A stimulating area of inquiry about the “investment-profit puzzle” (Stockhammer 2005;

Cordonnier 2006; Durand and Gueuder 2018; Rabinovich 2021) - that is, the question of the cause of the gap that is witnessed between investment and profitability trends in some of the biggest OECD economies - has developed within the broader field of corporate financialization studies. While the empirical part of this literature, working at the aggregate level, generally includes various countries in its analysis, when it comes to country-specific case studies, many students of the corporate financialization generally investigates the disruption of the investment-profit nexus by the rise of finance - what one might call the “financialization of the investment-profit nexus” - by focusing on the case of the US, as the review of the literature proposed by critical geography scholars Klinge, Fernandez, and Aalbers (2021) makes clear. This is problematic in so far that there remains a good deal of international diversity in the trajectories of socio-economic systems. In particular, aggregate data suggest that French capitalism did not simply follow in the tracks of its US counterpart. In short, three strands of riddles emerged: (i) what are the precise channels that the theoretical framework of financialization identify as susceptible to explain a rupture in the investment-profit nexus?; (ii) to what extent those explanations are relevant to the French case?; (iii) what lies behind the “puzzle within the puzzle” observed in the French context from the 2000s onwards, where the uncoupling between profit and investment seems to relax? More generally, in order to shed some light on the problem of the existence and lineaments of a French variety of financialization, and its potential impact - or lack thereof - on the investment-profit nexus of NFCs, the discussion is organized along the following lines: the first part consists in a review of the literature discussing the main hypotheses and narratives accounting for the disruption of the articulation between investment and profitability trends found in the financialization literature. A historical outlook on French capitalism and debates surrounding the nature of its mutations, as well as the relevance of analytical propositions formulated in terms of financialization in accounting for them, is also provided. We then engage in an empirical analysis, including stylized facts derived from microeconomic data of a sample of French listed NFCs and an econometric analysis. Next, taking into account those results, we provide an alternative hypothesis about the French accumulation patterns that dominated the 2000s and 2010s, one which is grounded in the recognition of the influence of the combined forces of globalization and intangible accumulation. Finally, we conclude our discussion by summarizing our main findings and suggesting future research avenues.