This paper describes the French handwriting recognition competition held at ICDAR 2011. This competition is based on the RIMES-database composed of French written documents corresponding to letters sent by individuals to companies or administrations. Two tasks have been proposed this year : the first one consists in recognizing isolated snippets of words with the help of a given dictionary, the second one consists in recognizing blocks of words segmented into lines. This year 9 systems were submitted for the different competition subtasks. A comparison between different classification and recognition systems show interesting results. A short description of the participating groups, their systems, and the results achieved are presented.