This paper presents a method for the syntactic simplification of French texts. Syntactic simplification aims at making texts easier to understand by simplifying complex syntactic structures that hinder reading. Our approach is based on the study of two parallel corpora (encyclopaedia articles and tales). It aims to identify the linguistic phenomena involved in the manual simplification of French texts and organise them within a typology. We then propose a syntactic simplification system that relies on this typology to generate simplified sentences. The module starts by generating all possible variants before selecting the best subset. The evaluation shows that about 80% of the simplified sentences produced by our system are accurate.