"French research is also under attack, even if it is more insidiously than in the United States."

Science is currently under attack from a staggering number of sources. These attacks are not limited to the United States, but also affect other countries, including France. Scientific knowledge informs us about the mechanisms of matter and life, our history, the functioning of our societies, the extent of social inequalities, the state of our environment, climate change, the decline in biodiversity, and more. Beyond its own value, this knowledge contributes to the development of public policies, for example, to reduce inequalities or define trajectories for decarbonizing society.

Everyone has in mind the recent measures against the US research system . France seems for the moment to be immune to such direct attacks. Yet, more insidiously, the situation of the French research and higher education system is hardly better: it has suffered budget cuts of 387 million euros in 2025 , after a cut of 900 million in 2024. This funding, including private effort, represented, in 2022, only 2.2% of the gross domestic product in France, compared to 3.1% in Germany. Compared to the number of students, the budget has fallen by around 25% in fifteen years.

Many competitive positions for support functions remain unfilled, as the status and salary levels are so prohibitive. Research professors must transform themselves into super-managers, to the detriment of their missions, in order to spend the limited resources they manage to secure.

The dissemination of knowledge is also weakened. Scientific publishing is, for the most part, left to the private sector, which manages to extract margins close to 30% by relying on the work of public-sector professors to evaluate manuscripts, the publication of which is often billed at around €5,000 per article in biomedical journals. This privatization pushes towards an increase in the number of articles and a shortening of evaluation times, which harm the quality of peer review, and therefore of scientific production.

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