This book has at least three merits: - It situates historically and compared the situation of France in explaining the very synthetic manner reasons for economic decline, political and diplomatic. You can always ramble on about some questionable judgments on the choice of criteria and its ideological presuppositions, remains the beam of cumulative evidence it stands is edifying. - Yet it is a antifataliste advocacy with the conviction that France is reformable but one hand the inability of the "elite" intellectual, political, trade union and media has come out of the old reading grids to understand the world and also the inability of gouverants imagine and create the conditions for reform courageous, results in a true anemia which eventually threatens France being relegated to third place. - It is certainly easy to criticize and propose solutions on paper than to govern, yet this book offers multiple tracks and clearly demonstrates the logic blocking any giving an alternative. Still, while we live a radical transformation during economic changes and who put géopololitique undermined the means and solutions to the old order, one wonders how the French attached to a generous welfare state will be able to reinvent a model that guarantees social rights and the conditions for prosperity in a environnememnt globalized. Historical parallels drawn up by Baverez want to warn us, we benefit from an opportunity to seize following the political shock of 21 April, there is a courageous reform is according to him a coming revolution or the flat spectrum extréme right. Beyond the warning to the right, this book will finally not be far enough define the conditions for an overhaul of the "French pact" and its republican ideology "he draws action levels sasn think possible, but in the underlying ideology. Brief lacks the French right, what Républicians Americans have managed to do with their "think tanks" neoconservatives, reinvent a political ideology, economic and compléte strategic and credible. Without intellectual revolution, there will be no political revolution.