For over 200 years, Parisian mints and brokers have been clustered around the northern end of Rue Vivienne. A tradition in the financial district of Paris, it is synonymous with the presence of a large number of gold changers and other numismatic specialists. But do you know exactly why this concentration is being made on this particular street?
The age-old tradition of the moneychangers on rue Vivienne
In the northern part of rue Vivienne, it’s hard not to notice them. The colorful stores, with their large displays of “Gold”, “Ingots”, “Buy” and “Sell”, face each other in stiff competition. In addition to Hotelling’s law, or the principle of minimal differentiation, which means that specialist stores are often found in the same department, this grouping is also due to a more ancestral tradition.
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, this concentration is partly explained by the proximity of the stores to the Palais Brongniart Palais Brongniart. In fact, for over 170 years, it was the lungs of the region’s financial activity, supportingthe “expansion of all the industrial adventures” of the day. At a time when not everything was dematerialized, and when financial agents compared their buy and sell orders verbally “à la Dress Circle”, the presence of these gold changers nearby facilitated exchanges.
And to complete this explanation, we need to go back to 1800, when Napoleon set up a pawnshop specializing in precious objects, including gold, right in the heart of Rue Vivienne. The forerunner of pawnbroking, the pawnshop allowed people in need of liquidity to borrow money in exchange for an object of value. Today, although it still exists under the name of crédit municipal, it has moved to rue des Francs-Bourgeois, but the whole ecosystem of gold changers that grew up around it has survived!
It’s your turn to shine in society with this little anecdote!
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