This article describes and analyzes the local implementation of the “Employment Support Contract” (Contrat d'Accompagnement dans l'Emploi: CAE) in 2009 in response to the crisis. Set up in 2005, this emblematic provision of France's national employment policy was initially designed for a structural purpose, namely, to bring people who had moved out of the labour market back into it. The revival of the CAE in the crisis period was supervised in a highly centralized manner, with the aim of obtaining a rapid and massive effect on unemployment figures. But this uniform approach ran up against the structural diversity of local labour markets, revealed by the 2008 population census data. The pace of CAE implementation differed widely between départements, with the Paris Region lagging well behind other areas. Econometric analysis shows that these disparities are partly due to the positioning of local labour markets along four dividing lines: (1) urban vs. rural; (2) agricultural employees vs. local tertiary-sector employment; (3) participation vs. non-participation, i.e. an opposition between départements with high and low female participation rates; (4) “sedentary female employees” vs. multipolar, involving differences in mobility to and from work and in geographic proximity to employment. Once these local labour-market structures are taken into account, we find that the CAE was implemented faster in départements that offered longer-term contracts. By contrast, the subsidy rate does not appear to have had a significant impact. Other signs suggest that the efficiency of public employment services, measured in terms of their job-search capabilities, played a role beyond the formal organization of the program. The degree of CAE implementation also depended on the commitment of local-government authorities.