Disciplining the Market: Debt Imprisonment, Public Credit, and the Construction of Commercial Personhood in Revolutionary France

Abstract

In 1847, Raymond-Theodore Troplong, one of France's most distinguished legal minds, presented his recently finished work on debt imprisonment to Paris's prestigiousAcadémie des sciences morales et politiques.He started his narrative with an imaginative reconstruction of debt imprisonment's origins in the “barbaric law” of “primitive peoples.” In such societies, Troplong explained, “the person responds corporally, and principally, to contracted engagements. On one hand, insolvency is assimilated to crime. The debtor who dishonors his word in not paying his creditor differs little from a thief. In dishonoring his word, he has dishonored the gods whom he has taken as witnesses of his oath; his body is therefore engaged by his offense; it belongs to its expiation. On the other hand, in order to make him pay with his possessions, the creditor must seize, first of all, his person.”