Michel Prieur was a French numismatist and dealer whose work bridged the commercial trade and serious scholarship. Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, he spent much of his childhood in Africa and the Middle East. His father was an expatriate teacher, and Prieur returned to France for secondary school at the Lycée Hoche in Versailles. Later he went straight into work, running his first coin-dealing businesses.

In 1988 he founded the Compagnie Générale de Bourse (CGB), which has become the largest numismatic firm in France. He wrote many articles on French coins and banknotes and co-authored Le Franc, a widely used guide modelled on Whitman's "Red Book." He was also a founding member of the associations Les Amis du franc and Les Amis de l'euro, and until his death he edited the free monthly Bulletin Numismatique, in which he published his observations and research.

His reputation however rests on a single major work. His attachment to the Levant, and to Lebanon in particular, led him to specialise in Syro-Phoenician coinage, and in 2000 he and Karin Prieur published A Type Corpus of the Syro-Phoenician Tetradrachms and their Fractions from 57 BC to AD 253. The book remains the standard reference for a difficult and poorly understood series, and "Prieur" numbers are cited routinely in catalogues. He continued to refine the corpus afterwards: CGB listings still refer to the TSP database he maintained, which records known specimens of each type, including those held in museum collections.