“If you want to sell a country abroad, you need its people to be confident,” says Philippe Favre, chairman of the government’s Invest in France Agency. “Now confidence about the future is returning. It’s making our job much, much easier than two years ago, when the country was going nowhere or there were riots in the suburbs.”

The number of jobs created or sustained by foreign direct investment in France this year is on course to top the 40,000 achieved in 2006, he says, and the number of projects should also reach a record.