the world of private banking

xxiv
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
In all countries, direct political involvement was unusual among Jewish bankers,
though they were concerned with politics and did enjoy a degree of influence,
especially when their advice or services was sought by governments.
The other major religious network, that of Protestant bankers, is analysed by
the late Martin Körner, who rightly points out in chapter 13 that, unlike Jewish
bankers, who were part of a religious minority in all the countries where they
traded, Protestant bankers became part of the majority in Lutheran and Calvinist
countries during the sixteenth century.
Protestant banking came into being as merchants and merchant bankers
converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. Its network of relationships became
internationally visible as early as the sixteenth century, through the financial
solidarity existing between European Protestants, especially Swiss, and the
Calvinist party in France – an international network which was older and wider
than the more restrictive Internationale Huguenote, which was limited to the
Calvinist banking world.
In non-Protestant countries, Protestant banking was particularly strong in
France, as a result of the French state’s growing financial needs and the funds
provided by the Huguenot International. In the second half of the seventeenth
century, Swiss financiers set up branches in Paris where the Protestant bank became
increasingly powerful, reaching its apex with Necker’s appointment as general
financial controller in 1776. In Germany, by contrast, the most important merchant
bankers remained Catholic after the Reformation, though the number of Protestant
bankers, such as Metzler and Bethmann in Frankfurt, grew in the later eighteenth
century. In Catholic Vienna, the dominant position reached by Protestant bankers
and financiers such as Wiesenhütter, Steiner, or Johann Fries might well have
been due to the government attempts at escaping Jewish finance. As a minority in
Catholic countries, Protestants bankers displayed high rates of intermarriage and
relied on their financial expertise and networks of relationships for their socioeconomic
success. As a group, their significance waned in the nineteenth century.
Social status has been an essential attribute of private bankers – resulting
from their wealth, family inheritance and gradual integration into the upper
classes. From the late nineteenth century, respectability and connections in the
highest social circles still enabled private bankers to deal with the most exclusive
customers, not least foreign governments, even though their firms were dwarfed in
size by the joint stock banks. Social status entailed responsibilities. As Pat Thane
clearly shows in chapter 14, elites were committed to philanthropy in Victorian
and Edwardian England, a commitment led by the Royal Family. For the financial
elites, especially the newcomers and parvenus, supporting the numerous charities
of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, was the price to pay for gaining
social respectability. However, she also shows that philanthropy cannot be entirely
explained by the aim of checking the advance of socialism nor the desire for social
acceptance. A concern for the sufferings of others was also clearly at work, not
least among Jewish financiers who felt compassion for the poverty of their coreligionists
who had emigrated to Britain from the early 1880s. While the level