Last year, the European Union authorities assailed the French government for shielding Gaz de France, a giant natural gas company, from a foreign takeover.
In 2004, Brussels threatened to take France to court when President Nicolas Sarkozy, then the finance minister, bailed out Alstom, one of France's premier heavy engineering firms - a fight that ultimately ended when the two sides cut a deal to save the troubled company.
In 2004, Mr Sarkozy engineered a merger of two French drug companies, Aventis and Sanofi, to stave off a bid by a Swiss rival, Novartis.
In the early 1990s, Paris also swooped in to save the bank Credit Lyonnais, at a cost of US$20 billion (S$28.3 billion) to French taxpayers.
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE