Financial Deregulation in France

The deregulation of the financial system in France in the 1980s and the French commitment to the freedom of capital, as recently pointed out by Rawi Abdelal, is ‘quite curious’ and even doubly paradoxical: how to understand, first, that the financial liberalization has occurred while the left was in power? Second, how to explain that Colbertist France took the lead for financial deregulation at a world scale feeding the hypothesis of a so-called ‘Paris Consensus’? Based on the primary archives of the French Treasury and of the Banque of France this contribution aims to demonstrate that the financial deregulation in France is managed by the State in order to facilitate its increasing indebtedness on a globalizing money market.