the world of private banking

PROtEStANt bANKING 239
lead one of the most powerful banks in Paris. Born in 1690 as a son of a Genevan
merchant, Isaac Thellusson, related to Louis Guiguer, arrived in Paris in 1707 after
his apprenticeship and further training in Amsterdam and London. A few years later
he became the managing director of the ‘Jean-Jacques Tourton and Louis Guiguer’
firm for ‘banking, change and trade’. Herbert Lüthy describes him as the typical
representative of the new banker generation in the eighteenth century: overbearing,
ruthless, authoritarian and violent, with the terrible good conscience of the just. He
was a decided enemy of the Scot John Law and held himself and his affairs back
from the System. The Thellusson family continued the profitable management of
their own bank. In 1757–68 the firm was called ‘Thellusson, Necker & Co’ and in
1789 ‘Greffulhe & Montz’. In 1770 ‘Thellusson, Necker & Co’ was known as one
of the three biggest private banks in Paris. The second one, ‘Tourton & Bauer’, was
also a Protestant bank. But the third one, ‘Lecouteulx & Co’, was Catholic. This
shows that not all the important private banks were the property of Protestants.
With the reorganization of the French monetary system and its stabilization
after the Law crisis, Protestant banks again became very important in financing
French foreign trade and serving the Royal Treasury. A new generation of Genevan
bankers – Isaac Mallet and Robert Dufour – introduced themselves in Paris in
order to administer the French bonds, mainly shares of the Indian Company, rents
on the town-hall and royal lotteries of Genevan and Swiss capitalists. ‘Tourton
& Bauer’ were highly implicated in the affairs of the King of Poland in 1733–8,
transferring French subsidies on behalf of the King. During the critical supply
situation in 1738–41 Thellusson in his function as minister of Geneva at Versailles
played a dominating role in financing the grain provision of Paris. After 1760,
the Royal Treasury got more used to accepting the services of the international
Protestant bankers at its highest level. One of them, Jacques Necker, citizen of
Geneva, merchant and banker, ascended also to the position of resident of the
Republic of Geneva at the court and under Louis XVI (1774–93) became the head
of the royal finances in 1776, and prime minister of the kingdom until 1788. During
these years, officially he was no longer a private banker, but he still continued to
be Georges-Thobie Thellusson’s partner in the Company.
Since the Swiss economy suffered during the eighteenth century from a
great capital overhang, the Genevan bankers present for generations in Paris,
and increasingly also those from St. Gallen, Zurich, Basel, Bern, Lausanne and
Neuchâtel, were looking for all kinds of investment opportunities. 17 In addition
17
For more details concerning the capital overhang in eighteenth-century Switzerland,
see J. Landmann, Die auswärtigen Kapitalanlagen aus dem Berner Staatsschatz im XVIII.
Jahrhundert: Eine finanzhistorische Studie (Zurich, 1903); J. Landmann, Leu & Co. 1755–
1905: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der öffentlichen und privaten Kreditorganisation (Zurich,
1905); J. Landmann, ‘Der schweizerische Kapitalexport’, in Zeitschrift für schweizerische
Statistik und Volkswirtschaft, vol. 52, 1916, pp. 389–415; H. Büchi, ‘Solothurnische
Finanzzustände im ausgehenden Ancien Régime (ca. 1750–98)’, in Basler Zeitschrift für
Geschichte und Altertumskunde, vol. 15, 1916, pp. 56–116; B. Wehrli, Das Finanzsystem