Two years later, letters were exchanged between the British Foreign Office and the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, committing the British government to hand over Deutsche Bank's shares in TPC to the French after the war. In 1915 the 25 percent stake in TPC still held by Deutsche Bank was sequestered by the British. A further 25 percent was held by Royal Dutch/Shell. The British-owned National Bank of Turkey had originally been TPC's major shareholder with 50 percent, but in 1914 the British government persuaded the bank to sell out to Anglo-Persian.
The TPC had been founded in 1911 to exploit the oil fields of Mesopotamia on either side of the German-built railway to Baghdad. The key was the 25 percent stake in the fledgling Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) held by Germany's Deutsche Bank. If the war engendered among the French an awareness of their desperate need for oil, it also created the opportunity for them to acquire it. Since then, the British had developed a powerful presence through the activities of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company&mdashøday's British Petroleum-and Royal Dutch/Shell. At the turn of the century the Americans and the Russians, with their huge domestic resources, had supplied 90 percent of the world's oil needs. The French were latecomers to the oil business. oil companies had concluded that the German navy had made the North Atlantic trade too hazardous. President Woodrow Wilson, asking him to resume American oil shipments across the Atlantic. President Georges Clemenceau addressed a desperate appeal to U.S. In late 1917 France had come within three months of running out of fuel and seeing its war effort grind to a halt. The motto of the Compagnie Françse des Pétroles (as TOTAL was first named)-France's oldest and, for most of its life, largest oil company-at its foundation in 1924 might well have been "never again." World War I had brought home to the French the need for secure energy supplies. The French state held a more than one-third stake in TOTAL for much of the company's history, but by 1996 France owned less than one percent. TOTAL's upstream sector consists of the exploration for and production of crude oil and natural gas, along with development activities in gas and electricity and operations in coal mining its downstream unit focuses on refining, marketing, and trading of petroleum products while the chemicals sector includes rubber products made by its Hutchinson subsidiary (the bulk of which are products for the automotive industry), resins, paints, inks, and adhesives. Its activities are organized into three main areas: upstream, downstream, and chemicals. is one of the largest oil, natural gas, and specialty chemicals companies in the world.
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