ABSTRACT
Contemporaries and historians have always contrasted two modes of organization of the nancial market, that of London and that of Paris, as antimonic references – whereas other markets are akin to one of these models or mixes of both. e opposition criterion is the public or private character of the brokers. e London market was labelled as ‘free’, since brokers and jobbers were title merchants without connections to any o cial function, whereas the stockbrokers of the o cial French market were ministerial o cials appointed by the Finance Minister. Such di erence resulted from the political and economic heritage of both countries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, since France had been governed by an absolute monarchy which had borrowed a lot, thereby conferring a major role to State rente1 whereas London was negotiating private securities and foreign funds. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century in France, admiration for the English model and increasing liberalism tended to question the legitimacy of the stockbrokers’ monopoly by diverting the debate towards an opposition between security brought by State-guaranteed monopoly and e ciency on the other hand: the London organization seemed to be the most favourable to business dynamism. It is this debate, leading incidentally to a large number of articles, which gave rise to the Act which recognized and reorganized the coulisse2 in 1898, an Act which only half-satis ed those standing for liberalism:
e opposition between monopoly and ‘freedom’ was somehow ideological, since, in fact it concerned at most a regulation provided by law or the government on the one hand, and on the other hand a guild-like self-regulation.
