Although it's a popular story, it is untrue that President George W. Bush once said, "The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur." Still, a common prejudice in Anglophone nations holds that the French are less entrepreneuri­al than we. Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital--a biography of the French-born Harvard Business School professor who practically created modern venture capitalism--is a reproach to that assumption.

That said, as BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante makes clear in his new book, Georges Doriot was an unusual Frenchman. He studied the sciences at his Parisian lycée, to which--after gaining his license at 15--he drove through the boulevards of a capital by then hunkered down for World War I. At 18 he passed from that lycée to the charnel house of the Western Front as an officer in an artillery regiment; at war's end heeded his father's counsel that the shattered state of France made the New World his wisest option.