Résumé en anglais

The practice of audit committees in France became an obligation for listed companies. Nevertheless, even if France adopted this practice, she did not adopt all the Anglo-Saxon recommendations considered as good practices: the French audit committees are not totally independent; France is also considered as a problem child about corporate governance. Why such a situation? A historic analysis of the contexts of audit committee‟s appearance and\or adoption seems to show that the audit committee was always considered as a good solution of the recurring mistrust of financial markets in the United States and in Great Britain, what explains the pro-activity of these countries in the development of recommendations on audit committees. On the contrary, in France, the audit committee seems to be collected as a constraint whose effects have to be limited, what can explain why certain recommendations were not implemented.