Journal article: In recent years, factor models have received increasing interest from central banks and international organizations to forecast macroeconomic variables. We examine the performance of these models in forecasting the French GDP growth rate over short horizons. The factors are extracted from a large data set including surveys balances, real, financial and international variables. A pseudo real time evaluation over the last decade exhibits a gain relative to the usual benchmarks. However, forecasts remain inaccurate before the beginning of the quarter. We also show that the use of international and financial variables can improve forecasts at the longest horizons.