Overview

The most dishonorable act that can dishonor a man."""" Such is Félix Grandet’s unsparing view of bankruptcy, adding that even a highway robber—who at least """"risks his own life in attacking you""""—is worthier of respect. Indeed, the France of Balzac’s day was an unforgiving place for borrowers. Each year, thousands of debtors found themselves arrested for commercial debts. Those who wished to escape debt imprisonment through bankruptcy sacrificed their honor—losing, among other rights and privileges, the ability to vote, to serve on a jury, or even to enter the stock market. Arguing that French Revolutionary and Napoleonic legislation created a conception of commercial identity that tied together the debtor’s social, moral, and physical person, In the Red and in the Black examines the history of debt imprisonment and bankruptcy as a means of understanding the changing logic of commercial debt. Following the practical application of these laws throughout the early nineteenth century, Erika Vause traces how financial failure and fraud became legally disentangled. The idea of personhood established in the Revolution’s aftermath unraveled over the course of the century owing to a growing penal ideology that stressed the state’s virtual monopoly over incarceration and to investors’ desire to insure their financial risks. This meticulously researched study offers a novel conceptualization of how central """"the economic"""" was to new understandings of self, state, and the market. Telling a story deeply resonant in our own age of ambivalence about the innocence of failures by financial institutions and large-scale speculators, Vause reveals how legal personalization and depersonalization of debt was essential for unleashing the latent forces of capitalism itself.

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9780813941417

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Reviews

A ground-breaking study exemplary in every way. --Maura O'Connor, University of Cincinnati, co-editor of Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective

A ground-breaking study exemplary in every way. --Maura O'Connor, University of Cincinnati, co-editor of Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective Erika Vause's challenging but deeply interesting book offers a welcome contribution to the study of debt and what its economic and particularly cultural consequences could be.... [A] sophisticated analysis of a dense legal subject. By setting the law in a larger, cultural context, [the book] adds considerably to our understanding of debt and its consequences --author of H-France In this impeccably researched and vigorously argued book, Erika Vause offers nuanced and original accounts of the concepts of debt and bankruptcy among merchants, moralists, and novelists that shed new light on the political divides and affinities that shaped France's trajectory from the Directory through the Revolution. --Clare Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France Vause's exploration of the emergence of that commercial personhood vital to the modern economy is an important contribution of this compelling monograph. --author of Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Author Information

Erika Vause is Assistant Professor of History at Florida Southern College.

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