The Société générale belongs to that handful of big joint-stock ‘new banks’ which sprang from the financial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century. Established in 1864 as a multi-purpose Paris based institute, quite rapidly the bank became national in scope, ranking among the major French banks. Bonin's Histoire reconstructs the founding and early developments of this bank, thus adding to French financial and banking history. The author's research in the Société générale's historical archives has resulted in a massive volume that displays a great deal of information about the bank and its men, as well as giving stimulating insights about its functioning and organisation during the first twenty-five years of its existence. It has to be noted, moreover, that Bonin labels it as the first of a two-volume history of the Société générale, explicitly referring to the second volume at least twice in his book, though without specifying the division into two volumes.

Interestingly, Bonin seems to have organised his book approximately after the pattern of Jean Bouvier's seminal work Le Crédit lyonnais de 1863 à 1882. Les années de formation d'une banque de dépôts. Apart from the obvious resemblances occurring in the two titles, in fact, both Bouvier and Bonin start recounting the negotiations and agreements which eventually led a group of bankers, financiers and industrialists to found the new bank, both focusing on the roles played by the different protagonists; then, both of them describe the development of the bank in the various activities and ‘jobs’ (métiers) it performed in its early years: from the organisation of a nationwide network of branches and of the firm's departments, to the collection of deposits; from granting discount credit, to the participation in international bond issues; from offering industrial credit to firms, to placing stocks and bonds among their customers. Both books show how wrong choices made in running a young bank could be dangerous and devastating for its very existence, though perhaps the crisis which affected the Société générale in the 1880s was less serious than that which its competitor had to face in 1882. Also Bonin's decision to end his story in 1890 – though he never explicitly explains this anywhere in the book – may be interpreted as a suggestion to compare the two institutions, which were the greatest French banks at the time.

After having described the founding of the new institute, the book explores the organisation of the top management of the bank, which underwent a number of changes during the period. That was due both to the growing competition with other big banks – e.g. the Crédit industriel et commercial and the Comptoir d'escompte de Paris – which made it impossible for the Société générale to let its managing directors sit on other firms' boards. Further, by the mid 1880s, some scandals concerning the guano affaire launched in Peru in the early 1870s resulted in long-term immobilisation of about 10–15 per cent of the bank assets, which forced its chair, Denière, to resign in 1886. While developing its nationwide network of branches and deposit banking services from the very beginning, in late 1864 the bank also embarked on international loans underwriting, issuing and placing (often through banks' pools and syndicates) and investing in foreign banks, public works and public utilities' enterprises. Quite surprisingly, however, the bank seems not to have organised any dedicated financial studies department, unlike the Crédit lyonnais which did so as early as 1872.

Bonin discusses the various activities performed by the young institution in separate chapters, titled after each particular ‘job’, mixing their description with what we could call an embryonic ‘social history’ of the bank employees, to which he devotes much room throughout the book. In fact, he could study the personnel records to trace most of the middle managers' careers, giving account of many professional biographies. This notwithstanding, the author often complains of the lack of records and of precise information which at times prevented him taking definitive positions, and left him with mere conjectures. This is the case with several affaires, for which apparently only concise descriptions are available from the minutes of the board of directors' meetings, but almost no specific records seem to have been found in the archives. The history of the organisation of the banks' departments, too (as for instance the fundamental Service de l'Inspection et contrôle and Service de la Comptabilité), relies completely on this kind of truncated source, resulting in a sometimes poor description and explanation of their functioning. What seems to emerge, however, is that in about 10 to 15 years the bank was able to rely upon its own breeding ground, namely the Service de l'Inspection which started supplying its network with new branch managers from the late 1870s.

After having analysed these aspects of the bank's activity, Bonin investigates in detail the bank's performance over the entire period, relying on the board of directors' records more than on the bookkeeping department's ones. He particularly tries to assess it from the stockholders' point of view, coming to the conclusion that the bank was a profitable investment for most of them, notwithstanding the ups and downs and the admittedly less satisfactory results of the difficult 1880s.

Finally, the author puts his reconstruction of the history of the Société générale into the broader perspective of its relationship with the social and political environment of the time and tries to define the bank structure and functional pattern as compared to other institutions and to the common wisdom about banking patterns and traditions. Interpreting – as the author does – the growing importance and power enjoyed by merchant banks and private bank houses during the Restoration as a first banking revolution is unconvincing, since they did not undergo any qualitative changes in organisation or form of enterprise from their appearance in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, much more convincing is Bonin's idea that both the Société générale and the Crédit lyonnais are not simply banques nouvelles as many others, but that they share similar characteristics along an original pattern, almost unique in Europe at the time: that of banks with a vast nationwide network of branches, performing a variety of activities. Putting it in other terms, it seems that the Société générale was a universal bank, whose specificity lay in its amazingly strong and precocious development of multi-branching and deposit banking activity. Bonin's Histoire de la Société générale is a useful contribution to the understanding of modern banking development in Europe. It raises several questions and suggests a number of possible research paths.