A hundred and twelve pages, fifty precisely dated decisions, and a thesis stated without hedging: “Ce déclin est d’abord une histoire française. En cinquante ans, ces cinquante mauvaises décisions expliquent, sujet par sujet, la chute.” (“This decline is first of all a French story. Over fifty years, these fifty bad decisions explain the fall, subject by subject.”) That is how the Institut Thomas More sums up, in the introduction to its Rapport 36, the thesis of the whole document. It is coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, and was published in June 2026 under the title 1975-2025: les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France (1975-2025: the 50 decisions that sank France). This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report, decision by decision, theme by theme. This first installment presents the object itself: who wrote it, by what method, and what it claims to demonstrate.
A think tank that does not hide its colors
The Institut Thomas More describes itself as a “liberal-conservative” think tank, based in Paris and Brussels. The report does not hide this and openly states its horizon: it positions itself explicitly “dans la perspective de l’élection présidentielle de 2027” (“with the 2027 presidential election in view”), and its authors state: “l’Institut Thomas More présentera cet automne ses 50 décisions pour redresser la France” (“the Institut Thomas More will present, this autumn, its 50 decisions to turn France around”). This positioning is worth stating up front - it is what allows the reader to situate the document, not to dismiss it.
Three names sign the coordination. Jean de Belot, a board member of the Institute, was editor-in-chief of Les Echos and editorial director of Le Figaro before running the consultancy Aria Partners since 2007; in the report he describes himself as belonging to the “génération honte” (“generation of shame”) - the one that inherited, at Georges Pompidou’s death, a country it then watched decline without managing to stop it. Tarick Dali, also a board member, trained as a journalist at Le Figaro and L’Usine Nouvelle before working in the automotive industry (Valeo, Volkswagen France), and has authored two books on Europe and ecology. Jean-Thomas Lesueur, managing director of the Institut Thomas More, oversees the team’s coverage of French political life, institutional gridlock and decentralization.
The report also thanks “about twenty experts” from both the public and private sectors, whose names are not published - at their own request, the authors note.
A thesis of accumulation, not a historical accident
The central thesis fits in one sentence: it is not globalization, the oil shocks or the financial crisis alone that explain France’s decline, but an accumulation of French choices, made with full knowledge of their consequences, over fifty years. The report does not deny external factors - it even calls them “colossal” - but argues that in 1975, “nothing was decided yet” and that “the story could have turned out differently.”
The choice of starting point is not neutral: according to the report, France in 1975 was emerging from the postwar boom years prosperous, industrial, sovereign, its diplomatic voice respected. Fifty years later, the authors draw the opposite picture - a country they describe as on the verge of ruptures that are “economic and financial, but also societal, cultural, religious, demographic, geographic, and security-related.” It is this contrast, between the France of 1975 and that of 2025, that structures the entire document.
To support this claim, the report’s introduction sets out a framework of four “insecurities” it says have grown over the period: material insecurity - economic and social, first - , then physical and judicial insecurity, political insecurity, which the authors tie to the perceived failure of the European project, and finally what they call “ontological” insecurity. This last one is the most directly identitarian and civilizational of the four: the report denounces leaders’ refusal to name “la guerre, pourtant documentée, que nous livrent plusieurs instances de l’islam radical” (“the war - well documented - that several instances of radical Islam are waging against us”), and it coins the term « minocratie » - a portmanteau of “minority” and “démocratie,” roughly “minority-rule” - to describe what it presents as a democratic inversion, writing that “la priorité aux minorités permet à celles-ci d’imposer leurs seuls objectifs et intérêts au peuple entier” (“giving priority to minorities lets them impose only their own goals and interests on the entire people”). These are the report’s own words, not this series’ - but a reader who wants to know what kind of document they are about to read needs to see them from the introduction on.
