Abstract
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.
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