Le Crédit lyonnais (1863–1986): Etudes historiques [The Crédit Lyonnais (1863–1986): Historical Studies]. Edited by Bernard Desjardins et al. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2003. 1020 pp. Tables, figures, notes, index. Paper, €43.90. ISBN 2-600-00807-1 (original) (raw)
The Financial Crisis of 2008: French and American Responses, Proceedings of the 2010 Franco-‐American Legal Seminar, 2011
This paper concerns a stock jobbing scandal involving the French Company of the Indies on the eve of the French Revolution. Speculative trading in the company’s shares on the Paris stock market triggered a credit crisis that brought down the king’s chief minister, Calonne, and ushered in the immediate chain of events that led to the collapse of the Old Regime and the beginning of the French Revolution. The episode witnessed the emergence of the modern French notion of “public credit” as a method of protecting the royal finances from the putatively corrupting influences of speculative capitalists. Two dynamics informed this broader development. First, the enterprise of speculative finance was linked to the worst excesses of Old Regime privileges generally. Second, the crisis of 1785-1787 served to displace the traditional notion of “royal credit” as the asset that required protection from the dangers of financial capitalism, making way for a more abstract, less personalized idea of public credit as an instrument and reflection of the financial power of the nation as a whole. That notion of public credit was, in principle, compatible with a monarchical form of government, but did not require a king to make it work.
International Committee of Historical Sciences, 2024
In 1914, France was the world's second-largest exporter of capital and controlled the second- largest colonial empire in the world, although far behind the much richer British Empire. Nevertheless, up until the First World War, France benefited from an extremely stable currency and an exceptional banking network organised around powerful deposit banks (in 1914, Crédit Lyonnais was the world's leading commercial bank in terms of the size of its balance sheet) and merchant banks (Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Banque de l'Union parisienne), although the boundary between the two types of bank was not totally watertight, as shown by the example of Société Générale, which was particularly active in the Far East. Thanks to its engineers, French companies were also very active in public works (2nd in the world after Great Britain) and in the operation of public services. The situation was less rosy in industry, but France also had a number of strong points in this area: silk from Lyon, the luxury goods sector (champagne, jewellery) and cutting-edge technological activities (world's leading exporter of cars, aviation). The First World War had a lasting and profound effect on the international expansion of French capitalism, with the country's balance of payments shifting from a creditor to a debtor position. While the depreciation of the French currency boosted exports (cars, textiles), the investment capacity of the French business community was increasingly focused on the Empire, as in Indochina, a particularly attractive territory. Benefiting from major infrastructure works (road network, Transindochinois, ports), Indochina became a major exporter of rice and rubber, ensuring the expansion of the Michelin family group, for example. In the 1920s, French merchant banks remained very dynamic, such as Paribas and the Banque de l'Indochine, which became the heart of a constellation of companies holding the Indochinese economy in their hands, while concession companies continued to operate in China. On the other hand, the crisis of the 1930s was accompanied by a further weakening of the banks and, correlatively, of French capitalism. In the Far East, French interests suffered severely from the scale of the Indochina crisis, then from the consequences of Japanese expansion in China, and finally from the Japanese occupation of Indochina, which had been cut off from France following the defeat of 1940. The aim of this paper is to use company archives to reconstruct the stages of expansion, followed by an increasingly marked decline in the influence of French capitalism after the First World War and the crisis of the 1930s.