This paper revisits the relationship between entrepreneurialism and risk by analysing the French crown’s efforts to promote the trade of Languedocian cloth in India from 1686 to 1702. The crown limited the CIO’s ability to import Asian textiles, regarding these as deleterious to metropolitan industry, while simultaneously requiring the CIO to make consistent, large orders with the Languedocian factories of Saptes and Villenouvette. This reflected an understanding of the factories’ entrepreneurs as agents of the public good who needed to be protected from market uncertainties. Yet while the CIO itself suffered from this dynamic, the scale of its orders facilitated the factories’ development into mature enterprises that undergirded French success in Ottoman trade in the eighteenth century.