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Société Générale, one of the leading French banks, withstood general crises and crashes, wars, and competition, to reach its 150th anniversary. However, it had to face four severe crises of its own (1886, 1905, 1913, and most recently 2007–2009), which almost swept it from the Paris marketplace, gnawed into its creditworthiness, fostered the risk of illiquidity, and fueled a crisis in the upper echelons of its management. Although each crisis occurred as a result of specific developments generally in internationalized fields of activity (trade finance, deployment of the bank in foreign countries, foreign loans, or financial trading), taken together, they allow us to examine common issues. The analysis of these four events constitutes a case study of the management and organization of the bank, thus allowing us to gauge the common management of risk as well as the relevance of the business model in the face of a portfolio of strategic activities and the geographic deployment of the bank in foreign markets. Archival sources are mobilized to scrutinize the causes of each crisis as well as how far each particular crisis threatened the survival of the bank, which helps us understand how top managers failed to adapt their model of management to the evolution in their activities and in the risks the institution faced. The paper then ponders how the managers called in to rescue the bank succeeded in reinventing its business model and its mode of supervising risk. Firms surviving a crisis generally come out with stronger methods of management and efficient systems for supervising business and risk and for controlling the procedures to be followed in each affiliate or branch. Since this was the case at Société Générale, we suggest that this crisis strengthened its ability to survive cyclical tensions and also enriched its corporate culture through the recurrent inflow of more accurate tools for risk assessment and of management values, leading to a stronger orientation toward a fine-tuned perception of the necessary balance between the dynamic strategies of organic growth and adapted structures of control, risk management, and the allocation of financial resources.