Initially the second industrial nation, France is still, some two centuries later, the fourth industrial nation. However, it is not covered in Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage of Nations, and among French or American business historians of France, nobody ever dared to write a general business history of France. This can be explained in two ways. Despite recent progress, many of the detailed researches necessary for such a synthesis are still missing. On the other hand, earlier literature focused on the performance of the French economy in the twentieth century and was more concerned to give a positive assessment of French business and management than to analyze the dynamics of the French large industrial enterprise. So, it is not an easy task to compare France and its firms with those of the three nations surveyed in Chandler's Scale and Scope, and then to review the post-World War II industries. Therefore, this essay cannot aim at exhaustiveness and, given the conflicting views on French business which have persisted among specialists for forty years, it has to be quite personal, maybe even subjective.

The French corporate enterprise since the end of the nineteenth century will be studied here in a Chandlerian perspective, emphasizing that the role of large industrial firms in the creation of wealth has been, first, to provide opportunities for investment of capital and employment of labor; second, to become the learning base for the technological developments and the managerial skills in specific industries; and, third, to become the core of a nexus of small and middle-sized related and ancillary firms.