Bank of France
프랑스 은행
The bank of issue and central bank of France, founded with private capital by Napoleon Bonaparte on 18 January 1800. It gained the monopoly of note issue in Paris in 1803 and throughout the country in 1848, was brought under government control in 1936 and nationalised in 1945, and has been part of the Eurosystem since 1999. The Paris Commune did not take it over but only borrowed from it, which Engels and Lenin counted a grave mistake of the Commune.
In depth
The bank began under First Consul Bonaparte as a private joint-stock company with a unique public status. The regents approved by the shareholders in 1803 were bankers of the Haute Banque, who had held the finances of France since before the Revolution. A law of 1806 had a governor and two deputy governors appointed by the emperor, and the basic statutes of 1808 governed the bank's operations until 1936. After it gained the nationwide monopoly of note issue in 1848 the bank became a byword for financial stability.
The bank's gold reserves had been moved out of Paris for safety in August 1870, but when the Thiers government left for Versailles in March 1871 it had no time to take 88 million francs in gold coin and 166 million in banknotes. The bank was guarded by 500 national guardsmen who were its own employees. Some Communards wanted to use the reserves for social projects, but Jourde, in charge of finances, refused, arguing that without the reserves the currency would collapse. Charles Beslay, whom the Commune appointed as its delegate to the bank, arranged no more than a loan of 400,000 francs a day to the Commune. Thiers approved, reckoning that the reserves were needed to pay the five-billion-franc German indemnity and keep the franc stable.
In his 1891 introduction Engels wrote that the hardest thing to understand was the holy awe with which the Commune remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France, and that this was also a serious political mistake: the bank in the hands of the Commune would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages and would have brought the pressure of the whole French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government for peace with the Commune. In "Lessons of the Commune" (1908) Lenin named the failure to expropriate the expropriators and take over institutions such as the banks as one of the two mistakes that destroyed the fruits of victory.
After the First World War the bank built up its gold so far that at its peak it held 28.3 per cent of the world's stock. It was brought under government control under the Popular Front in 1936 and nationalised by Charles de Gaulle's government in 1945. A law of 1993 made it independent of the government in 1994, and in 1999 it joined the Eurosystem, ceding monetary policy to the European Central Bank.