In the forty years or so before the first world war, observers in France routinely expressed concern about the competitiveness of the nation’s industry. Many looked enviously across the Rhine to a land of large manufacturing companies with fine laboratories and a ready flow of highly trained manpower emerging from an educational system adapted to the needs of the new industrial age. As historians, we are the heirs to these perceptions, which for over a century have coloured writing about France’s response to the challenges of Germany and the USA. In an abundant secondary literature that takes its lead from a long tradition of “declinist” sentiment about late-nineteenth-century France, blame has been directed at a supposed cultural gulf separating savants from industriels and at an indifference towards applied research that had both cause and consequences in an inadequate investment in industrial laboratories. The goal of my paper is a fine-tuning of this interpretation rather than its wholesale rejection. French industry, as I should argue, laboured under local circumstances that fostered a peculiarly “French way” on the path to modernity, one whose successes and failures should not necessarily be judged by the criteria we might apply to the industrial big guns of Germany or the USA.