Putting France in the Chandlerian Framework: France's 100 Largest Industrial Firms in 1913

Abstract

This article presents a new list of France's 100 largest publicly-held manufacturing firms in 1913 and compares them to the 100 largest American, British, and German firms identified by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., inScale and Scope. The largest French firms clustered in the same industries as the largest firms in the other countries. They were much smaller than their American counterparts, but in some industries they compared favorably with their German counterparts in size. More importantly, many of the largest French firms were behaving like the leading industrial firms elsewhere, developing cutting-edge technology, investing in state-of-theart production facilities, and putting professional managers in charge of operations. In contrast to the notion that France was a follower in the Second Industrial Revolution and eschewed the trend toward managerial enterprise in the early twentieth century, this article presents a picture of considerable dynamism, with France's leading industrial firms laying the organizational foundations from 1900 to 1930 for the managerial capitalism that would flourish in France in the post-Second World War era.