Each volume of this pair gathers about twenty contributors, from across the full range of career stages from junior researchers to professors, to deliver a path-breaking study which breaks the mould of the old-style thesis in law and economics to tackle the history of the Paris stock exchange. French financial history will therefore not be the same after the publication of these volumes, even if further inquiries emerge to complement a few of the topics.

The first volume is dedicated to general ‘stories’, that is, the global contribution of financial markets to French growth. It posits a three-stage chronological approach, and assesses the evolution of the stock exchange as a relevant and useful organisation for various circuits of the savings market. Tales about the evolution of banks, the framework of money and banking markets (Banque de France, savings banks and the manager of their deposits, Caisse des depôts, solicitors and various intermediaries), and the structure of the Ministry of Finance and of the Treasury, help explain the room left to the stock exchange and its singular contribution to the financing of the economy and the state. Another important point is to gauge the evolution of general savings amongst country-dwellers and the urban bourgeoisie and to estimate the proportion of securities issued against countryside property and city real estate – but the authors failed to tackle the issue of hoarding despite the attraction of gold (and silver) in France.

The main aspects of this volume comprise an overall measurement of the capitalisation of the Paris stock exchange and of a precise distribution between sectors. Convincing figures have been collected to assess the evolution of the structure of the stock exchange, the emergence of transportation securities, then the diversification towards companies’ securities, including mining and industry. But banks predominated among first-ranking capitalisations: that confirms the high degree of modernisation of the Paris market.

The second volume is focused on relevant sectoral studies. But its key advantage lies in the accompanying CD, because the authors collected huge amounts of data and have set up pioneering series which are breakthrough contributions to economic and financial history. The book team has scrutinised archives to deliver a wealth of original data, which will form the basis for further studies by the whole community involved in banking and finance history. The analysis of figures is supplemented by the measurement of the performance of a few state bonds thanks to the collection of about 11,000 quotations from each Friday of the Stock Exchange from 1798 to 1914. At the very end of the volume, graphs and tables concentrate huge amounts of data (especially indexes on the revenues of equity and bonds, sector by sector) to fuel arguments about the growth and profitability of investment: every specialist will find material to foster their analysis.

A first wave of chapters (mainly written by Patrick Verley) follows how the market itself got its institutional organisation: stockbrokers (‘agents de change’) benefited from a monopoly for state bonds and quoted equity between 1801 and 1816, whereas for the other stocks, values were traded on a more flexible market by ‘free-standing’ jobbers (‘maisons de Coulisse’), but far less supported by financial guarantees. The archives of the police and of the stockbrokers themselves help the authors to deliver a fresh analysis of these houses, through crashes, the piling of bad debts over collapsing customers, etc.

The section which traces the history of the bond market constitutes the most important aspect of the volume, because it provides a story, analysis and some synthetic developments about the issue and performance of state bonds from the Revolution and Napoleonic years to World War I. State bonds constituted a majority, then still about two-fifths, of the Paris capitalisation, which justifies a thorough study of the evolution of this market. In fact, the state and its bankers struggled to rebuild the state's creditworthiness from its bankruptcy in 1797 and Napoleon's defeat in 1815 to the several revolutionary events from 1830 to 1871. The negative effects on savers’ and institutional investors’ trust had to be dispelled, and the authors retrace the steps of this fight. They offer fine-tuned financial history and insights from political science converging towards a solid history of the successes, limits and consequences of the successive issues of state bonds.

This volume brings fresh analysis of the history of the financing of programmes of Paris developments, Haussmann's projects and of public works through the issuing of bonds by Ville de Paris. First, the City had to face a huge short-term debt and to consolidate it in the 1810s–20s. Then it had to set up, with bankers, the issue of long-term bonds to finance the programmes of public works: first, canals on the northern outskirts of Paris, then a global project to modernise and equip the city with facilities (including the Métro). Details about each operation and the use of cash are abundant. The final part, less innovative because this ground has been worked by others as recently as the 1970s (Pierre Léon, Adeline Daumard, etc.), follows the history of equity issues and the secondary market. Thanks to the enrichment of the upper and middle classes, stocks of savings were available and were drawn more and more towards private equity.

But there are a few criticisms: first, harmonisation across the studies could have been better, since several pages repeat themselves here and there. But one main point is that the authors ought to have made more use of nineteenth-century banking history because bankers’ contributions in terms of their portfolio of skills and networks were significant in the emergence and development of the financial market and are not sufficiently highlighted here. Another gap is the absence of analysis of the ‘secondary market’ itself, including the conditions of arbitrages, the role of banks and insurance companies in trading, etc. Speculation also ought to have been considered. And it would be useful for lazy readers to have final tables and graphs allowing comparison of the evolution of the French markets with that of the British, Belgian and German ones. Let us hope for a third volume in the near future to complement this already high-ranking series, of utmost importance for finance history.