the world of private banking

240
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
to the business with the above-mentioned royal bonds, they also bought for their
clients shares of semi-public and private firms in industry, trade, navigation and
banking. By making good use of their relationships with the world of trade and
with old Protestant banking in France these Swiss newcomers did not have any
difficulties in introducing themselves into the society of Parisian high finance.
Through their offer of foreign capital they appeared as very attractive partners
for French merchants and manufacturers. The Genevan Antoine Saladin easily
became a shareholder and managing director of the royal mirror manufactory of
Saint-Gobain. And we find Jacques-Louis Pourtalès from Neuchâtel at the head of
a multinational trading and banking house with bases at Lyons, Paris, Pondicherry,
Lorient, Hamburg, London, Philadelphia and Constantinople.
Alongside all the Genevan bankers in Paris such as ‘Girardot, Haller & Co’
– Necker’s old firm – as well as Mallet, Bontemps, Lullin, de Candolle and
Calandrini, etc. with all their well-trained business activities, we find in particular
five Protestant Swiss bankers among the seven members of the administrative
board of the Caisse d’escompte founded in 1776: Isaac Panchaud from Lausanne,
the promoter of this new trading bank, Jean Pierre Louis de Montguyon from
Geneva, an associate of ‘Pache frères & Cie’ in Paris, Jean Werner Marck from
Basel, founder of ‘Marck & Lafabre,’ which changed its name in 1775 to ‘Banque
Lafabre & Doerner’ at Paris, Paul Schlumpf from St Gallen, associated with
the ‘Sellonf & Perregaux’ bank at Paris, and Etienne Delessert, the head of the
‘Banque Delessert & Fils’ at Lyons and of its Paris branch ‘Delessert & Cie’.
These initiators of the Caisse d’escompte were specialists in maritime trade hoping
to be more successful than the French Indian Company which recently had lost its
monopoly in the colonial trade. Even the new generation of private bankers that
Necker called into this bank in 1778 after the eviction of Panchaud and the ‘traders’
were representatives of the haute banque of Paris, and all Protestants – Girardot,
Louis Tourton, Jean-Louis Cottin, Jacques Rilliet, etc. – except Lecouteulx, who
was a Catholic. Finally, after 1780 new Swiss Protestant bankers arrived in Paris
– Rougemont and Perrégaux from Neuchâtel and Hottinguer from Zurich, who
after the French Revolution and the early nineteenth century became some of the
big private bankers of the haute banque. 18
Zürichs gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Aarau, 1944); H.C. Peyer, Von Handel und Bank
im alten Zürich (Zurich, 1968); E.W. Monter, ‘Swiss Investment in England, 1697–1720’,
in International Review of the History of Banking, vol. 2, 1969, pp. 285–98; B. Veyrassat,
Négociants et fabricants dans l’industrie cotonnière suisse 1760–1840: Aux origines
financières de l’industrialisation (Lausanne, 1982); M. Körner, ‘Banques publiques et
banquiers privés dans la Suisse préindustrielle: Administration, Fonctionnement et rôle
économique’, in Banchi pubblici, banchi privati e monti di pietà nell’Europa preindustrale,
Atti del Convegno, Genoa, 1–6 October 1990 (Genoa, 1991).
18
For the period of the French Revolution and the early nineteenth century, see
M. Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes et l’industrialisation internationale dans la
première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1964). A good summary can be found in M. Lévy-