France's employment policy has historically been governed by a strategy of interventions aimed at specific categories of individuals, including victims of industrial restructuring, entry workers, the long-term unemployed, and the disabled. Since the 1980s, France has had the following main lines of employment policy: (1) assistance to victims of corporate restructuring; (2) intervention in the labor market; and (3) a "promotion of employment" policy. These policy lines reflect very different conceptions of relations between intervention in different groups and intervention in territories. To serve the needs of different groups and local labor markets, multiple actors have had to be mobilized at the regional, departmental, and local levels. However, two decades have clearly not sufficed to overcome these multiple actors' different professional cultures and institutional patterns and produce a genuine synergy among them. The French Ministry of Employment's central administration maintains a complex relationship with the local and regional territories, and any attempt to analyze this relationship necessitates distinguishing between "territorialized policy" (implementation of national policy in a given region or local territory) and "territorial policy" (elaboration and implementation of policy by local actors). A study conducted in 2001 shows that the territorial dimension has begun to assume a larger role, in both conception and implementation of employment policy. (MN)