Christian Saint-Etienne has been a chair professor of industrial economics in France’s National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, since 2009. Prior to that, he taught for 20 years at Paris-Dauphine University. He is the recipient of numerous academic awards, most notably the Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize, of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, in 2012.
He is the author of Le Joker européen and, in 2013, of the highly successful France: état d’urgence, both published by Editions Odile Jacob.

In his previous book, Christian Saint-Etienne deconstructed the vicious mechanism, at work for many years, that explains the profound crisis France is experiencing. He blamed the inadequacy and insufficiency of the means used to pull France out of the crisis and reserved his most virulent criticism for the major strategic error of the 1990s: runaway deindustrialisation.
How can France make the grade once more? Not by trying to defend at all costs the remains of its old production system but by resolutely participating in the third industrial revolution, which is now underway: by capitalising on innovative enterprises and mobilising the necessary skills and investments, in order to deliver products and services that respond to new forms of consumer demand.
France was a leader in both of the earlier industrial revolutions. The author warns that it is in the process of missing the third one. If the French don’t react soon they will lose their purchasing power.

• The author’s earlier book, France: état d’urgence, published in January 2013, was very successful.
• In these times of austerity, the question is: how to recover economic growth?
• A detailed roadmap showing how a new economic policy of reindustrialisation could enable France to recover.