The crisis of the 1880s brought to an end the preliminary phase of banking development in France: it consolidated the position of the great credit institutions and generated a policy of management rationalization which was coupled in due course with an ‘industrial disengagement’. It inaugurated the ‘golden age’ of a finance-market economy. The crisis of the 1930s marked the end of this period. Using modern economic concepts with care, I mean by this that, throughout the period, banking credit remained more or less limited and the financing of the economy came about through the accumulation of savings: primarily as companies directly used parts of their cash flow, but also by the transfer of domestic savings via the financial market.

Between the 1880s and the 1930s the state's influence was consolidated. Not that the preceding period was one of unadulterated liberalism; but, even before 1914, the germs of state intervention, very apparent after the First World War, were already perceptible. On the other hand, the war abruptly shattered the homogeneity of the period through the abandonment of the gold standard. And this was not without its consequences not only in the monetary, but also in the financial sphere.

The financial history of this half-century was still, I believe, dominated by the inability of the French private banks (unlike the banks of neighbouring countries with similar economic systems) to dominate financial channels. In other words, the increase in economic activity following the upsurge of the 1840s to 1860s might have brought about a rise in the power of banks as intermediaries.