People from Meurthe-et-Moselle, Moselle and Alsace call them club épargne, deriving from the German ‘sparclub’– the country where they originated before making their way into bordering departments.
A club épargne is a local bar, café or restaurant where people join an association to put money in a dedicated box, to serve as savings. Members meet either once a week or once a month.
The Connexion found at least five clubs across both departments in Algrange, Etzling and Sarreinsming (Moselle) and Schweighouse-sur-Moder (Bas-Rhin).
The amount of money put into each box is jotted down on a notebook by the association’s treasurer, collected by the owner of the bar and transferred into a private bank account. The money is then given back in the first weeks of December.
“Think of it as a piggy bank,” said Corinne Redelsperger, who ran the Café du Chemin de Fer in Algrange (Moselle) for 30 years and where the ‘Club de l’Ecossais’ runs its club épargne.
In a café épargne, people are given a number, usually from 1 to 100, that is attached to their box, often called a casier. Ms Redelsperger often takes the number 1 and 2, for her and her former husband, and the number 48 for her daughter.
Club de l’Ecossais reunites around 70 members who, every two weeks, deposit money.
Several reasons explain the emergence of club épargne.
The sums being saved are jotted down on a notebook by the association’s treasurerFrance Télévisions
Club épargne is the old equivalent of a Plan épargne – insert a relevant letter afterwards depending on whether it is an L (logement), R (retirement) or E for (entreprise) – and the money was to be spent on Christmas gifts for children, hence why it was given back to savers in December.
They are also a club épargne ‘whatever-you-feel-like-buying’.
Ad
“Let’s be honest, club épargne was initially a way to spend on things without your wife knowing about it. I had many clients openly admitting it,” said Ms Redelsperger.
Club épargne is nevertheless a thing of the past. Created in 1818 by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, it appeared in Strasbourg in 1860 and was the basis of the creation of the Crédit Mutuel, a French cooperative banking group that was founded in 1882 in La Wantzenau (Bas-Rhin).
They were permitted in that region of France because of a local law that allowed for-profit associations and thrived in the 60s and 70s.
“It had faded away,” said Christophe Meyer, the president of the association ‘Au P'tit Cochon’ which meets each month in the bar in Etzling.
Mr Meyer said club épargne closed when banks increasingly insisted on collecting information on members from the association and returned the saved money in the form of cheques rather than cash, the form favoured by members.
