Faire table rase
After 10 meetings, 3 unreadable PowerPoints, and a whiteboard full of arrows bravely pointing nowhere, the team finally decided to
faire table rase. They scrapped all the plans, all the “brilliant ideas,” and especially the infamous 40-page strategy
document no one had ever read. The only idea rescued from the wreck? Ordering croissants for the next meeting - apparently the only thing
everyone could agree on.
Faire table rase literally means “to make a clean slate” or “to scrape the table
clean.”
Figuratively, it’s the art of clearing out old habits or decisions to start fresh, like hitting “Reset” on life, work, or your junk
drawer.
Origin
Long before laptops, smartphones, and humanity’s eternal battle with autocorrect - in other words, long before we could blame technology for our mistakes - people wrote on wax tablets. To erase something, they simply smoothed out the wax, giving themselves a very medieval version of “Ctrl + A → Delete.”
That newly blank surface was called a “table rase” (“a scraped-clean tablet”), from the Latin "tabula rasa."
By the 18th century, especially around the French Revolution, the phrase took on a far more dramatic tone. Faire table rase
du passé no longer meant smoothing wax. It meant:
abolish traditions, reject old institutions, rebuild society from zero. Not just deleting a paragraph; deleting the entire operating
system. The expression became closely associated with revolutionary thinking: bold, idealistic, admired by some, considered
dangerously radical by others.
Today, thankfully, it’s less about overthrowing monarchies and more about everyday reinvention. Whether you’re ditching outdated plans, messy ideas, or your wardrobe of questionable fashion choices, faire table rase is your go-to for starting fresh.
And sometimes, the only thing that survives? Croissants.
Examples
L’entreprise veut faire table rase du passé et repartir sur de nouvelles bases.
The company wants to start fresh and rebuild from the ground up.
Pour avancer, il faut parfois faire table rase de nos vieilles habitudes.
To move forward, you sometimes have to
wipe out your old habits.