The method: one decision, one law
Formally, the method is chronological and designed to be checkable. Each of the fifty decisions is precisely dated, tied to an identified law or regulation, and placed under the presidency and government in office at the time - from the loi Haby establishing the collège unique (comprehensive lower secondary school) on 11 July 1975, under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, to the EVARS program on sex education, on 3 February 2025, under Emmanuel Macron. Between the two, the report’s summary table lists fifty entries spanning six presidencies and roughly twenty governments, grouped by the authors into ten themes: democracy and decentralization, school and cultural transmission, economy and agriculture, energy and environment, the state, taxation and public finances, immigration, the social model, health, security and justice, sovereignty and Europe.
This decision-by-law architecture is what sets the report apart from a simple opinion essay: each claim is, in principle, backed by a date and a text the reader can check independently. It is also the raw material this series will revisit, installment by installment, to discuss each decision on its merits.
Twelve lessons, a cascading diagnosis
Beyond the inventory, the report devotes an analytical chapter to a cross-reading of the fifty decisions. The authors say so themselves, plainly: “Trois erreurs, trois illusions, quatre menaces, une alerte et un espoir : nous proposons douze courts enseignements, à méditer par quiconque souhaite préparer le redressement de notre pays.” (“Three errors, three illusions, four threats, one warning and one hope: we offer twelve short lessons, for anyone who wants to help prepare our country’s recovery.”)
The three errors, according to the authors, concern how France read the major shifts reshaping the world: globalization seen as “a virtue in itself” rather than as the return of power politics between nations; a European project whose nature changed, from the 1986 Single European Act to the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, without the sovereignty ceded being matched by any real common sovereignty; and the refusal - documented, they argue, as early as the 1989 Creil headscarf affair - to treat Islam as simultaneously religious, legal and political in nature. This last reading sits among the most disputed positions in France’s public debate over Islam and secularism.
The three illusions concern what the state can actually do: an inconsistency, the report argues, between the international commitments France signed and its domestic economic choices; the continuous expansion of spending and regulation without any gain in efficiency, illustrated by the trajectory of public debt and civil-service headcount; and a kind of legislative restlessness - the report counts, for instance, nearly twenty school reforms and more than twenty-five texts on public-safety matters over fifty years - which, the authors say, paralyzes more than it resolves.
The four threats target democracy itself: a sense of democratic dispossession tied to the transfer of powers to the European Union and to the way the 2005 referendum on the EU constitutional treaty was circumvented; a loss of trust in public action on immigration, education and criminal justice; a weakening of local democracy, from the first wave of decentralization laws to the 2015 loi NOTRe; and, according to the report, a responsibility it places chiefly on political leaders rather than on citizens. The document closes on a final lesson framed as grounds for optimism: proportional to the scale of the errors, it argues, is the scale of the potential rebound.
What the next seven installments will open up
This first installment does not discuss any single decision in detail - that is precisely the purpose of the seven that follow. Each will take up one or more of the report’s ten themes - school and transmission, immigration and integration, economy and taxation, security and justice, health, sovereignty and Europe, institutions and decentralization - to examine what the decisions selected by the Institut Thomas More actually say, what they leave out, and how they hold up - or don’t - against other readings of the same half-century. The eighth and final installment will be the only one to offer an overall assessment: until then, this series remains a reading, not an endorsement.
What makes this report solid - and what calls for caution
Two things are worth saying, and they do not cancel each other out.
First: the report rests, decision by decision, on identifiable public sources - the Cour des comptes (national audit office), INSEE, DREES, the OECD, the Banque de France, Eurostat - and on dated, verifiable pieces of legislation. This is not a pamphlet without footnotes: it is documented work, and this series will be able to check it, piece by piece, against its own sources.
Second: this is an avowedly partisan think tank, writing less than a year before a presidential election, whose diagnostic chapter - as seen in the “war” it attributes to “several instances of radical Islam,” or in the term « minocratie » - carries an identitarian and, at times, polemical vocabulary. An informed reader needs to be able to read documented work without adopting its framing. That is exactly what this series sets out to do, installment by installment: verify, contextualize, and, where warranted, push back - decision by decision.
This eight-part series offers an outside reading of the report - it is not a publication of the Institut Thomas More. Read the full report (PDF, 112 pages, in French) - 1975-2025 : les 50 décisions qui ont coulé la France, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, Institut Thomas More, June 2026.
