"The Business of Reputations": Secrecy, Shame, and Social Standing in Nineteenth-Century French Debtors' and Creditors' Newspapers

Abstract

With the rise of industrialization and urbanization in the early nineteenth century, concerns about identity and information became increasingly pressing. At the same time, nineteenth-century society placed a high value on reputation and appearance. Secrecy was thus both deemed necessary to bourgeois notions of privacy and viewed as potentially dangerous to public order. While this dynamic has been explored for the elite primarily in terms of family life, the impact of honor and shame on economic practices of non-elites has been little considered. This article offers the first in-depth analysis of two competing types of papers in nineteenth-century France—those, like Le Tocsin and La Gazette des renseignements, which championed creditors and those, like Pauvre Jacques and La Gazette de Sainte-Pélagie, which defended the interests of debtors. Despite representing often directly opposing interests, both kinds of papers prominently employed tactics of public humiliation through the circulation of the names and personal details of specific creditors and debtors whose actions were deemed dishonorable. By examining the importance of reputation and honor in the lives of small shopkeepers and artisans at the beginning of the industrial revolution, this article shows how reputation grew rather than diminished in importance with a perceived increase in the anonymity of the market and how the commercial press could be used to describe and denounce economic and legal forces perceived as oppressive to small tradesmen and merchants.