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. 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 ideas, 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, 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”), giving us the phrase we still use today.
So whether you’re ditching outdated plans, messy ideas, or your wardrobe of questionable fashion choices, faire table rase is your go-to for starting fresh. Think of it as saying:

• “Let’s wipe the slate clean.”
  
• “Time for a fresh start.”
  
• “Out with the old, in with the new.”
  

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.