the world of private banking

‘HAUtE BANqUE’ AND tHE INtERNAtIONAL EcONOmy 135
view to the French horizon’. their foreign operations hardly represented a tenth
of their work.
Taking everything into account, the international involvement of the Mallets
appears to correctly reflect the average behaviour of the Haute Banque, if, that is, it
is correct to talk of an average for a group of establishments with such very varied
behaviour. On the whole, towards 1860 large French businesses still remained
essential to the majority of the houses of the Haute Banque, even if they had long
been habitual participants in international financial operations.
The Decline of the Haute Banque or the Strengthening of the International
Role of the Haute Banque?
At the end of the 1860s, the Old Bank triumphed over the New Bank, in other
words Crédit Mobilier, formed in 1852 by the Pereire brothers, who, it is true
to say, profited from the support of many families in the Haute Banque (notably
the Foulds and the Mallets). A decline had however already started for the
Haute Banque. This can readily be described as relatively rapid and apparently
inexorable, so much so that studies of banking history hardly mention the Haute
Banque after this time.
It is true that it had to contend with an entire economic and financial environment
little in favour of maintaining its traditional activities. As the trade from France
to England no longer gave regular trade surpluses, the Paris market lost one of
its advantages. It also suffered for too long from forced prices on notes from the
Bank of France which isolated it from international monetary agreements from
1870 to 1890. After this, the international supremacy of the London market was
indisputable. At the same time, the new credit establishments which were set up as
limited companies (Crédit Lyonnais in 1863, Société Générale the following year,
etc.) started to organize the systematic draining of savings in the form of deposits:
because of the formidable extent of their resources and the multiplication of their
agencies over all the national territory, they became very strong competitors for
the old houses.
It is nevertheless necessary to understand the reality of this decline in the Haute
Banque. Indisputably the number of houses making it up dwindled. It no longer
enriched itself with new members, because the few private banks, most often still
of foreign origin, that had been able to apply and be accepted were affected by
the severe financial crises which exploded in the decade of the 1880s, and then
by the Panama scandal, which resulted in their disappearance. At the opposite
end, some well-known members of the Haute Banque ceased their operations.
J.-F. Belhoste and H. Rouquette, La Maison Seillière et Demachy, banque de
l’industrie et du commerce depuis le XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1977).
D. Landes, ‘Vieille Banque et Banque Nouvelle: la révolution bancaire du XIXe
siècle’, in Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine, vol. 1956, pp. 204ff.