A documented analysis of forty years of sell-offs, technology transfers and industrial espionage that have methodically dismantled French economic sovereignty.
For several decades, France, once a leading industrial and technological power, has been methodically stripped of its national champions. Through choice, cowardice or personal interest, successive political decisions have led to selling off French excellence at a discount and handing our strategic industries over to foreign powers.
This organized plundering owes nothing to chance. It is the result of a policy of surrender pursued over forty years, under different political majorities but with remarkable continuity in the outcome: the loss of the industrial, technological and strategic sovereignty of a great nation.
What you will find in this analysis
A presidency-by-presidency map of the sales, mergers and transfers of ownership that sealed the fate of our industrial champions: Péchiney (1988), Arcelor (2006), Gemplus (2006), Alcatel (2006 and then 2016), Technip (2017), Alstom Énergie (2015), Latécoère (2019), OMMIC (2019), Sanofi and many others. The buyers are identified (United States, India, the Netherlands, Finland, the United Kingdom, Australia, foreign investment funds), and the strategic consequences are spelled out (Arabelle turbines for nuclear power plants, aeronautical Li-Fi technology, space semiconductors).
The analysis also addresses Chinese technology theft as documented by the French intelligence services (DGSE, DGSI): the case of the two DGSE officers convicted in 2017-2020 for handing secrets to Beijing, the LinkedIn operation targeting 4,000 French executives, the infiltrations at Dassault, the Safran/General Electric affair surrounding the LEAP turbofan engine, the coordinated cyberattacks against Airbus and its subcontractors by the "Turbine Panda" group, the Valeo affair and the systematic use of French universities as entry points.
A final section looks back at the removal of the crime of high treason from the French Constitution by Constitutional Law No. 2007-238 of February 23, 2007, and at the responsibility shared between elected political leaders and the voters who successively brought them to power.
Why this analysis now
Taking stock of what has been lost is not an act of nostalgia or resentment. It is a political prerequisite. You cannot restore what you have not first named and understood. This analysis is directly consistent with the Plan de Rupture et de Restauration de l’État and with theanalysis of American influence on European integration : restoring French sovereignty means facing up to the scale of what has been given away.
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