Corporate finance through equities marks the modern period, affecting entire sectors of the economy. The first joint stock companies were inspired at the beginning of the seventeenth century in France models from England and the United Provinces. The ACTIMOD project is a social history project which, with a database of identified shareholders participating in the different companies, should allow to see the social and cultural characteristics of shareholding in France and its evolution, and to highlight a active investor group that weighs on the economic and political choices of the state and announces the influence groups of the contemporary era. They are one of the keys to understanding the economic changes that occur at the end of the modern period.