La Bourse insoumise: Financial Policy, Policing, and Market Resistance to State Control in Bonapartist France

Drawing on arguments of my book manuscript, this paper explores how the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III intervened in the 1850s financial markets in pursuit of its goal of steering capital toward politically desirable long-term investments, while restraining speculative trends that it viewed as economically counterproductive and socially destabilizing. The paper also excavates the role played by the French police in these efforts, as they were tasked with monitoring and managing financial market activity long before the existence of formal securities market regulators. Inherent tensions arose, I show, between the state and the bourse as the latter resisted the former’s agenda to instrumentalize finance. This resistance to state initiatives took many forms, from the transactional to the epistemological, as investors sold government securities in protest and market phenomena evaded the comprehension of police intelligence gathering practices. In highlighting these conflicts, the paper underscores the Bonapartist state’s struggle with a financial sector resistant to political control. It also explores the unintended consequences of the state’s regulatory ambitions: the state’s capacity to manage the financial economy was limited, but its efforts to try made it appear culpable for market dysfunction. This losing scenario encouraged the regime to abdicate its interventionist stance in the capital market, thus anticipating the liberal economic policies that would emerge more fully in the 1860s.