This has been something of a week for activist shareholders in France. On Sunday, Philippe Germond, the chief executive of computer services group Atos Origin, was sent packing and the next day it was the turn of Carrefour’s youthful boss, José Luis Durán, to take the fall for the hypermarket group’s underperformance.

In both cases the relationships between management and shareholders had been difficult: investment funds PAI, Centaurus and Pardus in the case of Atos and Bernard Arnault of LVMH and Colony Capital in Carrefour. Although initially the chief executives seemed to have won a certain reprieve, in the end the funds proved ruthless.