Pierre Quesnay (1897-1937) from the League of Nations to the Franc Poincaré: Financial Discipline and Monetary Pragmatism

In a 1958 article, Pierre Dieterlen refers to a 'triumvirate' in order to qualify the team formed in France during the Poincaré stabilization by Emile Moreau, Governor of the Banque de France (BDF), Charles Rist, Professor at La Sorbonne and Deputy-Governor and Pierre Quesnay, his former PhD student, Head of the Department of the Economic Studies and Chief Adviser of the BDF. Pierre Quesnay is the youngest of the trio and has been quite neglected by the historians until the recent paper of Olivier Feiertag (2009) on the Monetary Internationalism during the Inter-War period. From the end of the war in 1918 until 1937, the short life of Pierre Quesnay is fully concerned by the monetary disorders generated by the suspension of the Gold Standard, the difficulties to find alternative monetary solutions, and the management of the monetary consequences of the Great Depression. Building mainly on the Quesnay's papers of the Archives Nationales, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effective contribution of the young money doctor to the monetary stabilization process of the interwar period.