Jacques Chirac

As prime minister during the 1986–88 cohabitation with President Mitterrand, Chirac led a programme that returned companies such as Saint-Gobain to private ownership. The institutional detail matters: this was a government policy under a president associated with the earlier nationalisations. Selling shares changed control and raised public revenue, while competition rules and other state powers remained. Read him beside Mitterrand to compare two different answers to who should own industrial firms, without treating either sale proceeds or ownership as a complete performance measure.