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Schneider and de Wendel, the two leaders in the French heavy industry, were firms of unquestionable European proportions. De Wendel, maîtres de forges since the eighteenth century and the dominant force in Lorraine, were already employing more than 3,000 workers in 1825. Their workforce had increased almost tenfold by 1913; they then allegedly produced 1.25 million tons of pig iron and 1.2 million tons of steel. Since 1871, however, the firm and the family had been divided between France and Germany, the bulk of their productive facilities being in ‘Lorraine occupée’. De Wendel’s arch-rivals, Schneider, started as ironmasters in Le Creusot in 1836 and had become by the early twentieth century a fully integrated and diversified group, especially in heavy engineering and armaments, where they were Krupp’s and Vickers’s chief competitors in the global markets. Two other firms employed more than 10,000 workers before the war: Marine-Homécourt and Châtillon-Commentry & Neuves-Maisons, both the product of a turn-of-the-century merger between a larger firm from the Centre (Forges et Aciéries de la Marine et des Chemins de Fer, Châtillon Commentry) and a smaller firm from Lorraine (Homécourt, Neuves-Maisons). Factor costs had become increasingly disadvantageous for the Centre’s iron and steel industry since the 1870s, and firms responded on the one hand by reorienting their production towards high-quality steels and heavy engineering, and on the other by investing in expanding areas, especially in Lorraine, as well as in Russia. Otherwise, no significant merger took place in French heavy industry. In the country’s two principal regions of iron and steel production (the Lorraine, where rich iron ores were discovered in the early 1880s, and the Nord, which was endowed with coalfields), major firms such as Longwy or Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, and Denain-Anzin or Nord-Est in the Nord, did not employ more than 5,000 to 7,000 people before the First World War. Nevertheless, French ironmasters’ business position was solidly entrenched in the Parisian business community. Many companies had their head office in the capital, even though their plants might be far away in the regions.