It looked like a classic Gallic double standard. Just as France's companies continue to pile up foreign acquisitions - and its St Gobain construction group today details its unsolicited bid for Britain's BPB plasterboard specialist - so its industry minister, François Loos, revealed this week that the government was developing a list of "strategic" sectors to be declared off limits to foreign bidders. So, not content with being a driving force in the European Union's ill-judged move to restrict Chinese textiles, Paris might appear to be pulling up the drawbridge on foreign investment as well as foreign goods.

Luckily, there may be quite a wide gap between rhetoric and reality. In his interview with Les Echos, the Financial Times's French sister paper, Mr Loos referred to the use that could be made of two new instruments.