French Tech has changed the French entrepreneurial landscape. She released the energy of a generation, attracted capital, encouraged innovation and brings out dozens of unicorns. This success, celebrated as a collective victory, is nevertheless based on a much more precise – and much less neutral – architecture than it seems.
The startup nation, in reality, has never been an industrial policy. It has never been designed to serve a strategy of sovereignty or reindustrialisation. It was designed to respond to a clear logic: maximizing the return on capital in a short period of time. It is not a moral criticism, it is an observation of design. The value chain has been organized to feed venture capital: rapid creation, accelerated growth, strong valuation, released in 5 to 7 years. A model of efficiency … but deeply constrained.
In this logic, which does not enter into the criteria of the Venture Capital – slow, capitalist projects, not very scalable, or too industrial – is neither funded, nor accompanied, nor mediatized. And so, it does not exist. This is how whole sections of digital or industrial sovereignty were left fallow: no major public cloud, no European semiconductor sector, no sovereign industrial bone. The market does not finance them, the dominant model does not make them desirable, and the State does not impose them.
This model was not imposed by chance. He was supported, defended, institutionalized. Lobbies, consulting firms, clubs and other think tank (proudly carrying their red rooster as a rallying sign), played an active role in its consolidation. By shaping the dominant account of innovation and promoting the figures of the VC as the central actors of progress, they helped to make venture capital and the omega of French entrepreneurial policy. This work of influence is not illegitimate. But it has systemic effects: it reduces the imagination of the possible, marginalizes alternative models, and aligns public priorities on private expectations
It is not a crisis of creativity. It is not a lack of talent. It is a framework crisis. A vision crisis. Capital structures innovation according to its objectives. However, these objectives no longer coincide with the strategic priorities of the country. Today, while ecological transition, reindustrialisation and technological autonomy are becoming vital, continue to think innovation as a series of tables amounts to being mistaken.
The most worrying is that politics has not corrected this trajectory. He accompanied it, consolidated, sometimes even sacred. The state made himself an accomplice of a model designed by investors for investors. Admittedly, it intervenes through the BPI, arrowing investments towards certain strategic sectors such as Deep Tech. But if certain orientations are judicious, they often struggle to massively mobilize the private funds. The economic model of venture capital does not always align with these long-term ambitions, slowing down the real impact of these public initiatives. Elsewhere, state choices have been more risky, as evidenced by the difficulties encountered by highly sustained companies such as Cloudwatt, Sigfox or Ynsect.
The state has distributed aid, promoted competitions, strengthened labels, but never fully assuming a real long -term strategic direction. He encouraged creation, without organizing construction. He spoke of sovereignty, without building the material conditions.
What we call today “ecosystem” is not a strategic system. It is a flow, a dynamic, a network effect. But it is not a policy. However, the subjects that matter – Critical infrastructure, health data, public artificial intelligence, secure cloud, industrial cybersecurity – require something other than pitches, decks, and roadshows.
We need a base. A technological, digital and industrial base, designed to last, to structure, to resist. A base that does not seek to seduce, but to hold. Who does not try to go out, but to anchor. This implies thinking about the long term, building sectors, pooling resources, governing innovation as a common good, and not as a portfolio of assets.
This also implies that the state resumes its role. No longer that of the benevolent catalyst, but that of the strategist (Clément Beaune if you read us). This involves choosing battles, orienting capital, laying down technological and social requirements for public investment, refusing that innovation comes down to the ability to lift. It is not a question of denying entrepreneurship. It is a question of giving him a compass.
French tech has been useful. It unlocked mechanisms, transformed from imaginations, open doors. But it can no longer, alone, take the place of technological policy. It was the story of an era carried by liquidity. Today, we need a story of power, construction, resilience.
We no longer need another startup. We need a course. Of a project. Of a state that dares to regain control. And a system that is no longer measured in valuation, but in capacity to last.
