy and 13% in Sweden. So the problem is not just that the world has changed. The problem is that other European countries, exposed to the same shocks, have resisted better. It must be said clearly: our industrial decline is not inevitable. It is above all a French responsibility.
Of course, those who denounce exogenous factors, such as Chinese strategy, are right. Beijing is not just playing trade: it is pursuing power politics. Massive subsidies, control of value chains, organized overcapacity, artificially low prices: from solar panels to batteries, China uses its productive apparatus as an economic weapon. When over-subsidized products arrive in Europe at prices that our companies cannot keep up with, this is not fair competition. It is an industrial war fought by other means.
Those who point to intra-European competition are not wrong either. In the single market, factories compare, costs are arbitrated and investments move. When a group chooses Spain, Romania or Poland rather than a French site, it is not out of disenchantment with the flag. This is often because our productive environment is heavier, more expensive, slower, more uncertain.
A worrying delay
But these explanations should no longer serve as a refuge. Our neighbors, such as Germany, Italy, or Sweden, live in the same European market, are subject to the same Chinese pressure, the same standards, the same technological breakthroughs. However, they have better preserved their productive base. For what ? Because they took the concrete conditions of production more seriously: taxation, ETI, innovation, skills, regulatory stability.
The first French weakness is fiscal. You cannot reindustrialize a country by penalizing the very act of producing. But this is what France has done with, among many examples, production taxes. These taxes which hit the company even before it makes a profit: because it owns machines, occupies land, employs, invests. Even after the reductions undertaken since 2021, the handicap remains: in industry, these taxes still represented around 3.6 points of added value in France, compared to 0.4 in Germany as in the euro zone average. Rebuilding our industry with such a burden is less about strategy than blindness.
An industry that robotizes too little and takes too long to modernize its processes ends up losing productivity
The second weakness relates to our business fabric. France lacks industrial ETIs, these companies with 250 to 4,999 employees which form the backbone of a productive economy. They are large enough to export, invest and train, while remaining rooted in the territories. This is the strength of the German Mittelstand. Here again, the comparison is brutal: France has around 19 industrial ETIs per million inhabitants, compared to 52 in Germany. Behind this gap, there is less of a technical debate than a strategic failure: too few companies capable of growing without uprooting themselves.
The third weakness is technological. An industry that robotizes too little, invests too little in R&D and takes too long to modernize its processes ends up losing productivity, then competitiveness, then sovereignty. France remains around 180 robots for 10,000 industrial employees, while Germany exceeds 400, Sweden 350 and Italy 220. Our R&D effort, close to 2.2% of GDP, remains lower than that of Germany, around 3.1%, and Sweden, above 3.4%. And for our industry, the delay accumulates, then pays for itself.
The weight of our renunciations
Added to these weaknesses are bureaucracy, normative instability, authorization delays, cost of productive land, weakness of industrial apprenticeship or transmission difficulties. Together, they say one simple thing: French deindustrialization is not only the result of China, Brussels or globalization. It is above all the product of our renunciations.
France likes to talk about industry. She likes plans, slogans, announcements and big speeches. But the industry does not come back through communication. It returns when producing becomes simpler, less penalized, better financed, better trained.
Our neighbors teach us an unpleasant but useful lesson: it is possible to remain industrialized in the same world as us. The first step is not to find someone to blame. It is to accept that, to become a productive power again, France must correct what still prevents it from producing.
*Alban Magro, associate researcher at the Thomas More Institute, has just published the report “Reindustrializing France: five European lessons”a comparative analysis of industrial policy in Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland.
