The year 2025 will not go down in French industrial history as a year of shock. There was no wave of massive plant closures, no brutal collapse in industrial employment, no spectacular signal comparable to the great phases of deindustrialisation in the past. And yet, to conclude that French industry is doing well would be a serious analytical mistake. 2025 marks a quieter, but far more dangerous rupture: a break in trajectory. The industrial base is still standing, but momentum has been lost. Not through destruction, but through abstention.
On paper, the indicators remain reassuring. Industrial employment has declined slightly year-on-year, without triggering a visible social crisis. The number of industrial sites has not collapsed. Some openings and extensions still exist, but they are far fewer than between 2021 and 2023. Taken individually, these signals call for caution. Taken together, they tell a different story: an industry that is not disappearing, but no longer projecting itself forward.
This is what makes 2025 a pivotal year. French industry is not collapsing because it has entered a phase of brutal closures. It is eroding because structurally decisive choices are no longer being made. The real weak signal of the year is neither employment nor the number of factories, but productive investment. Consolidated data on heavy industrial CAPEX will only be available in 2026, but leading indicators already converge. The Banque de France’s business surveys show a clear slowdown in productive investment projects. Sectoral federations report postponed or downsized projects. On the ground, industrial players speak of investment committees that no longer arbitrate.
In practical terms, this translates into new production lines that are technically validated but financially frozen, site extensions planned to support growth that remain on paper, and deep modernisation projects pushed back by several years. Industrial companies continue to invest, but differently: retrofitting rather than building, defensive automation rather than expansion, short and reversible projects rather than fifteen-year industrial bets. French industry no longer invests to grow. It invests to hold its ground.
The map of industrial jobs “at risk” published in autumn 2025 by Les Échos makes visible what aggregated statistics still struggle to capture. It identifies dozens of industrial sites, representing several tens of thousands of potentially affected jobs, spread across the entire country and touching all major industrial pillars: metallurgy, chemicals, agri-industry, automotive, energy, packaging, biotech. What stands out is not the scale of a localised crisis, but its diffusion. No single industrial basin is collapsing while others thrive. Instead, we see a multitude of points, of different sizes, across very different territories. This is not a sectoral crisis. It is a systemic phenomenon.
More importantly, most of the situations identified are not outright closures. They are gradual workforce reductions, frozen projects, sites placed under strategic review. In other words, the phase that precedes exit. This is what makes the deindustrialisation of 2025 specific: it makes no noise. It settles in quietly.
Not all industrial non-decisions are alike, and 2025 reveals a clear underlying mechanism. Growth projects are the first to be cut back: new production lines, capacity increases, partial relocations that are politically encouraged but economically fragile. Next come decarbonisation projects, often frozen despite their strategic relevance, because they combine energy, financial and regulatory risks. Finally, industrial R&D projects are postponed, not for lack of innovation or skills, but because priority is given to margin preservation and short-term cash flow. Each decision is rational when taken individually. Collectively, they produce deferred deindustrialisation.
Three factors explain this blockage, but they do not weigh equally. The first, by far the most decisive, is energy. Even after stabilisation, energy costs remain structurally higher and, above all, far more volatile than before 2020. For an energy-intensive industry, it is not the average price that blocks a fifteen-year investment, but the inability to secure a credible price cap over the project’s lifetime. Several projects involving new furnaces, process electrification or heavy modernisation have been explicitly postponed for this reason.
The second factor is political and regulatory instability, particularly pronounced in 2025. Regulation itself is not new, and industrial actors know how to deal with constraints. What creates the blockage is unpredictability. Taxation, energy frameworks, environmental standards, extra-financial reporting: building a ten- or fifteen-year industrial business plan becomes a speculative exercise. France is not perceived as anti-industry, but as unreadable.
The third factor is regulatory overload, which acts as an amplifier. For an SME or mid-sized industrial company with two to three hundred employees, CSRD compliance already represents tens of thousands of euros and a significant mobilisation of management time. This is not the primary cause of investment freezes, but it adds friction in an already degraded context.
Behind these arbitrations lie very concrete human realities. In many industrial sites, plant managers maintain existing equipment without being able to launch projects that were validated on paper two or three years earlier. Hiring is frozen, training slowed, subcontractors survive on short-term renewed contracts. Local authorities see extension projects quietly disappear from their agendas. Nothing closes brutally, but nothing starts anymore. Territories feel this inertia long before statistics reflect it.
This dynamic is not unique to France. Germany, Italy and Belgium are also experiencing an industrial slowdown. But the European comparison is unfavourable. Some countries now offer greater energy visibility, through industrial PPAs or guarantee mechanisms, as well as political stability perceived as stronger. For comparable projects, investment arbitrations no longer automatically tilt in favour of France.
If 2025 was the year of waiting, 2026 will be a year of responsibility. It will no longer be about commenting on trends, but about choosing. Securing industrial energy over several years through concrete hedging mechanisms, stabilising regulatory trajectories to restore visibility for productive investment, and conditioning any new standard on a real and public industrial impact assessment: these are not ideological choices, but matters of economic coherence.
Deindustrialisation through non-decision is the most comfortable form in the short term. It creates no visible crisis and no open conflict. But it is also the most destructive in the medium term, because it erases industry without ever watching it disappear. In 2025, France did not destroy its industry. It stopped choosing it. 2026 will determine whether this renunciation was temporary—or the sign of a lasting shift.