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This article proposes a sociologically based political economics of the paradoxical privatisation of the Paris stock exchange. In the 1980s, the successive French governments restructured the state’s investment margins. Stock exchange intermediaries lost their official ministerial status and their family enterprises were absorbed by private or privatised but more often nationalised financial institutions. The Paris Bourse ceased to be a cooperative institution that organised the public listing of securities and instead became a “more-than-private ” enterprise.