Contenu du sommaire : Les monnaies pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale

Faced with a shortage of foreign currency reserves from 1931, the German Reich faced it through increasingly draconian exchange controls. As soon as Hitler came to power, he brought all his trade agreements into the clearing system. Compensation had several advantages from his point of view. It saved foreign exchange reserves, while allowing Germany to pay foreign suppliers and to honour the service of debts, of the Dawes and Young plans in particular. By organizing the clearing, Berlin was also dividing the front of the creditors and bringing Europe into the logic of its rearmament. The Reich was thus preparing, step by step, the general clearing with which it involved Europe at the start of the war.

On June 12, 1941, the Reich minister for Economy, Walther Funk, gave in Vienna a speech entitled « The Economic Organization of New Europe ». It was a compromise between the views of Nazi ideologues, who opposed even the notion of an international monetary system, and those of the leaders in charge of the economy, who wished to restore after the war a minimum of international exchanges based on a system of convertible currencies, even alongside a much-extended clearing system. One must acknowledge that the speech had a wide reception not only in occupied Europe but also in London and Washington. It brought about a series of reflexions and negotiations, which were to lead, in reaction, to the Bretton Woods agreements and to dollar supremacy.

The article examines the issue of Swedish neutrality between 1940 and 1945 from the perspective of monetary sovereignty and the role played in this respect by the Swedish central bank, the Riksbanken. Faced with pressure from the Reich, the economy of Sweden was fully integrated into the German war effort from April 1940. But in 1944, the changing balance of military power was in its favour and in 1945 it took advantage of its comfortable economic and financial situation to implement an ambitious strategy that was supposed to contribute to the economic and political reconstruction of its neighbours, both in the West and in the East, and thus to peace. But this strategy soon came up against the geopolitical choices of the American Congress, which also considered that having traded with Germany during the war meant having been its accomplices. The conclusion underlines the very active role of the Riksbanken and its president Dag Hammarskjöld, the profound innovations introduced by the war in the management of public finances and the extent to which Swedish sovereignty was dependent on changes on the international scene.

The currency, like the other components of the French sovereignty, was successively subjected to the defeat of 1940, the armistice and the German army's Occupation until the end of 1944, as well as the Liberation and Reconstruction under American hegemony. But, in both situations of subordination, albeit very different, there remained a certain margin of manœuvre, even narrow, for monetary sovereignty, from which the figure of Jean Monnet emerges in December 1945.

Allied preparation to liberate Europe from German occupation included planning for the currency to be used for military purchasing in combat zones and for the restoration of monetary order in liberated regions. For France, this planning was complicated by the unwillingness of Allied leaders to recognize Charles de Gaulle and the CFLN as having the authority to issue currency, although they were the only credible negotiating partner to manage civil affairs in liberated regions. The Allies landed in Normandy carrying “Allied Military francs”, printed in the USA, and authorized by General Eisenhower, but de Gaulle denounced these as “counterfeit currency”. The issue shows the importance of monetary sovereignty as an attribute of national sovereignty in Allied planning to free Europe.

During and after the Second World War, the French traded goods on several markets: the official market controlled by the State, the free market and the black market. At the time of the resumption of monetary circulation in June 1945, a black market in bills deprived of legal tender developed in metropolitan France, in the empire and in neighbouring countries. This black market resulted in a vast international traffic that damaged the external value of the franc and jeopardized French monetary sovereignty abroad. It highlighted the inability of the new Republican authorities to impose a single currency between metropolitan France and the French Union (October 1946). It also revealed their inability to carry out genuine economic diplomacy: monetary diplomacy was presented as a monetary purge based on moral and political criteria. On the other hand, this great crisis allowed the financial elites to gain a better understanding of the functioning of money in the multilateral framework of the post-war period.