Compte rendu de Erika Vause, In the Red and in the Black

Erika Vause, an Assistant Professor of History and St. John’s University, is passionate about early nineteenth French history and especially the “Revolutions” of the title, those of 1789 and 1848. As she shows, credit — public as well as private — was then hotly and extensively discussed. In order to better understand the economic, political, and cultural stakes of the discussions, Vause focuses on two legal devices that were specific to merchants: debt imprisonment and bankruptcy. After three brief abolitions, imprisoning debtors was finally abrogated in 1867. Bankruptcy law entailed criminal and commercial procedures, depending on suspicions of fraud, and was regularly reformed.