This report is now the subject of an eight-part dossier on this site. A full reading of the document, decision by decision, with verified sources: 1975-2025: France through its decisions.
A liberal-conservative think tank has just published what its authors themselves call “the history of our collective decline”: 112 pages, fifty precisely dated political choices, and a thesis that is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking.
A Structural Diagnosis, Not a Partisan Assessment
The Thomas More Institute report, coordinated by Jean de Belot, Tarick Dali, and Jean-Thomas Lesueur, immediately rejects the usual explanations. Globalization, oil shocks, financial crisis, forced deindustrialization: these are all real factors, but insufficient, according to the authors, to account for the scale of France’s falling behind. Their thesis is sharper:
« French decline is not just an accident of history; it is first and foremost the product of a succession of French political decisions. »
The document, published in June 2026 under the reference Report 36, covers the period 1975-2025 and organizes its fifty decisions into ten themes:
- democracy, institutions, and decentralization
- school, culture, and transmission
- economy, industry, and agriculture
- energy and environment
- State, taxation, and public finance
- immigration and integration
- social model and family
- health
- security and justice
- sovereignty and Europe
This thematic architecture distinguishes the report from a simple partisan indictment. By simultaneously covering the educational, economic, and institutional spheres, it attempts to establish causal links between choices that public debate usually treats in isolation.
1975, Year Zero: When Choice Was Still Possible
The starting point - 1975 - is not chosen at random. According to the report, France was then emerging from the Trente Glorieuses (the thirty postwar boom years) with a powerful industry, a respected diplomacy, a solid state, and real sovereignty. Nothing, the authors insist, was set in stone: « the scenario could have turned out differently ». The exogenous upheavals of these decades - globalization, the computer, digital, and artificial intelligence revolutions - were, they acknowledge, « colossal » and « inevitably redistributed the positions of nations ». But France, instead of repairing its weaknesses, allegedly aggravated them, « decision after decision ».
The first targeted decision is the single middle school system (collège unique), established by the Haby Act of July 11, 1975. By eliminating differentiated tracks and delaying academic orientation, this choice, according to the report, ushered in a lasting « leveling down ». PISA assessment results are cited in support: France ranks in the average, but far behind the top countries, with documented weaknesses in spelling and reading comprehension in primary school.
Schooling appears several times in the list of the fifty selected decisions:
- the Lang decree on « all things cultural »
- the 1989 Jospin Act, placing the student at the center of the system
- the 2013 Peillon Act
- the 2025 EVARS program on sexuality in schools
For the Thomas More Institute, the National Education system has progressively abandoned its mission of transmission to become, in its words, « an ideological laboratory ».
Three Analytical Errors, Three State Illusions
Beyond the inventory, the report identifies three major analytical errors that allegedly guided all the decisions made over half a century:
- Viewing globalization as a virtue in itself and as the end of nations, when it was « on the contrary, their zenith » - with the authors now noting « the return of empires and nations, after having disarmed our own ».
- Misunderstanding the changing nature of European integration: from the Single European Act of 1986 to the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, certain essential sovereignties were allegedly transferred to a community level that has « largely failed, organizing a real fool’s bargain for Europeans ».
- Refusing to recognize the specific nature of Islam - defined in the report as « at once a religion, a legal code, and a political authority » - and thus « the unprecedented nature of immigration of Muslim origin ».
To these three errors, according to the authors, are added three persistent illusions about what the State can do, with the report highlighting « the incompatibility between the external commitments entered into » and the internal choices actually made.
Institutional Dispossession: When Decisions Escape the Ballot Box
One of the common threads of the report is the question of the democratic legitimacy of the decisions made. Several of the fifty selected choices correspond to commitments made within supranational frameworks - the European Union, international treaties - which have progressively reduced the room for maneuver of the national legislator.
According to the authors, the European trajectory deserves particular scrutiny: what was presented as a deepening of cooperation between sovereign nations allegedly led, treaty after treaty, to a transfer of powers to technocratic bodies with little or no direct electoral oversight. This finding aligns with a broader critique, shared by very diverse political currents, regarding the democratic deficit of EU institutions.
The report’s analytical framework is explicitly structural here: it is not isolated individuals who are blamed, but a decision-making logic that has become independent of the vote - a de facto technocracy, both national and supranational, that has progressively substituted its own priorities for those expressed at the ballot box.
The Continuity of Decision-Making Elites
The Thomas More Institute report highlights a fact often obscured in public debate: the fifty selected decisions were made under alternating political majorities, both left and right. The single middle school system was a late Gaullist reform; major progressive educational laws spanned presidential terms without interruption; the policy of opening up to migratory flows continued under governments of opposing leanings.
This continuity suggests that the problem is not reduced to a classic political alternation, but points to what the report calls an elite consensus - senior civil servants, experts from international institutions, academic and media circles - who have shared, over half a century, the same assumptions about globalization, European integration, and the educational model.
« No credible recovery can be envisioned without an objective and comprehensive diagnosis of the causes of our collapse. »
— Thomas More Institute, Report 36, June 2026
A Counter-Narrative to the Consensus of “Progress”
The political value of the report lies less in each individual decision than in the serialization of these choices over fifty years. By documenting them theme by theme, based on « unquestionable public and private sources » according to its authors, the Thomas More Institute produces a counter-narrative tool against the dominant narrative that presents France’s decline as an external inevitability - globalization, Asian competition, the subprime crisis.
This type of historical and political synthesis is rare in the French intellectual landscape, where conservative-leaning think tanks remain fewer and less endowed than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts or large subsidized progressive institutions. Whether or not one shares all of its conclusions, the report poses a legitimate question: who decided, in the name of what, and with what verifiable consequences?
The answer to this question, if it were to be seriously debated, would require major political parties to agree to submit their own past decisions to this type of audit. This is precisely what the media and partisan consensus makes difficult - and what explains, perhaps, why a think tank, rather than a parliamentary commission, took it upon itself.
The full report (112 pages) is available for free access on the Thomas More Institute website.
