The State and the "market" faced with the banking exclusion of individuals: a comparative analysis of the responses in the United States and in France.

Summary The importance of the economic and social role of financial inclusion has forced most governments in continental Europe and in Anglo-Saxon countries to address the issue of retail banking access. Comparing the paths taken by the United States and France is the focus of this research. The aim of this research is to give an account, without claiming to be exhaustive, of the political and institutional solutions in force in these two countries, while attempting to identify the main orientations in order to find a basis for them. The first objective was to make the public systems implemented through information asymmetries intelligible. While this approach has made it possible to appreciate the meaning and scope of some of them, it has proved insufficient in terms of the readability it offers of the process of exclusion of individuals from banking and, more broadly, in terms of its representation of intermediation and the financial relationship. The second objective sought to explain the magnitude of the differences observed in these two countries through a reflection on money. The analysis of its social significance and access, based on the idea of its social inscription and by means of a parallel comparison of the different representations of poverty, constituted an additional step in the interpretation of the facts observed, linked to historical and "societal" data. These have added coherence to the overall picture of the different forms of public action, considered from the point of view of their legislative framework, but also from the point of view of the nature and role of other actors in access to financial services.