  In social processes, long-term trends can be influenced or disrupted by
various factors, including public policy. When public policies depend on a
misrepresentation of trends in the areas they are aimed at, they become random
and disruptive, which can be interpreted as a source of disorder. Here we
consider policies on the spatial organization of the French Higher Education
and Research system, which reflects the authorities' hypothesis that scientific
excellence is the prerogative of a few large urban agglomerations. By
geographically identifying all the French publications listed in the Web of
Science databases between 1999 and 2017, we highlight a spatial deconcentration
trend, which has slowed down in recent years due to a freezed growth of the
teaching force. This deconcentration continues, however, to sustain the growth
of scientific production in small and medium-sized towns. An examination of the
large conurbations shows the relative decline of sites that nevertheless have
been highlighted as examples to be followed by the Excellence policies
(Strasbourg among others). The number of students and faculty has grown less
there, and it is a plaussible explanation for the relative decline in
scientific production. We show that the publication output of a given site
depends directly and strongly on the number of researchers hosted there. Based
on precise data at the French level, our results confirm what is already known
at world scale. In conclusion, we question the amount of disorder resulting
from policies aligned with poorly assessed trends.
