France's war on red tape is going nowhere
Every French president since Mitterrand has pledged to cut the regulatory burden. In 2025, the country added more than one million words of new law.
The promise of simplification has become an admission of defeat.
At a Glance
France’s regulatory corpus now stands at nearly 268,000 regulatory articles and more than 99,000 statutory provisions currently in force, according to the Secrétariat général du gouvernement — France’s central government coordination body
In 2025 alone, French law grew by more than one million words — roughly the length of all seven Harry Potter novels combined
Regulatory simplification has been a stated priority of every French president for decades. None has managed to reverse the trend
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
A regulatory corpus without a ceiling
Reading the entirety of French law in force would take more than 110 days of uninterrupted reading. That figure, published by the Secrétariat général du gouvernement, no longer shocks anyone — and that numbness is itself part of the problem. Regulatory inflation has become so chronic that it is no longer perceived as an anomaly. It is a structural feature of the French state.
The accumulation is constant, annual, and meticulously documented. Each year, new decrees, ministerial orders, and circulars layer on top of an already saturated legal architecture. In 2025, the net addition alone topped one million words — a volume that defies comprehension for texts ostensibly designed to govern the daily lives of citizens and businesses.
For small and medium-sized businesses, the cost is tangible. Compliance officers, legal consultants, and administrative paperwork have become fixed overheads in sectors where they were once unknown. A fishmonger fined for failing to display the Latin name of their products, or a building renovation project blocked to protect a swallow’s nest — these are not anecdotes. They are the visible face of a system that produces rules faster than it can assess their real-world cost.
The norm as a political reflex
What this phenomenon reveals is less a technical failure than a deeply rooted cultural instinct. Benjamin Morel, a constitutional law scholar and associate professor at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University, captures the paradox precisely: everyone denounces regulatory excess, yet the first instinct when a problem arises — whether in civil society, local government, or trade associations — is to turn to the state and demand new rules. The norm is simultaneously the symptom and the imagined cure.
This dynamic suggests that simplification cannot be purely a matter of political will. It would require a deeper transformation in the relationship between social actors and the regulatory state — which could make it one of the most structurally resistant reform agendas of the Fifth Republic, France’s current constitutional order established in 1958.
From absurd examples to systemic failure
A portion of the rules applicable in France would appear to originate at the European level — and their transposition into national law could, in some cases, be accompanied by additional obligations that amplify the layering effect, though the precise scope of this mechanism remains to be documented rigorously. What is clear is that Brussels and Paris each contribute to a ratchet that moves in only one direction.
The result is a body of law that has effectively decoupled from the lived experience of those it governs. When the gap between regulatory intent and regulatory impact becomes visible — through absurd enforcement cases or administrative paralysis — it feeds public cynicism without generating the political energy needed to address the root cause.
A presidential promise in perpetual renewal
Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, made regulatory simplification a signature of his political project. As his presidency draws toward its close, the outcome mirrors that of every predecessor: the regulatory machine keeps running, driven by ministerial, parliamentary, and European dynamics whose overlap could explain the structural ineffectiveness of top-down simplification mandates.
The issue resurfaces, with reliable periodicity, in the platforms of declared candidates for the 2027 French presidential election — with candidates across the spectrum having already seized on regulatory reform as a talking point. Whether any of them will have the institutional tools, and the political capital, to break a cycle the Fifth Republic has never interrupted remains an open question.
The bottom line
France produces law the way other countries accumulate debt: continuously, without a binding withdrawal mechanism, under the assumption that more is better.
No government appears to have found, at this stage, the equivalent of a normative “golden rule” — the principle that any new regulation requires the removal of an existing one.
The United States has long experimented with such constraints. The Regulatory Flexibility Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the impact of new rules on small businesses, and sunset clauses — provisions that automatically expire a regulation unless actively renewed — are tools that place the burden of justification on the rule-maker, not the regulated. France has no comparable binding architecture. Until it does, the promise of simplification will remain what it has always been: a statement of intent without an enforcement mechanism.
Sources: franceinfo · Secrétariat général du gouvernement