Palais Brongniart

Building in Paris that housed the historical Paris stock exchange
the commodities exchange

The Palais Brongniart is a building in Paris that was built at the direction of Napoleon in the early 19th century to house the Paris stock exchange It is located at the Place de la Bourse, in the 2nd arrondissement in central Paris. It was named after its initial architect, Alexandre Théodore Brongniart, who died in 1813 prior to its completion. The Palais Brongniart is nowadays used as an events centre, since the trading floor relocated in 1987, followed in 2004 by the last financial institution that was still housed there.

Historically, stock trading took place at several spots in Paris, including rue Quincampoix, rue Vivienne (near the Palais Royal), and the back of the Opéra Garnier (the Paris opera house).

In the early 19th century, the Paris Bourse's activities found a stable location at the Palais Brongniart, or Palais de la Bourse, built to the designs of architect Alexandre Théodore Brongniart from 1808 to 1813 and completed by Éloi Labarre from 1813 to 1826. Brongniart had spontaneously submitted his project, which was a rectangular neoclassical Roman temple with a giant Corinthian colonnade enclosing a vaulted and arcaded central chamber. His designs were greatly admired by Napoleon and won Brongniart a major public commission at the end of his career. Initially praised, the building was later attacked for academic dullness. The authorities had required Brongniart to modify his designs, and after Brongniart's death in 1813, Labarre altered them even further, greatly weakening Brongniart's original intentions. From 1901 to 1905, Jean Baptiste Frederic Cavel designed the addition of two lateral wings, resulting in a cruciform plan with innumerable columns. According to the architectural historian Andrew Ayers, these alterations "did nothing to improve the reputation of this uninspiring monument." Moreover, until about the middle of the 20th century, a parallel market known as "La Coulisse" was in operation. Until the late 1980s, the market operated as an open outcry exchange, with the agents de change meeting on the exchange floor of the Palais Brongniart. In 1986, the Paris Bourse started to implement an electronic trading system. This was known generically as CATS (Computer Assisted Trading System), but the Paris version was called CAC (Cotation Assistée en Continu). By 1989, quotations were fully automated. The Palais Brongniart hosted the French financial derivatives exchanges MATIF and MONEP, until they were fully automated in 1998. In the late 1990s, the Paris Bourse launched the Euronext initiative, an alliance of several European stock exchanges.

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