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 47-page strategy document no one had ever read past page 3. The only idea rescued from the wreck? Ordering croissants for the next meeting - apparently the only thing everyone can agree on.

Faire table rase means clearing out past ideas, habits, or decisions to rebuild something new — the emotional equivalent of hitting “Reset” on your life. It’s what you say when you’re tossing the old (literal or figurative) to make room for something better… or at least more coherent.

Origin

Long before laptops, smartphones, and humanity’s eternal battle with autocorrect - in other words, back in the Middle Ages - 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”).
So faire table rase originally meant erasing your wax tablet to start fresh, and today it means doing the same with ideas, plans, policies… or closets full of questionable fashion choices.

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.