"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 Blackexamines 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.
This Article explores the use of criminal courts and prosecutors' offices to criminalize civil debt disputes and the relationship between the current criminalization regime and the historical use of ...debtors' prisons to punish individuals from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds and control Black Americans. It documents the rise of civil imprisonment, the creation, reform, and abolition of debtors' prisons in England and the early United States, and the retention of quasi-debtors' prisons in the post-Civil War United States as a mechanism of white supremacy. The Pinkerton guards of the Gilded Age were the precursor to modern private security forces. Modern shifts in criminal law and procedure have expanded the scope of the law of theft and authorized the use of criminal prosecutions to recover financial damages for victims. These new property offenses, and the state regulation of restitution that they authorize, operate as a class-based system to reinforce power structures, which bolsters the dominance of corporations and the powerlessness of impoverished individuals who lack the resources to fight it. There are distinct parallels between the traditional system of debtors' prisons and the modern system of using criminal prosecutions to secure restitution for corporate victims, which render them particularly prone to abuse. Restitution has become a way for corporate victims to use the coercive power of the State to extract sometimes wildly unreasonable "damages" from criminal defendants without having to prove the basis for those damages and that these prosecutorial restitution practices ultimately serve to redistribute wealth upwards, from poor defendants to rich corporate entities, deepening class inequalities.
Little Dorrit grows up in the Marshalsea debtor's prison, where her father has been imprisoned ever since her birth. When Mr Dorrit's debt is excused, he is anxious to forget his inglorious past and ...be accepted back into the best circles of society. Dickens criticizes the hierarchical society which would demand such an impossible thing of a man, and also questions which class of their acquaintance are good people and true friends. When one of London's biggest banks fail.
In 1847, Raymond-Theodore Troplong, one of France's most distinguished legal minds, presented his recently finished work on debt imprisonment to Paris's prestigious Académie des sciences morales et ...politiques. He started his narrative with an imaginative reconstruction of debt imprisonment's origins in the “barbaric law” of “primitive peoples.” In such societies, Troplong explained, “the person responds corporally, and principally, to contracted engagements. On one hand, insolvency is assimilated to crime. The debtor who dishonors his word in not paying his creditor differs little from a thief. In dishonoring his word, he has dishonored the gods whom he has taken as witnesses of his oath; his body is therefore engaged by his offense; it belongs to its expiation. On the other hand, in order to make him pay with his possessions, the creditor must seize, first of all, his person.”
