1In La fabrication des billets en France (The Production of Banknotes in France), Mathieu Bidaux provides a detailed historical account of the industrialization of banknote production in France between 1800, the founding date of the Banque de France, and the beginning of the First World War in 1914. The aim of the book, which is based on the author’s dissertation at the University of Rouen and was financed via a CIFRE-convention with the Banque de France, is to answer the question of how and why this process of industrialization took place. In particular, Bidaux asks why the Banque de France decided to create a printing facility within its own organizational boundaries instead of relying on exterior suppliers. In order to provide an answer to this question, Bidaux draws on a large variety of primary sources, the lion’s share belonging to the archival collections of French state administration, most notably the Banque de France, the Direction générale de la fabrication des billets, the ministère des Finances and the Monnaie de Paris (p. 397-401).

2As the subtitle Construire la confiance monétaire (Constructing Monetary Trust) suggests, Bidaux also places his work within enduring debates about the origin of the value of fiduciary money. It has often been noted that it is an unsettling feature of economic life that people accept to exchange valuable goods against intrinsically worthless slips of paper. Why would a rational person indeed do this? Bidaux draws attention to an aspect of the problem which, at least to the best of our knowledge, has hitherto not received very much attention in literature: as Bidaux argues, the material properties of the currency are an important element of the puzzle’s solution. Only if the emission bank is capable of guaranteeing by technical means that banknotes cannot be reproduced by forgers, can the value of the currency be established.

3The book is divided into three distinct sections. The first section, Construire la légitimité des billets (Constructing the Legitimacy of Banknotes), deals with the creation of new denominations over the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the 19^th century, even the smallest existing denominations amounted to the multiple of an average worker’s monthly salary. As a consequence, banknotes were first and foremost a means of payment for well-off merchants and were used for the settlement of high-value wholesale transactions. In this context, the introduction of smaller denominations over the nineteenth century was a crucial element for the adoption of banknotes by a wider public and for its use in a broader range of transactions. Changes in the existing denominations affected therefore the level of both supply of and demand for banknotes. This democratization of the bill represents an important background element to make sense of the process of industrialization which the production of banknotes underwent over the 19^th century.

4As Bidaux shows in the first section, the democratization of banknotes was at many points contentious and led to confrontations amongst different ideological camps in the Banque de France, records of which represent the main source used in this part of the book. A common thread in these debates is the question of whether the public at large, beyond the restricted circle of merchants, can be trusted with banknotes. Indeed, as discussions of this matter in the Banque reveal, many bankers feared that non-merchant actors might easily loose trust in the value of the notes in times of financial stress or in reaction to rumors, due to their alleged credulity. This, they reckoned, could eventually undermine the stability of the monetary system as a whole. Bidaux argues that the Banker’s wariness was the result of an earlier collective trauma in French monetary history. Indeed, in the course of a monetary experiment conducted under the guidance of Scottish financier John Law, banknotes had been introduced on a wider scale, a measure which had been quickly followed by a large-scale bank run.

5Why then were banknotes democratized nevertheless? According to Bidaux, the bankers anticipated that the Banque de France might lose its dominant position within the French financial system, since private institutions could very well provide a means of payment to social groups which the Banque itself refused to serve. The case for democratization was also made on the grounds of its profitability from the point of view of the Banque. Furthermore, it was driven by recurring periods of political and economic crisis. While during settled times, the Banque de France relied on a sophisticated network of committees and councils in order to implement these changes, many of the most consequential decisions were taken in an ad hoc fashion in exceptional circumstances, often with the premise to counter an acute shortage of currency.

6The second and third section, respectively entitled Construire les conditions techniques de la confiance (Constructing the Technical Conditions of Trust) and Entretenir la confiance matérielle du billet (Cultivating the Material Trust in Banknotes), address the evolving production process of the Banque’s bills. Here, the Banque’s permanent struggle against the ingenuity of counterfeiters represents the key factor driving both technological and institutional innovation. The internalization of bill production was indeed a crucial part of the Banque’s continuously evolving anti-counterfeiting policy. As Bidaux shows, progress in the field of printing and reproducing techniques, especially the invention of photography, kept giving serious headaches to the employees at the Banque. Thus, while at the beginning of the 19^th century, the meticulousness of the drawings which figured on the note were considered as sufficient guaranties, at the end of the period under study, the secrecy of the production process and the monopolization of the means of banknote production had become the centerpieces of the Banque’s strategy in the struggle against counterfeiting.

7This continuous process of innovation to counter criminal activity was accompanied by reforms to rationalize production, initiated under several generations of civil engineers. These reforms led to a more severe surveillance of employees and went in hand with the increasing mechanization of their work, ultimately entailing their disqualification. The conjunction of these two tendencies helped the printing facility of the Banque de France to establish its renown on the international level. While the Banque de France had initially only accepted to sell banknotes to French colonies, demands by other foreign emission banks quickly followed. Somewhat embarrassed by the idea of becoming a production workshop for foreign banks, the Banque accepted nevertheless by appealing to the necessity of solidarity between emission banks. Thus, the internalization of bill production was first spurred by concerns related to monetary security. Over time, other factors came however to play a decisive role and helped maintain this institutional configuration, in particular, the Banque’s emerging role as supplier for other countries.