This article intends to explain the evolution of the distribution of tasks within the government on issues related to security. It sets the circumstances of the resurgence of the Secretariat général de la Défense et de la Sécurité ationale (SGDSN) at the heart of the inter-ministerial organisation of “crisis management”. It fills a gap between on one side a sociology of public action abandoning the sector of defense and on the other side critical security studies too much inattentive to the analysis of institutional processes. After reviewing the context of the Secretariat général at the end of the Cold War, we propose two levels of analysis to explain this refocusing within the decision-making circuits: the first, organizational, stresses the operational, doctrinal and institutional turning points experienced by the Secretariat, and the second, based on the study of the successive position holders, highlights the positions and resources of the secretaries-general.