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This article traces the trajectory of the problem of government coordination in France. At the heart of coordination policies is the project, whether publicized or more discreet, of central regulation of ministries and of the worlds they have helped to create. This programme has taken on consistency around very different objectives over the long term: to distance from parliament under the Third Republic, to modernise society under the direction of a voluntary and reformist post-war state, to navigate between legal and economic constraints with a view to performance and reduced expenditure in the recent period. Forces for eform have been transformed: nebula of the “State reform” in the 1930s, modernisers of the Ministry of Finance and Plan after 1945, operators of the development of public policies for growth around the sectoral ministries of the Welfare State, senior centralist officials with the principle of the Strategic State in the 1990s’. The emancipation of the executive but also the rise in power of an inter-ministerial space, now coordinated by the two heads of the executive, form the two stabilized outcomes of these processes.