Even though, at the national level, increases in GDP are an important development objective, the survival of local communities is often ensured by the capacity to maintain or generate employment. An important body of work has examined local particularities and the connection between territory and development - particularly employment creation. Another body of work seeks to understand the general processes governing the geographic distribution of employment growth. Starting from an approach developed in the Canadian context, two questions can be raised: 1) to what extent can an approach conceived in order to understand the geography of employment growth in Canada be relevant in a French context? 2) what are the factors governing the geography of development in France between 1982 and 2006? We show that, although the North-American approach captures the geographic dimensions of French development rather well, the underlying logic of French development is different. This paradox highlights the need to develop theory at an intermediate (meso) level, situated somewhere between the particularistic territorial approach and the universalist economic one, which would be able to capture contextual effects.