This set of books on the history of the French financial market in the nineteenth century combines two volumes and two approaches that, while referring to one another, can each stand very well alone and be read (and bought) separately. The second volume is accompanied by a CD containing a valuable collection of data series.

The first volume is the result of a joint effort by Pierre-Cyrille Hautcœur, Zheng Kang, Carine Romey, Theirno Seck, and André Strauss. It offers a chronological overview of the history of French financial markets from the aftermath of the Napoleonic Empire to the onset of World War 1. The central character of the story is the Paris Bourse. Four of the fourteen chapters are dedicated to the institutional development of the stock exchange, the evolution of the legislative framework, and the fascinating parallel structures of a heavily regulated official stock exchange, the parquet, on the one hand and the unregulated yet sizeable and well established coulisse on the other. Over the century, the relationship between the two markets oscillated between competition and complementarity, where the coulisse for most of the time constituted the more dynamic and innovative element, trading a larger set of securities and providing liquidity through an officially prohibited yet lively forward market. In order to delineate the specific role of the Bourse, this history is complemented by chapters on other institutions providing long-term finance: traditional lending networks, notaries, private banks, and the Treasury in the early nineteenth century; later on joint stock banks. Another set of chapters looks at the savers as the ultimate providers of resources and the recipients of funds such as canals and railroads.

While the chapters on the Bourse itself rely extensively on primary sources (and reproduce some of them in appendices), the remaining sections of the book mainly summarize and reorganize existing research on those aspects of the financial system that the authors deem crucial for understanding the development of the stock exchange. Such a combination of original research and background material is a valuable approach. However, the almost total absence of references within the text and the lack of a comprehensive bibliography limit the use of the book as a starting point for newcomers to French financial history, who otherwise would seem to be the book's natural audience. If this is due to space constraints, it is really unfortunate.

A second limitation concerns the delineation of the book's subject. The choice of the chapters that complement the core history of the Bourse derives from the authors' concept of financial markets as those institutions that intermediate long-term financing between savers and investors. While this—loosely speaking—”primary market perspective” provides insights from the point of view of economic growth, it is not entirely satisfying when it comes to understanding the driving forces behind the evolution of the stock exchange itself. The attractiveness of a stock market stands and falls with the liquidity of the secondary market. The secondary market, however, receives little attention, while the money market and in particular the market for reports, i.e., for lending on stock, another potentially important ingredient of secondary market liquidity, is completely excluded. Little space is also dedicated to the role of the banks in the secondary market, be it as providers of short-term lending, competitors that internalize part of the trading between their customers and thereby reduce market liquidity, or as market makers for securities they have underwritten. It would seem that these elements all have an important bearing on the institutional evolution of the stock exchange and should have been investigated further.

The second volume edited by Georges Gallais-Hamonno includes ten articles on selected aspects of the Paris stock exchange. Most of the studies are rich in data; their approaches borrowing more from finance than history. The articles with the broadest appeal are Jacques-Marie Vaslin's history and weekly index of French central government bonds and Pedro Arbulu's monthly stock index of the Paris Bourse. For the first time, key benchmark series for the French financial markets for the entire nineteenth century are available. What is particularly laudable is the authors' decision to describe in detail the methodology used in constructing the time series as well as to provide the underlying data, i.e. individual bond prices and the nominal price and total return indices for all companies that form part of the aggregate indices, on a CD-ROM, which should also help users to orient themselves between Arbulu's and other more recently published indices (see D. Le Bris and P.-C. Hautcoeur “A Challenge to Triumphant Optimists? A Blue Chips Index for the Paris Stock Exchange, 1854–2007.” Financial History Review 17, no. 2 (2010): 141–83). These two studies are complemented by more specialized articles, e.g., on the bonds issued by the city of Paris, the specificities of quoted insurance companies or the forward market, again all seen from a quantitative perspective and with plenty of data to play around with.

To conclude, these are two volumes with some weaknesses and some merits that should and will stimulate further research on their important subject.