Classes de Chern des varietes singulieres, revisitees

We introduce a notion of `proChow group' of varieties, agreeing with the notion of Chow group for complete varieties and covariantly functorial with respect to arbitrary morphisms. We construct a natural transformation from the functor of constructible functions to the proChow functor, extending MacPherson's natural transformation. We illustrate the result by providing very short proofs of (a generalization of) two well-known facts on Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes: Kwiecinski's product formula, and the Ehlers-Barthel-Brasselet-Fieseler computation of Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of toric varieties.