Georges Pauget has just published his first popular book on banking. Dedicated to his four-year-old granddaughter Chloe, the book is designed to show her that a banker is not merely the person that feeds the cash dispensing machine with crisp notes.

It also has a broader purpose. Banking these days has become one of the most vilified occupations, even more than journalism, politics and the legal profession. The very title of Mr Pauget’s book – Should we burn the bankers? – could hardly be more explicit and provocative. After all, the chief executive of Crédit Agricole, France’s second largest bank, is simply asking whether the image and reputation of banking has reverted to the middle ages when – in France at least – bankers were often regarded as evil sorcerers and sometimes, like witches, burnt at the stake.