France has won four World Cup semifinals and lost three, a record that answers the question driving searches about how many times has France won the World Cup and why the team keeps showing up at the tournament’s sharpest edge. Didier Deschamps was the latest manager to carry that standard, guiding a side built around Antoine Griezmann, Michael Olise, Ousmane Dembele and Kylian Mbappe.
The reason the question matters now is simple: France’s semifinal ledger is not a one-off burst but a pattern that spans generations. From June 24, 1958, to December 14, 2022, Les Bleus reached the World Cup semifinals eight separate times, and those matches have become part of the answer to whether France has been a true heavyweight at the World Cup.
The wins are clear enough. France beat Croatia on July 8, 1998, beat Portugal on July 5, 2006, beat Belgium on July 10, 2018, and beat Morocco on December 14, 2022. That gives France four semifinal victories, each one pushing the team into the final and reinforcing a record that has made the country a recurring presence on the sport’s biggest stage.
The losses are part of the same story, and they explain why the total needs care. France lost its first World Cup semifinal on June 24, 1958, against Brazil, then lost again on July 8, 1982, and July 25, 1986, both against West Germany. Those three defeats sit beside the four wins, which leaves one semifinal appearance accounted for only by the broader total of eight; the record given here does not separate that last result, even though the math behind the appearances demands it.
That first semifinal in 1958 also carried another marker: Albert Batteux became the first France manager to guide the national team that far, and the match was played at Sweden’s Rasunda Stadium. Decades later, Deschamps would inherit a different France, but the same basic burden remained — turn semifinal runs into the result that the history books remember most.
So the clean answer is that France has won four World Cup semifinals. The harder answer is that the team’s record is bigger than the total of wins alone, because the run of eight appearances tells the fuller story: France has been close enough, often enough, that each semifinal has become a test of whether Les Bleus are finishing the job or adding another line to the ledger.
