Things are changing in France’s business world. One in 10 top listed firms has a foreign boss, all report earnings in English, and a recent bid battle showed that state influence doesn’t always trump the business interest, reports Euronews.
But if you think that signals the end of the Gallic sneer at “Anglo-Saxon” ways – the free-market bent of the Americans and British – last week’s promotion to economy minister for the interventionist Arnaud Montebourg is a reminder that laissez-faire government remains, in France, a linguistic irony.
Anglo-Saxon trends to get government out of business and implement shareholder-friendly governance reforms have largely passed it by.
Over a third of the companies that make up the CAC-40 index of top stocks has the government as a significant shareholder.
More than three-quarters of the men who run those same 40 blue chips have a combined chairman and chief executive role, in contrast to the U.S.-UK ideal, which separates the two jobs to ensure shareholder interests and profit come before personal power.
Marwan Lahoud, chief strategy and marketing officer at aerospace group Airbus Group , says the caricature of a French boss is “Bonapartist”, after Napoleon Bonaparte, who made himself French emperor and conquered much of early 19th-century Europe, “(with) the boss at the top, forgetting he is not the owner of the business and that there are shareholders. He decides everything.”
France’s corporate culture has long felt different.
From the car-making Peugeots to the defence sector’s Dassaults, families play a prominent part in many of its publicly listed companies.
At the same time, the “grandes écoles” – exclusive academies where France’s elite are educated – have blurred the lines between business, civil service and politics.
All this is compounded by the fact that governments of right and left have used company legislation and tax policy to pursue social projects, often at odds with the pursuit of profit.
“France has an historic and cultural mistrust of enterprise,” said Lazard France chief Matthieu Pigasse, adding that this dated back to the 19th-century view that the military and the clergy were the best routes to social advancement.
For an investment banker, Pigasse’s own résumé – a former civil servant, who has been close to President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party throughout his career – would look unusual anywhere but in France.
France’s penchant for state intervention has been in evidence as Montebourg took sides in the takeover battle for media group Vivendi’s telecoms arm SFR, even though the government had no stake in any of the companies involved.
Read more of this Reuters report published by Euronews.