Patents and public health in France. Pharmaceutical patent law in‐the‐making at the patent office between the two world wars

France excluded the patentability of pharmaceutical products for a long time, from 1844 to 1960. Yet, even though there was no change in the legal norm relative to drug patents, during the inter‐war period the national patent office (ONPI) examined applications for pharmaceutical patents and issued a growing number of process patents on an increasingly broad range of health products. This article analyses the making of patent law by the Comité Technique de la Propriété Industrielle, comprised of jurists, patent engineers, industrialists and professors in pharmacy. The committee produced its own corpus of rules for examining patent applications, which superseded the law. This committee’s work led to two significant developments: a growth in the number of pharmaceutical process patents between 1920 and 1939, and the inclusion of biological product preparations (hormones, vaccines, serums) into the patent sphere.