Part of the works of Richard Arena (Arena et Maricic, 1988; Arena and Schmidt, 1999; Arena, 2000) has been devoted to the reactions of French economists to the publication of General Theory. In fact the French translation of this book, completed in 1939 but only published in 1942, did not originate from an academic interest (although according to Keynes the book was “chiefly addressed to [his] fellow economists”) but a political one: the translator, Jean de Largentaye, implemented it when, as a high-ranking public officer, he was confronted to issues related to the ruling monetary situation or a prospective plan of economic recovery. Using the private correspondence between Keynes and Largentaye and other sources of the same period, my contribution aims at clarifying the historical context in which the French translation of General Theory was prepared and published. As such it is complementing a study of the theoretical stakes of the translation that I recently published elsewhere (Deleplace 2021). Publication: Deleplace, G. (2024 b), “When General Theory met French Politics: the Historical Context of a Translation,” in Dal Pont Legrand, M. and Gloria, S. (eds.) Fifty Years of Economics through the Lenses of Historians of Economic Thought, New York: Springer, à paraître.