"Bondholder Associations and the Creation of the French International Investor (1860s–1920s)"

One of the most important archives of modern French business history is housed at the Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail and is comprised of the collections of France’s first national bondholder association, the Association Nationale des Porteurs Français de Valeurs Étrangères (hereafter ANPFVE). This French counterpart of the British Corporation of Foreign Bondholders was founded in 1898 with the aim of fostering and supporting French foreign investment. The ANPFVE established a substantial library and archive on domestic and foreign enterprises, on which basis it informed investors and advocated for their interests at home and abroad. This paper will draw on membership records and other sources to examine the significance of this body as a mediator and co-producer of ‘French capital’, and argues that this association represents a milestone in the emergence of French rentiers as a class in and for itself. Indeed, starting from the 1860s, the mobilization of numerous rentier activists—such as the political economist, statistician, and journalist Alfred Neymarck—played a decisive role in domesticating foreign investment within French society and in fostering a form of class consciousness. We then turn to the ANPFVE archives to analyze the political agenda of its members—some of whom were genuine businessmen who specialized in bondholders advocacy and engaged in an intense lobbying enterprise. We demonstrate that their activities systematically oscillated between demands for governmental support abroad in the name of national interest and efforts to secure autonomous action that would insulate international investment from political interference—an approach that, in certain respects, foreshadows late twentieth-century phenomena such as vulture funds and Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).