Ordinary Investors and the Everyday Experience of Global Finance: France, 1880–1914

In the professionalizing financial advice literature that proliferated in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, speed was constitutive of the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate economic practices. Investors, this literature advised, bought slowly, after reflection and with the intention of holding; speculators, in contrast, bought fast and sold just as quickly, taking their cues from the swift-moving worlds of rumour and telegraphy. These speculators provided the familiar iconography of the turn-of-the-century world of finance, with its scenes of frenetic crowds at vast exchanges and chronicles of skyrocketing gains and nosediving losses. Yet the writings of investors themselves – particularly modest investors, a group which expanded rapidly in economic and political significance in France at the end of the nineteenth century – show that the speed of financial capitalism was experienced and assimilated in a far more uneven fashion. Through a close reading of letters and petitions that novice investors penned to authorities in the belle époque, this paper demonstrates that even as the investor class exploded in this period, it was the longer, slower temporalities of the family – lifetimes of saving, planning for old age, and intergenerational security – that structured how individuals thought about and engaged in the financial sphere. These imagined timeframes found parallels in the unremarkable speeds of key market mechanisms: the delays of financial correspondence, the walking pace of door-to-door salesmen, the drawn-out process of buying securities on installment plans. Investor writings open up an enduring economic everyday coexisting with the novelty and abrupt transitions of financial capital.