LA POLITIQUE D'ESCOMPTE DE LA BANQUE DE FRANCE ET SES PERMANENCES (1857-1870)

Principal dispenser of the credit in a country which was eager for it, endowed with an exclusive privilege, the Banque de France maintained its discount rate at the fixed level of 4 % during more than 26 years, from 1820 to 1847. The violence and the recurrence of the monetary crises, the transformations of the payment conditions, the development of new economic theories on the solidarity of financial markets, led it to apply a policy of mobility of its discount rate, which constitutes a major break with its previous practices. Further debates develop among the economists about the consequences of this policy and about the opportunity of the mobility of the discount, in the new perspective of the solidarity of financial markets. They join former controversies, which the policy of mobility revived, on the missions which involve to the Bank in credit: saint simoniens and defenders of the Bank keep fighting on the new battlefield of the mobility of the discount. If the controversies on the monopoly and the freedom of issue widely hid these former and new debates on the mobility of the discount, these last ones nonetheless remain alive and rich from the point of view of the economic analysis.