In the Red and in the Black: Debt, Dishonor, and the Law in France between Revolutions by Vause Erika;

Author:Vause, Erika; [Vause, Erika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Marseille

42

14

Saint-Étienne

43

1

Avignon

16

9

Montpellier

56

42

Nîmes

41

22

Clermont-Ferrand

38

14

Total

658

130

Source: Bayle-Mouillard, De l’emprisonnement pour dettes, 188.

Bayle-Mouillard’s evidence seemed to substantiate these concerns about bills of exchange. After studying over three hundred financial instruments that had led to arrest, he doubted “that a single one of them was sincere.”30 Most bills were drawn not between major commercial cities but rather in isolated villages and hamlets that Bayle-Mouillard considered unlikely venues for genuine commercial transactions. The creditors involved were frequently landowners rather than merchants. Bayle-Mouillard believed that such transactions masked usurious exchanges between manipulative moneylenders and desperate borrowers. Extrapolating from his data, he stressed a connection between high percentages of arrests based on debts in bills of exchange and high percentages of non-commerçants imprisoned for supposedly commercial debts. What did this trend imply about the utility of contrainte par corps for commerce? Relying on data about regional commercial activity, including the per capita concentration of merchants (defined here as those who paid the government business tax or patente) and the amount of commercial litigation before commercial courts, Bayle-Mouillard insisted on a connection between high levels of commercial activity and low numbers of arrests for bills of exchange and of non-commerçants. That is to say, he linked commercial “backwardness” with the use of debt imprisonment on noncommercial individuals. On the other hand, he saw no link between commercial activity and the overall use of commercial debt imprisonment in a region: many of the most commercial départements in France had only middling numbers of debt arrests, while départements like Cantal, hardly a commercial center, had among the highest per capita usages of imprisonment. Bayle-Mouillard also found no correlations between economic crises and rates of debt imprisonment or bankruptcy rates and imprisonment.

Although Bayle-Mouillard’s work refuted the claims of pamphleteers who had insisted that only non-commerçants ended up in debtors’ prison, it confirmed another allegation routinely made by opponents of debtors’ prison: that noncommercial creditors regularly utilized contrainte par corps to arrest commerçants. Bayle-Mouillard noted that in every city he studied, creditors who listed their professions as rentiers, property owners, and farmers formed a considerable percentage of incarcerators. In Lyon from 1831 to 1833, for example, he counted only twenty-eight debtors who were non-commerçants but a whopping 124 creditors whose professions seemed unaffiliated with commerce. When they did not live in the city where they incarcerated their debtors, they lived in the surrounding countryside rather than in major cities like Paris or Lyon. For Bayle-Mouillard, this fact suggested that the “businessmen, manufacturers, and merchants, those men who cover all of France with their social networks and who sell their products everywhere, who enrich the country with their labor, don’t use contrainte par corps.”31 Only a parasitic and unproductive class of creditors relied on debt imprisonment as a means of payment.

Bayle-Mouillard held similar views on the debtors who were arrested. Although his data suggested that incarcerated debtors tended to be commerçants, he did not believe these commerçants formed an important component of their region’s commerce. In cities where the number of commerçants arrested for debt vastly

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