text: Vincent Kessler/Reuters A glossy brochure notes proudly that France is already home to 20,000 foreign companies and as recently as last year was the leading destination for corporate foreign investment. "Our objective is to leverage France's attractiveness to remain a key investment destination in Europe," the brochure says.
  That is why critics say Mr. Montebourg's hard line against ArcelorMittal is the wrong message at the wrong time."The image France is projecting is disastrous," said Nina Mitz, a public relations consultant in Paris with deep ties to past Socialist governments in France. While she conceded the Florange factory case presented a political thicket for the Hollande government, Ms. Mitz said such bold talk of nationalization — even if served up mainly for domestic consumption — "sends a frightening message, particularly to investors from other countries."The government's stance has invited ridicule from some opportunistic critics. Boris Johnson, the outspoken mayor of London, alluded to the Montebourg threat on Tuesday, telling Indian business leaders they should not "wait to be persecuted by the sans-culottes in Paris," but should rather bring their business to London.
  Mr. Mittal, who built ArcelorMittal from the 2006 merger of his Mittal Steel with Arcelor, then the largest European steel maker, promised at the time to help modernize the European steel sector, but the company says that the Florange facility was already slated for closure under Arcelor, its previous owner. This week he has countered the Montebourg threat with a warning of his own, saying in a statement that any sale of the entire Florange plant "would jeopardize the viability" of the rest of ArcelorMittal's operations in France.Initially dismissed as rhetorical arm-twisting by Mr. Hollande's Socialist government, Mr. Montebourg's talk of nationalization has now garnered support from across the French political spectrum. On Tuesday, Henri Guaino, a close political associate of Mr. Hollande's predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, revealed in an interview with the business newspaper Les Échos that Mr. Sarkozy had himself grappled with the question of whether to temporarily nationalize another ArcelorMittal facility, in the eastern city of Gandrange, in 2008.
  Benoit Tessier/Reuters The Sarkozy government ultimately failed to find a suitable private investor to take over the Gandrange plant and ArcelorMittal closed the site a year later, resulting in the loss of nearly 600 jobs — and no small amount of political face for Mr. Sarkozy.
  There are precedents for nationalization, including the late Socialist President François Mitterrand's takeover of most of the banking sector in 1982, fulfilling a longstanding Socialist policy goal, and analysts said there was no legal impediment to such a move.Asked in 2011, as ArcelorMittal was discussing the closure of a plant in Liège, Belgium, if European Union treaties prohibited nationalization, the European competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said that the rules required only that the state act as a private enterprise would in the market, paying the owner the full value of the nationalized property and seeking to make a profit.
  Whatever the outcome of the dispute over Florange, no one doubts the gravity of the problems faced by ArcelorMittal. Since the company's creation in the easy-credit days of 2006, it has been beset by the financial crisis and now the current slump in Europe. Its steel shipments fell 8.3 percent in the third quarter of this year from the previous three months, and it reported an operating loss of €643 million for the first nine months of 2012.Analysts do not expect any significant improvement in European steel demand before 2014.ArcelorMittal, which accounts for about 6 percent of world steel production, is trying to return to profitability by shutting down excess capacity. The Florange site, it argues, is too far from sea transport and too costly to supply under current conditions.
  The company says it would supply slab steel from its plant in Dunkirk, on the English Channel, for processing at Florange.Workers at the Dunkirk plant, for their part, are already complaining that one of the plant's three blast furnaces has been shut down longer than the company had said, and expressing concern that what happened to Florange will be their lot next.