Paris\u2019s Stock Exchange \u2013 the Bourse \u2013 was the heart of the second largest financial market in the world down to the Great War. It trailed London in terms of the volume of transactions it hosted, but was nevertheless similarly international, with a privileged position as a market for international public debt. Along with the third and fourth place markets of Berlin and New York, and thanks to the rapid expansion of its massive commercial banks, Paris was a strategic centre channeling the flows that constituted capital\u2019s first era of globalization.<\/p>\n
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Photograph of the Paris Bourse, early twentieth century. Source: Archives de la Pr\u00e9fecture de Police de Paris, D\/B 188.<\/p><\/div>\n
Despite its global footprint, the nineteenth-century Bourse was also distinctly and importantly Parisian. Not only were the microstructures of the exchange \u2013 the rules of trading and the regulations governing agents \u2013 distinct from other national exchanges. (These rules made information generated on the Bourse an entirely different kind of commodity from that springing from the London or New York exchanges.) The exchange was also Parisian in a legal sense. Built by the architect Alexandre-Th\u00e9odore Brogniart along designs approved by Napoleon, it became the property of the city of Paris in 1829. It was a municipal asset that brought in around 240 000 francs to the city\u2019s coffers annually at the turn of the century. (When a 1fr entrance fee was imposed between 1856 and 1861, it returned 617 000 francs per year.) The city\u2019s police had a special division dedicated entirely to the exchange and to controlling places where brokers conventionally gathered, tracking the curb market and other unofficial trading groups through caf\u00e9s, passages, and club rooms near the official exchange.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since at least Saskia Sassen\u2019s now classic work Global Cities<\/em>, local spaces and material assemblages are acknowledged as crucial to seemingly disembodied networks of global finance. In the nineteenth century, exchanges became icons of urban and financial modernity, their confusing crowds instantiating otherwise invisible relations of money and trade. At the same time \u2013 and as is the work of icons \u2013 their spectacular imagery obscured the ordinary and routine work that assembled financial transactions into international markets.<\/p>\n A portrait of L\u00e9vy from her book, La Bourse en 1890.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n This labour is not invisible to all \u2013 certainly not to those who perform it. Taking sidelong or unfamiliar views can help push aside the tropes of the temple of money and reinvigorate our understanding of the \u2018how\u2019 and \u2018why\u2019 of financial markets. \u00a0<\/p>\n This particular view comes from the cloakroom. The Paris Bourse had at least three, one at each entrance, where men with business on the exchange consigned their hats, jackets, umbrellas, canes \u2013 anything that might encumber their activities during trading. (At some points, turning over umbrellas and canes was obligatory, to avoid the temptation of their aggressive deployment inside.) They were leased to concessionaries by the City of Paris, and all were run day-to-day by women \u2013 the only women permitted inside the Bourse, which was open only to those who enjoyed their full political rights. In 1889, one of their occupants, Nathalie L\u00e9vy, penned a unique guide to the men and spaces that made up the Bourse<\/a>, one that defied convention by individualizing its participants and by widening its scope to include not only the flurry of tail-coated transactions that typically dazzled observers but the work of maintenance, surveillance, and support that surrounded the hubbub of finance.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n L\u00e9vy’s Exchange<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Among popular guides to the Bourse, L\u00e9vy\u2019s not only stands out for being written by a woman and a worker at the exchange. It is deeply idiosyncratic, eschewing the official agents and spaces of the Bourse in favour of its employees, independent intermediaries, and service spaces. Even the familiar portion of the book \u2013 an almanac-style section listing the city\u2019s principal banks and brokers \u2013 is uniquely developed, listing hundreds of smaller agencies in multiple lines of business \u201cconcerned with finance\u201d alongside financial heavy weights like the Bank of France and the Cr\u00e9dit Lyonnais. The world of L\u00e9vy\u2019s Bourse is sprinkled across the city, from single-room brokerages to multi-branch financial department stores.