"A lot of French construction companies got very rich out of building the Wall, " said Jerome Prieur, author of a 2010 book, Le Mur Atlantique.

BBC: Hitler's Atlantic Wall: Should France preserve it?

Dubai-based construction firm Arabtec announced on Tuesday that it had won the 2.4 billion dirham construction contract for the Middle East outpost of the famous French museum and will begin construction immediately.

BBC: Abu Dhabi takes on the art world

From these plans, as well as extensive inventories of construction materials carefully preserved by the French court to reflect the magnificence of the finished palace, Zega and Dams were able to trace the peculiar rise of Versailles.

FORBES: Palace Coup

Similarly, federal construction of the Panama Canal began where a failed private French consortium left off.

ECONOMIST: American economic intervention

Around the same time as "The Thousand and One Nights, " Matisse was overseeing the construction of the so-called Matisse Chapel on the French Riviera and the artist's self-proclaimed magnum opus.

WSJ: Matisse's The Thousand and One Nights in Pittsburgh

Its shares soared after the French company, whose interests run to media and construction, said profits next year would be far better than expected.

ECONOMIST: Breathtaking

Indeed, on a recent morning in Highland Park, the drone of construction trucks and workers could be heard along the streets lined with Tudor and French-style mansions.

WSJ: From Oil, a Land Rush��WSJ Mansion

Finland and France, which produces more of its electricity in nuclear plants than any other big country, each have under construction a plant of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) design developed by AREVA, a French industrial group.

ECONOMIST: Nuclear power