In the 19th century Crédit Lyonnais, a French commercial bank, developed a full range of economic and financial intelligence services. Part of which was aimed at assessing sovereign risk, but its interests were broader and covered a wide array of topics.
The Service des Etudes Financières central role in information gathering and its excellent records have made its then a key repository and archive source for research in economic and financial history. Its archive is now accessible at Crédit Agricole SA archive center, following the acquisition of Crédit Lyonnais by Crédit Agricole.
As part of this research and information effort, Crédit Lyonnais also acquired an impressive library, including collections of stock exchange lists of virtually any single market on earth. Because these are books rather than handwritten material, this source was not well suited for conservation in Bayeux, in Normandy, France, where it was stored and commuted at the peril of its preservation. Handling them involved specific challenges and difficulties and following exchanges between Roger Nougaret, Chief Archivist from Crédit Agricole and Professor Marc Flandreau, a project to donate the collection to the Graduate Institute so as to permit its exploitation was finalized in 2008 and 2009.
In September 2009, a formal contract was signed between Roger Nougaret and Professor Philippe Burrin, Director of the Graduate Institute.
At that point, the volumes were scattered in an archive storage over several thousands squared meters. There was initially no way to make sure that the available listings referred to complete collection. Riad Rezzik, an economic historian and research assistant at the Graduate Institute worked in cooperation with Crédit Agricole Staff during the Fall of 2009 to investigate the degree of completeness of the source. This preliminary phase was finished in December 2009 and the results were truly amazing.
This revealed that the series listed in the catalogue were almost complete and that there were in fact additional stock exchange lists, not recorded in the archive database such as entire portions of the Valparaiso Stock Exchange List, a rare collection.
Completing the adventure, the books were then physically moved to Geneva in late December 2009.