<\/p>\n The author\u2019s chief interest comes in a humorous catalogue of Bourse denizens, brought to life by sketches from well-known illustrators. L\u00e9vy draws verbal \u2018silhouettes\u2019 of dozens of individual intermediaries \u2013 like the remisiers<\/em><\/a> who shuttled business between clients, brokerages, and official stock brokers \u2013 offering teasing and pun-filled descriptions of their appearance, business, and temperament. Where most \u2018physiognomies\u2019 populate the Bourse with types (the bull, the bear, the winner, the loser), L\u00e9vy introduces us to people \u2013 for example, to L\u00e9on Weil, who used to work for Pereire but today trades for the Dreyfus bank; to Ernest Morel, a trader in the curb market who has two clerks just to sort his telegraph messages (and for all that gets impatient if a moment passes without more news); to Clavelly, who can claim a self-made fortune; and to Poloniny, a \u201ccr\u00e9ole<\/em> by birth\u201d and \u201cthe prettiest boy at the Bourse.\u201d<\/p>\n Bonhomie\u00a0<\/em>at the Bourse:\u00a0An unsuspecting trader is the butt of his fellows’ jokes, fearing what they place in his pockets.<\/p><\/div>\n Light-hearted and playful, the guide catalogues a fraternity of fair sport, even-handedness, and good intention. From the rowdy coulisse<\/em> (the curb market) to the middlemen of the official exchange, L\u00e9vy\u2019s Bourse is a marvel of good faith and honesty, \u201ctrafficking in millions\u201d with nothing but a pencil tick. Slow moments are given over to harmless fun and innocent escapades \u2013 \u201cgamineries<\/em>\u201d (childishness) like slipping a live crayfish into someone\u2019s pocket \u2013 all while sharing around chocolates and candies. (L\u00e9vy purportedly sold sweets from her perch in the cloakroom.) In the place of a nefarious network or impenetrable tumult, L\u00e9vy gives us charming personalities and boys being boys, a simplicity and jocularity that humanizes and entertains. Professional money-making jockeys with professional pleasure-taking in descriptions that give more space to horse-racing, yachting, and concert-going than to financial operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n If this world is like any other, it is the world of the theatre. (L\u00e9vy\u2019s book is published by the Revue th\u00e9\u00e2trale illustr\u00e9e<\/em>, edited by her father, L\u00e9on, who was also the concessionary of the Bourse\u2019s cloakrooms.) We learn that Jeaques Kann\u2019s pencil \u201cserves two ends: for prices on one side of his paper, and portraits on the other;\u201d that Cola\u00e7o, a specialist in arbitrage, \u201clooks shockingly like Rochard, director of the Ambigu Theatre\u201d and that the banker Raphael looks like \u201cColonne, director of the Ch\u00e2telet\u2019s concerts;\u201d that the remisier Gans never misses an opening night and that Andr\u00e9 Wolff married the daughter of a singing sensation from the Op\u00e9ra-Comique.<\/p>\n Maintenance and caretaking workers at the Bourse, 1924. Source: BNF, Agence Rol.<\/p><\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The name of the unofficial market, the coulisse, also refers to the wings of a theatre, and L\u00e9vy\u2019s account expands from the supporting cast of traders to those behind the scenes. She introduces readers to the people responsible for maintaining the building, running the cloakrooms, writing up official prices, and securing order. The agents from the local police detachment, called upon to control crowds and settle disputes (L\u00e9vy puns that \u201cdiscussions of a very delicate nature are often liquidated <\/em>in [their] office\u201d), along with the twenty-two guards (black uniforms with silver braid) managed by brigadier R\u00e9mond and attached to the official stockbrokers, and the building\u2019s eight caretakers (blue coats and red epaulettes), render \u201cimportant services\u201d to the business of trading. It was the concierge, M. Cottin, we learn, who saved the building and its archives during the Commune \u2013 indeed, the Bourse\u2019s police detachment records are the only local commissariat archives to survive<\/a> the fires of the siege and Commune. She lingers, too, on the material that makes the Bourse tick: how chairs are rented and moved about, how movable writing surfaces were designed and installed, how telegraph cables were transferred via secure bags and fleets of running or cycling clerks.