Business is business

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For an article on the 1971 Dutch film of the same name, see Business Is Business.

Business is business (in french, Les affaires sont les affaires) is a french comedy in three acts, by the novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, performed in april 1903 on the stage of Comédie-Française, in Paris, and world-wide acclaimed, especially in Russia, Germany and United States. An English-language adaption by Sydney Grundy was produced in London in 1905.

That work is a classical comedy of manners with characters in the tradition of Molière, where Mirbeau criticizes the French society and the world of business, legal kind of gangsterism. The main character, symbolically named Isidore Lechat, is a predator without any scruples, predecessor of the modern masters of business intrigue, a "brasseur d'affaires" who is a product of the new world, a figure who makes money from everything and spreads his tentacles out over the world.