Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has been invited to visit Paris in November, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in Tehran on Wednesday.

The French minister, for his part, said that he held constructive and positive negotiations with Iranian officials in the field of energy.

“I have a letter from the president of my country Francois Hollande in which he is inviting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to visit France in November”, Fabius said, as quoted by the ISNA news agency.

According to information reaching here from Paris earlier, France will send a delegation of 80 French companies to Tehran at the end of September.

Fabius is to travel to Tehran on Wednesday over the deal which requires Iran to curb its nuclear capabilities in return for the lifting of crippling sanctions.

But the Laurent Fabius started his trip to Iran by saying it was time to kickstart relations between the two countries following the nuclear deal.

He was making an apparent reference to attacks by hardliners in Iran against France, which was seen as the most hawkish of the global powers negotiating the deal with Tehran. “It is true that in recent years, for reasons that everyone knows, the ties have cooled but now thanks the nuclear deal, things will be able to change”, Fabius told reporters.

The campaign against Fabius – led by conservatives including a former representative of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour – has also criticised his support of Iraq during its war with Iran in the 1980s and his “hard” position during nuclear negotiations.

Unlike Fabius and Mogherini, whose visits to Iran have a political as well as an economic dimension, Sigmar Gabriel, minister for economic affairs and energy and vice chancellor of Germany, visited the country less than a week after the deal was struck for a purely economic agenda. French energy giant Total and automakers Renault and Peugeot had a strong presence in Iran before they withdrew in 2012 after sanctions were imposed over Iran’s nuclear program. The scandal involved blood supplies contaminated with HIV that were imported from France at the time when Fabius was prime minister and which infected hundreds of Iranians.