Franchising business is more and more international whatever the chain origin. Among the most worldwide chains, McDonald's: 30000 restaurants in 119 countries serving 47 million customers each day... This internationalization phenomenon is also particularly important too in the French franchising context: about half of the chains are internationalized. The purpose of this paper is to study the internationalization of French franchising chains dealing in the retailing sector and its determinants. A description of the French franchising business is made before focusing on the international franchising literature. The empirical work is composed of a descriptive analysis of the French chain internationalization and then, logistic regression
models implemented on 162 franchising chains allow to highlight some determinants of the
internationalization.