ACTIMOD

While not totally new, as there are some examples from the Middle Ages (G. Sicard, 1953), the development of equity-based corporate financing, which affected entire sectors of the economy and accompanied the Industrial Revolution, marked the modern era, and the 17th century in particular. While the movement is well known, the men behind it, the shareholders, are less so. Yet they are the key players.

The ACTIMOD project is a social history project aimed at characterizing the players in this transformation of the French economy at a key moment in its history. Knowing investors, their expectations and motivations, means understanding how these companies were run, and possibly also their successes or failures, but it also means, on a different scale, understanding how the economic world was perceived, and how the modernization of the French economy took place. The chosen period covers the 17th century, when the first joint-stock companies were set up in France, and the 18th century. We will stop in 1789, before the revolutionary upheavals led to the dismantling of companies, their reorganization and a new distribution of capital. Shareholders' assets, particularly those of the nobility, were confiscated. Some companies were even "nationalized".

The formation of a database (BDD) on shareholders should enable us to visualize the major social and cultural characteristics of this group in France and its major evolutions, and to highlight active investors who weigh on economic and political choices and their networks. Comparisons with the shareholder structure of English and Dutch joint-stock companies, and of the "sociétés anonymes" of the early 19th century, will be considered in the final synthesis, in order to deepen reflection and open up new perspectives. To what extent do these Ancien Régime experiments foreshadow nineteenth-century capitalism? Is there continuity or rupture in the profiles and motivations of shareholders after the French Revolution? Do the shareholders of the modern era in some way foreshadow the influential groups of the contemporary era? The theme of shareholding in modern France raises a number of questions that are echoed in today's world. Shifting our gaze, here to the past, could just as well help us better appreciate the realities of our times as grasp their genesis.