Review by Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, forthcoming in Journal of Economic History, 2003.

Ken Mouré’s book on French interwar monetary history is an interesting contribution to the historiography on monetary regimes. Based on a detailed reading of recently available archives at the Banque de France (as well as more commonly used central banks and Treasuries archives in France, England and the U.S.), the book does not focus on the macroeconomics of the period but on the understandings and decision processes of the main actors of monetary policy, mostly in France. The author actually accepts the broad lines of the macroeconomic interpretations presented by what he calls the « new orthodoxy » on the interwar gold standard (e.g. Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters : the Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992 ; or Peter Temin, Lessons from the Great Depression, Cambridge : MIT Press, 1989), but suggests that judging a monetary regime indepently from the precise intellectual, political and social environment of the actors is not an historian’s job and can lead to simplistic interpretations. As stated in the conclusion : « The agency of the players must not be sacrificed in order to argue the determining force of regime principles or ‘rules of the game’ » (260). This makes the book an interesting attempt at giving new weight to historical accounting of how  history happened on a topic largely invaded in recent years by economists and political scientists. In order to fulfill this promise, Mouré gives much importance to individual opinions, interactions and decisions, and much less to economic constraints. That rehabilitation of politics and individuals proves largely convincing in the interwar period.
The book begins with 5 chapters in chronological order, which deal in detail with the period not covered by Mouré’s previous book (Managing the Franc Poincaré : Economic Understanding and Political Constraint in French Monetary Policy, 1926-1936, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991). It starts with a synthetic presentation of the classical gold standard, which the author presents as largely accidental an much less stable than what idealized retrospective visions argue during the interwar (and after). Chapter 2 describes the action of both the Banque de France and the Trésor during the war, when debt and money creation went side by side with the Banque’s accumulation of gold previously held by the public. Chapter 3 analyzes the situation at the end of the war, showing that the understanding of the stakes of monetary policy was quite good both in Academia (Charles Rist), at the Treasury (Pierre de Moüy) and at the Banque (Jules Décamps). This constrasts with many remarks in J. M. Keynes tradition that suggesting, until todya, that a low understanding in monetary policy among french leaders was the reason for many  « policy errors ».
Chapter 4 confirms the political character of the conflict between the Banque and the government  during the Cartel des gauches, and gives details on the scandal of the falsified balance sheets of the Banque which deprived Premier Herriot from financial credibility without being responsible of any wrongdoing.
Chapter 5 analyzes the stabilization process, detailing how reporting legal stabilization allowed Poincaré to stay in power until 1928 and to escape the constraints of both the Banque and foreign lenders. As concerns the level of the stabilization of the franc, Mouré closes an ongoing debate by recognizing that the level has not been set volontarily low (125 francs per pound was much higher than the 150-60 suggested by Quesnay or Rist, and did not receive british criticism at the beginning).
Chapter 6 deals with central banks cooperation. Mouré shows that the interwar gold standard did not suffer from a lack of cooperative behaviour among central bankers, nor from their theoretical disagreements, but mostly from political rivalries among nations. For example, the Banque of France wanted to obtain a status equal to that of the Bank of England, which had been at the center of all stabilizations in the 1920s and occupied a superior position in a gold exchange standard which could be interpreted as a hierarchical system. All this had clear diplomatic implications which the British and Americans tended to neglect but the Banque de France insisted on, as Mouré shows clearly.
One regret is that the discussion on international matters is treated separately and appears as independant from the french policy studied earlier, since much of the determinants of french policy were international (reparations and war debt settlement in the 1920s, democratic alliance against fascism in the 1930s).
In chapter 7, Mouré présents a synthesis of the main debates on the 1928-1936 period, without repeating the contents of its previous book, but answering some critics. This is the chapter where the methodological divergence appears most clearly between the regime-wide judgments of the "new orthodoxy" on one side, and both the historian's emphasis on the representations of the gold standard in the french elite and the irreversible impact of historical accidents and decisions on the other. The gold standard appears then as a rigid system which destruction resulted from a succession of accidents and inadequate decisions in a conflictuous world, more than from its causal role in the onset of the great depression (a typical american preoccupation that forgets the realities of the european interwar).
Chapter 8 deals with the post-1936 period. It is less clear on the macroeconomics of the period, giving for example no satisfactory explanation for the failure of the devaluation. The evolution of ideas on monetary policy is studied in particular in relation with the transformations of the functionning of the Banque de France and the debates on open-market policy, which is a somewhat restricted point of view. Mouré insists that the French were exceptionnally devoted to the gold standard. One should nevertheless notice that the survival of the term « gold standard » as a metaphor for perfection until today, as shown in the book's last pages, is an american and not a french phenomena.

The books main novelty is the discussion of the economic "orthodoxy" which considers the interwar gold standard as a monetary regime which intrinsically could not work. This is not replaced by a defense of the gold standard but only by the suggestion that only the path of events and the interaction of representations with new situations led to the gold standard failure, which should then be considered as an historical process more than from a theoretical point of view. Many historians will agree and economists disagree.
They should instead regret the lack of some micro and macroeconomic analysis, especially in the last chapter for which the existing litterature does not provide satisfactory background. More generally, a presentation of the functionning of the french financial system, which was an essential constraint on monetary policy during all the period, is clearly lacking. For example, a discussion of the exchange controls both in the 1920s and the late 1930s would have been useful. More profoundly, Mouré debunks convincingly the "gold standard illusion", but sometimes looks like falling into another one, the Greenspan's illusion that "fine tuning" by central banks can remedy any disorder.
Even considering these small shortcomings, Mouré's book makes an interesting read and a convincing presentation of the interwar gold standard's difficult birth and inevitable fall.