The Little Paris and the New Berlin: The French Money Doctors’ Unsuccessful Mission in Romania, 1929-1933

The Banque de France (BDF) conducted a mission to the National Bank of Romania (NBR) and the National Romanian Government between 1929 and 1933, acting as advisor to the Romanian monetary and financial authorities. It tooks place in complement to two loans provided in 1929 and 1931 respectively to stabilize the leu and to develop the Romanian economy. Despite a few months of relative stability, the mission was ultimately unsuccessful. After 4 years of cooperation, the Romanian authorities were obliged to restrict convertibility to defend the leu. The Romanian Government was also unable to follow French advice and finally defaulted. This episode has already been studied by Kenneth Mouré [2005], Philipp Cottrell [2003], the authors (Torre and Tosi [2010]), and Ileana Racianu [2012]. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two dimensions: (i) In addition to Banque de France archive documents in French, it draws on various sources in Romanian for the most part never previously explored; (ii) more importantly, it complements the strictly economic analysis of the episode by means of sources depicting the changes of views of intellectuals and politicians and the evolution of the international situation in Central Europe during the period. With this increased distance from the studied events and access to hitherto unavailable source material, this opens up new insights into how France was able to prolong this sterile cooperation phase beyond all reasonable consideration.