Business is business (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 worldwide acclaimed, especially in Russia, Germany and United States.

The work is a classical comedy of manners with characters, in the tradition of Molière,[2] in which Mirbeau criticizes the French society of the Third Republic and the world of business as a legal kind of gangsterism.

[3] When the play was presented in Paris during the 1994-5 season (400 performances), it was commented that business and scandals are no different today than they were 100 years ago.

He sacrifices his children in his obsession to get more and more money and power: Lechat insists upon purchasing an aristocratic husband for his daughter Germaine, and upon making his corrupted son Xavier the leader of Parisian society, paying for him fabulous gambling debts.

But almighty Lechat, in spite of his 50 million francs, is powerless in front of death (his son is killed in a motor car accident), as well as in front of love (his daughter Germaine rejects the "beautiful" marriage he arranged and runs away with her moneyless lover, Lucien Garraud).