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Concept
Crédit Lyonnais
Summary
The Crédit Lyonnais (kʁedi ljɔnɛ, "Lyon Credit [Company]") was a major French bank, created in 1863 and absorbed by former rival Crédit Agricole in 2003. Its head office was initially in Lyon but moved to Paris in 1882. In the early years of the 20th century, it was the world's largest bank by total assets.
Its former French retail network survives as LCL S.A., a fully owned subsidiary of Crédit Agricole, under the brand LCL adopted in 2005 with reference to "Le Crédit Lyonnais".
The creation of Crédit Lyonnais was favored by French legislation of that liberalized the creation of joint-stock companies without prior government authorization. The bank was chartered on by Henri Germain, who was the largest shareholder with 5.4 percent of equity capital and became its first chairman. Prominent promoters of Saint-Simonianism initially participated in the venture, namely François Barthélemy Arlès-Dufour who was instrumental in convincing Germain to initiate the project, Paulin Talabot, and Barthélemy Enfantin, as well as industrialists such as Eugène Schneider. Crédit Lyonnais then started its operations on July 26, initially in the recently opened Palais du Commerce of Lyon.
The bank initially served local businesses in Lyon, but opened branches in Paris and Marseille as early as 1865. Furthermore, Germain married into a Parisian family and entered national politics in 1869. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he moved some of the bank’s funds to London for safety and thus created Crédit Lyonnais’s first foreign branch there. He also participated in the negotiation of the financial clauses of the Treaty of Frankfurt that ended the war in 1871.
From 1876, Germain directed the building of an ostentatious headquarters building in Paris, with architectural details modeled on the Louvre Palace. The first phase of that Parisian Crédit Lyonnais headquarters was completed in 1883, but it kept expanding until occupying the entire city block in 1913 after Germain’s death. The bank branch located there opened as early as , inaugurated in the presence of Léon Gambetta.
Official source
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