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n View from the Wings<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n We have L\u00e9vy\u2019s positionality to thank for this attunement to the overlooked work of care, maintenance, and support in the life of the Bourse. At least briefly an actress (newspapers report favourably on some stage appearances in 1891 and 1892) and connected to the theatre through her father, she was familiar with the vast operations of a mise en sc\u00e8ne. <\/em>As a service provider at the exchange, we can imagine a daily routine of observation from her counter at the cloakroom, in the wings of the Bourse\u2019s central dramas. It is easy to picture the lulls between harried moments of arrivals and departures, when security guards, cleaners, and unoccupied clerks pitched up at Nathalie\u2019s counter to gossip and crack jokes, possibly at the expense of self-important financiers. Her position as a woman accentuated this remove. The book\u2019s tone is maternal, indulgent and gently mocking. (I don\u2019t know Nathalie\u2019s age for certain at this point, but it\u2019s likely she was in her late forties.) Reviewers uniformly commented on the (agreeably) feminine nature of the text; Le Gr\u00e9lot<\/em> described the author as \u201cenormously parisienne<\/em>,\u201d an adept \u201cof the art of scratching without piercing the skin.\u201d<\/p>\n A sketch of Nathalie L\u00e9vy at the cloakroom of the Bourse, from La Presse<\/em>, 1900.<\/p><\/div>\n Critics skewered her in both gendered and antisemitic terms. The cloakroom, where traders partially disrobed to better maneuver (coat, hat, boutonniere, and gloves discarded, so that \u201cone would no longer recognize the elegant man about town\u201d) lent itself to much innuendo. One retrospective from La Presse <\/em>in 1900 described her as having transformed a simple attendant\u2019s role into a lucrative salon \u2013 turning up when she felt like it, decked out to the nines and holding court with traders up for intrigues\u2026sous le manteau <\/em>(illicit dealings \u2013 literally: under the coat). On the one hand, \u201cshe symbolized the cult of the feminine, a reminder of romance and rest in the midst of the deafening racket, the brutalities and m\u00eal\u00e9es of the money traffickers;\u201d on the other, the journalist suggests, she earned the nickname \u2018Madame Putiphar\u2019 for her alleged liaisons. Hers were the illicit pursuits of a woman out of place and a \u201cwell protected Jewess,\u201d replaced in her turn by \u201canother, no less pretty and no less Jewish, freshly divorced and adorably blonde.”<\/p>\n Indeed, the only part of her book to receive serious engagement in the press was an assertive section defending Jewish financiers from the period\u2019s rampant antisemitism. Noting that readers will have noticed that \u201cchildren of Israel\u201d occupy a significant place in \u201cthe temple of speculation,\u201d she praised Jewish finance \u2013 \u201cthis haute banque <\/em>that so obsesses Drumont\u201d \u2013 not only for sustaining the market in public debt and national securities but for putting thousands to work \u2013 the employees, building caretakers, and telegraph boys she\u2019d just introduced by name. While the press obsessed over the smallest infractions if they happened to be committed by a Jew, she wrote, it entirely overlooked their immense works of charity. She flagged the contributions of Jewish women particularly, pointing out that two of the only five women ever to be awarded the Legion of Honour were Jewish. This section was excerpted at length in Le Gr\u00e9lot<\/em>, a weekly illustrated magazine, and the author disparaged for being insufficiently objective about her fellow Jews, whose \u201cmanias\u201d prevent non-Jews from treating them as countrymen. Yet the entire book, with its sketches of business bonhomie<\/em> and layers of worthwhile labour, can be read as an effort to celebrate and normalize an increasingly demonized group.<\/p>\n Nathalie L\u00e9vy\u2019s text gave her a buzz of publicity in the early 1890s, after which \u2013 and after the death of her father, in 1892 \u2013 she seems to have dropped from the public eye. But her unconventional guide to the Bourse, informed by her status as a woman, Jew, and worker located simultaneously at the heart and on the margins of the icon of finance, opens far more informative vantages on the work and location of finance than she surely intended when penning her comical anecdotes. In most respects, this is not a serious book; it’s a piece of gossip, a work of advertising, a grab at some headlines and salacious repute. And yet it reveals much of the daily world of market-making, and helps us recover the mundane, material, and embodied aspects of financial enterprise that both shaped its development and informed its cultural and economic significance. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Further Reading<\/em><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"A](\"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/riseoftherentier\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/269\/2021\/04\/Levy-Portrait-242x300.png\")
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