In the Red and in the Black: Debt, Dishonor, and the Law in France between the Revolutions. By Erika Vause (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2018) 336 pp. $45.00

Abstract

A reader might fear that a study of bankruptcy from roughly 1789 to 1870 in France would bog down in the minutia of interest rates, contractual forms, and the composition of a committee of creditors. Instead, however, this fine monograph uses the methods of cultural, economic, political, and legal history to plumb the experiences of insolvent merchants, financiers, tradespeople, and consumers. Their ruin brought bitterness, imprisonment, and sometimes a few opportunities. Canteens, gambling, and fruit vending, for instance, allowed them to earn a little money in jail. Some of them set up smoking rooms, and added wallpaper and even an alabaster clock to their cells (128–137). Vause’s records describe businessmen who tossed account books into piles of manure or, after burying indigo in a marsh, came into court spouting Latin gibberish (80–81, 105–106). Periodicals like Pauvre Jacques excoriated creditors, bailiffs, and the “tissue of lies” that led to financial demise (146–148). Dislodging such stories required Vause to move between the multitude of courts and ministries involved in criminal, commercial, civil, and legislative matters. She consulted four departmental archives outside Paris to weigh the variation in regional practices, and, importantly, the impact of bankruptcy on different social classes (166–171). A wealth of reports, pamphlets, petitions, and literary works reinforces her arguments.Broadly, Vause asks, “What does it mean to fail?” (2). Perhaps 2 percent of French businesses went bankrupt each year, roughly 1,000 to 2,000 annually, outstripping the number of enterprises created (94). In the early nineteenth century, about 200 to 500 debtors were locked up annually (127). The Napoleonic Commercial Code of 1807 established commercial courts, though their boundaries with criminal and civil tribunals were unclear. An 1820 decree created prisons to shield the insolvent from the “contagion” of criminals. Yet questions persisted. Was every bankruptcy criminal? What of mismanagement or bad luck? Should the courts distinguish investing in railroads from running a vineyard, squandering a family’s fortune, managing a bakery, or writing a worthless iou? Did Old Regime barriers between movable and immovable property still hold? These questions intensified as individual merit and means—land, money, investments, and merchandise—replaced birth as the basis of the social order. The boom and bust economy of the nineteenth century—with its banks, factories, and imperial undertakings—added to the complexities of success and failure.These contradictions might have led to a bewildering narrative of reversals and unintended consequences. Instead, Vause identifies an overall arc in the laws, the emergence of modern economic personhood, which was tied less to the body of the debtor than more abstractly to a company or firm.1 Key evidence for this significant claim lies in her analysis of imprisonment for debt, contrainte par corps. This practice brought dishonor to the insolvents and made it hard for them to repay their obligations. It merged the person with the money owed: One literally guaranteed a loan with one’s body. The threat of incarceration maintained a “moral economy” in which corruption justified punishment (46). Interestingly, it actually stood to benefit borrowers who had too little property to back a loan. When contrainte par corps was enforced, lenders knew that they could detain defaulters. They lost their advantage, however, when it was abolished or loosened, as it was from 1793 to 1797, for being too cruel or impractical. Without the threat of imprisonment credit dried up for the poorest people (255).Contrainte par corps ended for the last time in 1867. By then, forms of association that limited personal liability had severed the body of the debtor from the weight of the sums owed (205–219, 248–250). Such understandings tended to free large merchants, though not so much smaller ones, to take more risks. Ruin no longer meant prison. Vause’s exploration of the emergence of that commercial personhood vital to the modern economy is an important contribution of this compelling monograph.