In the 1660s, mirrors had become very popular among the upper classes of society: Italian cabinets, châteaux, ornate side tables, and pier-tables were decorated with these expensive and luxurious products.

[2] As a result, French Minister of Finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert wanted France to become completely self-sufficient in meeting domestic demand for luxury products, thereby strengthening the national economy.

The beneficiary and first director was the French financier Nicolas du Noyer, a receiver of taxes of Orléans,[5] who was granted a monopoly of making glass and mirror-glass for twenty years.

To compete with the Italian mirror industry, Colbert commissioned several Venetian glassworkers he had enticed to Paris to work for the company.

Competition between France and the Venetians became so fierce that Venice considered it a crime for any glass artisan to leave and practice their trade elsewhere, especially in foreign territory.

Nicolas du Noyer complained in writing that the Venetians were unwilling to impart the secrets of glassmaking to the French workers and that the company was hard-pressed to pay its expenses.

Life in Paris proved distracting to the workers, and supplies of firewood to stoke the furnaces were dearer in the capital than elsewhere.

In 1667, the glass-making was transferred to a small glass furnace already working at Tourlaville, near Cherbourg in Normandy, and the premises in Faubourg Saint-Antoine were devoted to glass-grinding and polishing the crude product.

A group of Franco-Swiss Protestant bankers rescued the collapsing company, changing the name to Compagnie Dagincourt.

At the same time, the company was provided royal patents which allowed it to maintain a legal monopoly in the glass-manufacturing industry up until the French Revolution (1789), despite fierce, sometimes violent, protests from free enterprise partisans.

The company had to depend on the participation and capital of private investors, although it continued to remain partly under the control of the French state.

While Saint-Gobain continued to dominate the luxury high-quality mirror and glass markets, its newly created competitors focused their attention on making medium and low-quality products.

In 1830, just as Louis-Philippe became King of the newly restored French Monarchy,[4] Saint-Gobain was transformed into a Public Limited Company and became independent from the state for the first time.

By the end of the 19th century, Saint-Gobain named the Casa Pellandini “its sole representative and exclusive depositary throughout the Mexican Republic.

Glass and fibreglass sales benefited from the booming construction industry and the rise in mass consumption after the Second World War.

Multinational corporation Suez suggested that Saint-Gobain and Pont-à-Mousson (another French industrial group) should merge, to maintain independence from Boussois-Souchon-Neuvesel.

Beffa invested heavily in research and development and pushed strongly for the company to produce engineered materials, such as abrasives and ceramics.

In 2005, Olivier Bluche took the helm of Supply Chain Operations, quickly modernising the company's lengthy and dated processes.

[19] In 2023, the company's India-arm acquired Twiga Fiberglass, a manufacturer of glass wool with production facilities located near Delhi and Mumbai.

[22] Saint-Gobain is organized into three major Sectors (% by 2014 Net Sales restated excluding Verallia): Building Distribution (49%), Construction Products (27.5%), Innovative Materials (23.5%).

Since then it has grown both internally and through acquisitions (in France with Point P. and Lapeyre, the UK with Jewson and Graham, in Germany, the Netherlands and Eastern Europe with Raab Karcher and in the Nordic Countries with Dahl).

[26] After the company had entirely owned Avancis[27] and its two plants in Germany manufacturing thin CIS film modules for some time,[28] it was sold to China National Building Materials Group Corporation (CNBM) in 2014.

The External Venturing unit has staff in Boston, Paris, and Shanghai interested in connecting with entrepreneurs working in advanced materials, construction products, and environmental sustainability.

[30] In December 2005, Saint-Gobain purchased the British company BPB plc, the world's largest manufacturer of plasterboard, for US$6.7 billion.

Recently the company sold its cosmetic glass manufacturing business, including a plant in Newton County, Georgia, United States.

[41] Saint-Gobain deliberately and intentionally constructed a bypass stack to thwart environmental inspections and avoid PFAS removal.