The ‘reform of the state’ is one of the most powerful contemporary narratives in French politics, but it is deeply ambivalent. It rests upon the assumption that the state needs reforming, a diagnosis contested by public sector workers, mid-ranking civil servants and much of public opinion, but central to official reports such as the Picq report of 1994. In the largely constructivist French political science tradition, writers such as Rouban (1997, 2003) emphasise that a convincing discourse is needed to legitimise state reform in France, a discourse that is consistent with pre-existing ideational frames and institutional orders. Yet there is no commonly accepted overarching référentiel, or framework of ideas, in the field of state reform. In Chapter 2, three distinctive but interconnected versions of the reform of the state programmes are presented, based on administrative modernisation, contractualisation and budgetary reform. These cases each illustrate an important dimension of governance in France: the attempt by governmental elites to redefine the core of state activity to give a strategic sense to the centre under threat. The chapter begins by setting out in some detail the state-centric model in France and its limits. It then considers in turn administrative modernisation and instrumentation, contractualisation and budgetary reform as attempts by powerful actors at the core of the state to reaffirm their centrality. It concludes by relating the evidence from the state reform case to the framework of analysis defined in Chapter 1.