Revue des Sciences Humaines, n°285/janvier - mars 2007

At a time when the 2008 financial crisis and the many financial scandals have shaken the banking systems and further undermined confidence in banks, little is known about banking supervision and internal control practices, which are nevertheless an essential part of banking regulation. This book – the first in French on this subject – aims to place prudential supervision in a comparative and long-term perspective.

After a historiographical review, it presents recent research on the actors and institutions, practices, and tools of banking supervision since the nineteenth century, in France, in Switzerland and in the French colonial area. Then it analyses the internationalisation of supervision and accounting standards of risk control in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Finally, the contributions of archivists of banks and regulatory authorities sound like a call for new research to fill the gap in French historiography.