France doesn't appear at all in the contemporary international literature on State reform, so that, we could wonder if it almost exists. Furthermore, the process is facing internal strong critics from everywhere, arguing on the slowness and little interest of an outdated process, by comparison with what had been done on the rest of the OECD countries. Now, as the historic analysis demonstrates, State reform is among the oldest topics of the French public debate, whose origins belong to the Revolution of 1789: discussions on political rationalization, started at the very beginning of the XIXth century but wouldn't encounter real success before the Fifth Republic by 1958; the same occurred regarding the ideas on decentralization, only really implemented in the last 80s and 90s, as well as the administrative deconcentration; it also took more than a century and half to the revolutionary principles on civil service to get effectiveness, after the Second World War; last but not least, the Administrative Law, directly born from the Revolution, has always been marked by a large and profound evolution, showing at the same time, up to nowadays, a great innovative capacity. In other words, yes, the State in France is moving; it always knew how to adapt and reform itself, although on a slow and somewhat chaotic way on a lot of aspects. Probably, the invisibility of the French State reform process would come from the domination of the actual paradigms linked with the New Public Management. On the contrary, the focuses of the reform elected by France don't correspond to the best shared ones and, by the way, don't appear to be that relevant. All this is interesting since, parallely to these orientations, the French process for State reform had been marked in the past by very close preoccupations to the ones of the promoters of the NPM. And this, decades before the 90s. Indeed, in the first half of the XXth century, identical criteria and considerations were constituting the core thought of numerous internal groups to the French public administration, whose conceptual modernity has to be quoted. Unfortunately, they didn't encounter the success. The State reform process would have suffered a great instability and uncertainty in its management. So that, the interesting thought and efforts initiated in the early 30s, almost never got implemented. It is only in the very recent years that the necessary legal tools for that, the adequate structural changes and some opportune new practices were introduced. Possibly, they will permit the process to get out from the nowhere, and France to join back its international partners, now closer to their strategic priorities and shared methods. In that sense, this new focus would have confirm that one of the consequences of the globalization is to smooth the originality of any process out of the dominant focus.
