ABSTRACT
The development of the pharmaceutical industry in France bore for a century and a half the strong imprint of the rigid regulatory framework set up under the Empire. Confronted with the necessity of adapting to that legal framework, which was hampering their development, pharmaceutical firms commonly took one of the three following positions: compliance, alliance or avoidance, with various degrees of success and long-range consequences for the strategy and structure of the French pharmaceutical industry. Doctors formed from their practice ideas for improvements to products and processes which could only be translated into reality through testing and production by suitably equipped pharmaceutical firms. The gradual reintegration of pharmaceutical innovation into common law had begun, but it had a long way to go still, notwithstanding the eloquence of its advocates. The Malthusian policy of restricting the entry of non-pharmaceutical new capital into the industry had been a considerable brake on investment for a long time.
