The French Obsession with Lagging Behind. An Analysis of the Rhetoric about Technological Backwardness

For several years now the theme of the decline of France, far from being new, has come back into fashion with the publication of various alarmist books. From Nicolas Baverez to Alain Minc or Jacques Julliard, to mention just a few, the “declinologists” are regularly in the news in France, highlighting how far France is lagging behind the other industrialized countries. But what exactly is this supposed lag? And lagging behind with respect to what?
Julie Bouchard, whose doctoral thesis was on this subject, shares her main conclusions with us here. Having carefully examined the rhetoric regarding French backwardness in science and technology, she shows how much the assessment of it varies with space and time, and how it serves as a means of expressing particular concerns.
She goes on to identify four main “ideal standards” in what is said about the French failure to keep up in the field of science and technology. The first is based on the idea of scientific progress for its own sake (hence the need for systematic efforts to overcome any deficiency in this regard); the second relates to interdependence, so that backwardness is defined in terms of the interdependence among disciplines or between science and society; the third is based on international comparisons; and the last relates to administrative or managerial objectives. These four standards coexist in time and space, Julie Bouchard concludes, but in recent years the main emphasis has tended to be on the last two: international comparisons and with reference to some predetermined objective.