the world of private banking

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THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
appearance. It was obviously that of the then usual payments between the existing
dominant economic centres of the Catholic world. About twenty years later, both
systems, the Catholic and the Protestant, were on the way to integration.
Consolidation and Domination of Protestant Banking in France in the
Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries
To repeat: at the beginning of the seventeenth century the French monarchy owed
to the Swiss Republics, the private financiers, bankers and mercenary entrepreneurs
a sum of around 11 million écus or 36 million livres tournois. This was the result
of the growing credit given by the Swiss, rather earlier than generally related in
the dominant literature on finance and bank history. In fact, the growth of Swiss
financial power in France began in the early sixteenth century and grew from about
the late sixties, when one observes the diminishing activities of rivals at Genoa
and in Catholic Southern Germany, manifestly turning its capital flow toward the
German and Spanish Empire. 10
Already in the sixteenth century, the French Crown became interested in
Protestant Swiss financiers as counsellors. Just after the great loans at the time of the
Grand Parti of Lyons and the insolvency of the Crown in 1559, the Catholic Caspar
Pfyffer from Lucerne and the Protestant Benedikt Stokar from Schaffhausen acted
as intermediaries for the representatives of King Charles IX and the Swiss lender
consortium. 11 However, in 1562 the French ambassador in Switzerland, Pomponne
de Bellièvre, chose two Protestants as his special counsellors for financial affairs
between France and Switzerland. Of the two mentioned, he kept Stokar and added the
new Hans-Heinrich Lochmann from Zurich. 12 The preference for the Protestant Swiss
Republics can also be shown after 1602, when King Henry IV solemnly renewed the
military alliance of 1521 with the Swiss Republics and confirmed the old privileges
for all Swiss merchants in the Kingdom of France. Henry engaged himself to pay the
accumulated interest on capital, part of the principal owed and especially the subsidies
See M.A. Denzel, ‘La Practica della Cambiatura’: Europäischer Zahlungsverkehr
vom 14. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1994), p. 529. For the quotations of bills of
exchange in 1575–80, see M.A. Denzel (ed.), Währungen der Welt, vol. IX: Europäische
Wechselkurse von 1383 bis 1620 (Stuttgart, 1995), p. 32, map 2. For more examples, see
M.A. Denzel, ‘Die Integration Deutschlands in das internationale Zahlungsverkehrssystem
im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, in E. Schremmer (ed.), Wirtschaftliche und soziale Integration
in historischer Sicht, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 128
(Stuttgart, 1996).
For the quotations of bills of exchange in 1595–1600, see Denzel, Währungen,
p. 106, map 3.
10
Körner, Solidarités, pp. 416–30.
11
Ibid., p. 421.
12
Ibid., p. 422.