L acier et la sidérurgie française, vus par l histoire économique

This article proposes two complementary visions of the French Steel Industry between the 19th and today, from the standpoints of economic history and of the history of firms. The first part describes how the sector evolved over this extended period of time and what where the drivers and the actors of change. The nature of raw materials, energy and mining, drove the transformations. Since the new processes for making liquid steel were invented at the end of the 19th century (Martin-Siemens and Bessemer processes), steel production left forests and rivers to settle on coal and iron ore deposits until it moved to the sea shore after the 2WW: major geographical relocations! The connection between the steel industry and the state was very close following the two WWs, when deep restructuring took part, and the end of the 30 Glorious Years, when the state in France nationalized the sector to keep it from fully collapsing. Europe, now the EU, has also entertained close ties with steel, when the ECSC was created and during the Davignon plan. Mittal s takeover bid caused all interventions from the French State and from the EU to stop. The second part proposes models that explain how these changes took place. Initially, there are the models of Schumpeter, which describe how innovation percolates in industry under capitalistic rules, carried by a series of long-term waves. Then, the vision of Chandler is introduced, who explains how firms get organized, in an evolution that took place in all sectors and all over the world, with first a U model and then an M and a H one. Control, which was initially family and patrimonial, moved to a model where experts, engineers and managers, took over control. However, the recent internationalization of the sector (Mittal and Tata) shows that the model can backfire.