The French government strengthens its economic security doctrine in the face of growing threats

The government wants to strengthen its control of the economic security of companies, while continuing to attract foreign investors, and published its “doctrine” on the subject on Thursday in the face of a “growing” threat which also concerns SMEs.

“Economic openness and security, I am convinced, can be complementary,” declared Minister of the Economy and Finance Roland Lescure in his opening speech at the Economic Security Conference, which is being held on Thursday in Bercy. “Investments and foreign partnerships are necessary” to “accelerate our development, our innovation capabilities,” he stressed. But “faced with threats of predation, a reactive and targeted protection system is necessary to preserve the technologies, know-how and individual capacities that will make our activity long-term,” he added.

State services processed 750 economic security alerts in 2025, a tripling compared to 2020, according to Bercy. Alerts which concern 80% SMEs, and take very varied forms: attempts to capture intellectual property, signing of unbalanced partnerships, reputational attacks, espionage, shareholder activism aimed at influencing a company's strategy.

“Our device has a defensive vocation. The idea, obviously, is not to go and attack,” the minister further underlined, also noting his “vocation to neutrality. We treat threats regardless of their origin.” A French “global doctrine” on the subject was constructed, then published on Thursday, in order to better coordinate and accelerate action between businesses and administrations.

Two thirds of investors do not come from the EU

The Directorate General of the Treasury also published, also Thursday, its annual report on the control of foreign investments in France (IEF), and reported an activity which “maintained at a high level in 2025”, with an expanded scope of application. Thus, “418 files (authorization requests, requests for prior examination and notifications of crossing the threshold of 10% of voting rights in a listed company) were submitted to the General Directorate of the Treasury, compared to 392 in 2024 and 309 in 2023”. However, almost half of these files did not require authorization. For the others, 167 investments were authorized, almost half of which “were subject to proportionate conditions imposed on the foreign investor”. Two thirds of investors come from countries outside the European Union.

The holding of this Economic Security Conference in Bercy was announced in July by the minister when submitting a parliamentary report on the subject. This report was requested in the spring by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, after the announcement of the sale of the French defense company LMB Aerospace to the American Loar Group, which had sparked controversy and protests on the right and the left.