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La pérennité d’une société sur plusieurs demi-siècles constitue une sorte d’« exploit » historique sur l’arrière-fond d’une démographie des entreprises qui est riche en faillites, liquidations ou absorptions. Or la banque qu’est la Société générale a encore plus été soumise à cette réalité qu’elle œuvre dans un secteur fragilisé par des prises de risques pro-cycliques sans cesse renouvelées pendant les boums conjoncturels, d’où des krachs récurrents. Mais elle a réussi à résister aux tensions de son environnement bancaire et financier, alors même qu’elle a été confrontée à des erreurs de gestion et, surtout, à trois crises en interne qui l’ont fait vaciller au bord du gouffre. Les quatre crises (années 1880, 1905, 1913 et 2007-2010) endurées par la Générale sont ainsi révélatrices des dysfonctionnements d’une organisation de firme, ce qui fait s’interroger sur la qualité du management bancaire, des difficultés d’adaptation d’un mode de gestion aux mutations d’un modèle économique et stratégique, ce qui suscite des questions sur la réactivité et la lucidité des dirigeants, et enfin sur les processus de gestion des risques, ce qui induit de méditer sur les risques inhérents au métier bancaire et à leur spécificité.

Société générale, one of the leading French banks, has resisted general crises and crashes, wars, and competition, to reach its 150th anniversary. But it had to face its “own” four dire crises (1886, 1905, 1913, and recently, 2007/2009) which almost swept it from the Paris marketplace, gnawed into its creditworthiness, fostered the risk of a risk of illiquidity, and fuelled a crisis at the top of the leading team. Each crisis commenced because of specific developments, generally on internationalised fields of activity (trade finance, deployment of the bank in foreign countries, foreign loans, financial trading), but altogether they allow to question common issues. The analysis of these four events constitutes a case study about the management of the organisation of the banking firm, to gauge the commonplace management of risks, but moreover the relevance of the business model in front of the portfolio of strategic activities and in front of the geographic deployment of the bank on foreign markets. Archives are mobilised to scrutinize the causes of each crisis, and how far this one threatened the survival of the bank, which helps understand how the head managers failed to adapt their model of management to the evolution of the activities and of the risks of the institution. Thereafter, the article ponders how the managers called to rescue their bank succeeded in reinventing its business model and its mode of supervising the risks. Firms surviving to crisis generally came out with stronger methods of management, efficient systems of supervising business and risks, of controlling the procedures to be respected in each affiliate or branch – and that was the case at Societé générale indeed, about which we could thus suggest that its crisis reinforced its ability to cross the cyclical tensions. It also enriched its corporate culture, through the recurrent inflow of more accurate tools of risk assessment and management values, to be more oriented toward a fine-tuned perception of the necessary balance between dynamic strategies of organic growth and adapted structures of control, of risk management and the allocation of financial resources.