They can’t pay ? We lock them up. Body constraint for debts is born in XIIe A century – it was not abolished in France until 1867. Julie Claustre examined her genesis and her development in Paris of the end of the Middle Ages, taking an interest in the legal framework, but also in sociology and prison conditions. While the credit is massive and diffuse in old companies, the procedure proves to be formidable efficiency.
Until its abolition in 1867 the constraint by body was in France, as in most European countries and as is still the case in the United States for example, the normal mode of coercion of debtors who did not honor their commitments. This book, taken from a doctoral thesis, examines the genesis and the development of this practice in Paris of the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike most recent works devoted to the history of credit, it does not favor the economic and social approach but addresses debt and public constraint as specific objects and examines in detail the legal and procedural aspects.
Massive debt
A long introductory chapter usefully breaks down some preconceived ideas on the Middle Ages. Debt is a massive phenomenon which, far from constituting the monopoly of marginal professionals (usurers, Jews), concerns all the economic actors and all the levels of society: merchants, craftsmen but also peasants borrow and run commonly to finance their activities or enhance their capital. The Church, despite the censorship of theologians of XIIe And XIIIe centuries, in no way condemns the loan of interest but only the requirement of abusive interests, in other words wear. And even if the historian can not know anything about the ocean of transactions having not been the subject of any written act, or at most a simple recognition of debt under private seal, it is likely the possibility offered to creditors to use public constraint greatly favored the proliferation of debt relationships. There are many jurisdictions before which the letters of obligation could have passed: churches, seigneurial tabellionages, royal courts. The one that studys this work is the Châtelet de Paris, seat of the Royal Provost which administers the capital and its vast spring.
Genesis of body constraint
Based on a very fine analysis of regulatory texts as real practices, Julie Claustre first traces the genesis of body constraint, at the cost of demonstrations sometimes extremely technical but remarkably conclusive. Thus, a number of traditional views inherited from a legal historiography, enclosed by simplifications and system logics are refuted.
It is indeed the democratization of the use of credit, during the XIIIe century, which pushed the public authorities to supervise these practices through institutions capable of ensuring the confidence of creditors: seals of the graceful jurisdictions authenticating the letters of obligation and then implementing methods of constraint to guarantee their execution (excommunication by the ecclesiastical courts, banishment by the municipal authorities in northern cities, custom ofostagium (Consignment at the home of the creditor) in the southern regions). While the previous legislation and learned doctrine excluded incarceration in royal prisons for private debt, in the name of a morality assimilating the constraint by body to the abuse of the usurious credit, the major reform order of 1303 made the prison for debt the pillar of coercion against debtors, ratifying an evolution of the practices and the actual law decades before.
The synchronism of this legal reversal with the beginnings of the great economic depression is also striking: the generalized debt undoubtedly appeared as a crucial problem at the turn of XIIIe And XIVe centuries, particularly in the capital where the phenomenon took on an unrivaled dimension and where royalty exercised much more effective social control than everywhere else. The Paris Châtelet seems to have played a pioneering role in this regard, before the generalization of imprisonment for debt by other royal jurisdictions in XVe century.
Sociology of debtors
A second part of the book is attached to the sociological analysis of the debt. If most of the credit studies are primarily based on the notarial archives, the defect of these, for the end of the Middle Ages, requires turning to judicial sources. Thirteen civilian registers (1395-1455) and a nut register (1488-1489), in addition to a few wrecks such as the fragments of the 1412 nut register, offer very discontinuous, and just as imprecise documentary coverage since the recording of legal facts is quite laconic.
They nevertheless make it possible to first outline a sociology of very telling debtors, even if its conclusions remain fragile due to the narrowness of their statistical base. Almost all are laborers of the campaigns around the capital or craftsmen and employees workers in the urban industry: the bodies’ obligation, although it involved the consent of the debtor who accepted the possibility of his imprisonment in guarantee of the claim, weighed above all on the least solvent social categories, as confirmed by the number of debtors who cannot declare any domicile.
Most of these obliges go into debt alone, but dilute their debt by soliciting several different lenders. The credit offer is in any case not concentrated in the hands of some specialists, as evidenced by the scarcity of the use of imprisonment of their debtors by customary creditors.
The amount of these debts, the vast majority denominated, proves to be modest: more than half do not exceed five Parisis pounds, which represents about fifty working days of a maneuver. It is mainly short -term credit for the purchase of movable property which is often raw materials or craft tools, small trade goods. Then come the loans, frequently linking two socially unequal individuals but members of the same professional branch, and often contracted for the clearance of unpaid. Many of these debts are still resulting from the termination of employment, learning or rental of services, legally assimilated to financial obligations ; The imprisonment for debts is therefore the rescue of the discipline of work, at the very time of the first legislation criminal rejecting idleness and vagrancy. Finally come the leases, ferment contracts and rent constitutions which also involved the obligation by body: here the frequent accumulation of old arrears for very variable amounts, the presence of all social categories among the setbacks, draw a very diverse practice of credit.
It should be added that well before the Moulins order (1566) which authorized the imprisonment for any kind of debt, the field of constraint by body overflowed that of the obligation by letters and bored its progressive increase: it was extended by royal privilege to the claims of foreign merchants in the kingdom, then merchants frequenting the fairs of champagne or the lendit, finally the merchants the supply of the capital and indirect royal taxation (sea fish, wine, livestock). Thus the corps obligation clause tended to become widespread in contracts to finally lose its conventional character and become practically tacit at the end of the XVe s.
Prison conditions
The work finally describes the realities of the jail, where the prisoners for debt were not separated from the others but subject to the same regime, moreover very uneven according to the issue of the prosecution, the social state of the interested parties and the amount of the costs of stay which they could pay.
In the absence of adequate sources, it is difficult to measure the share of prisoners for debt throughout the prison population: 10 to 20 % according to the author’s estimate, the debt being in any case the first material subject to the civil justice of the Châtelet. This represents a small third of the nuts in the register of 1488-1489, an annual average of three nuts per day. The jails of the Châtelet therefore permanently welcome around twenty prisoners for debt, as much as XVIIIe A century when the Parisian population will however be three or four times more numerous.
The importance of turnover also corroborates the frequency of imprisonment for debt. Indeed, half of the nut levies occur in forty-eight hours, and three quarters before a week ; Stays of more than a month represent the exception. The detention is all the more brief since the interview of the needy debtor lies with the creditor himself. This is explained by the function of incarceration, which is not to punish indefinitely – and without profit for anyone – the insolvent debtor, but to convince the solvent debtor to honor his commitments. The latter must therefore quickly recover the freedom of movements necessary for him to find out of the means to reimburse.
By means of what, the total cost of the procedure remained reasonable for the creditor: 10 to 15 % of the amount of the claim, at least one part of which could be recovered from the debtor himself, via the arrangement negotiated with him for the clearance of the debt, prior to the lifting of the nut.
Procedure efficiency
Several procedures allow the prisoner for debt to recover his freedom: judicial dispute of the validity of the taking by body, obtaining royal letters canceling not the debt but the taking by body (letters of respite), assignment of goods to the creditor, to a third party or … to himself for a new loan, conclusion of an agreement with the creditor for a deferred reimbursement. For the prisoner, the lifting of the nut therefore only rarely implied the extinction of the debt: this was generally only re-calibrated or transferred to a new obligation. The creditor, on the other hand, obtained in most cases reimbursement or at least the promise of subsequent satisfaction, possibly guaranteed by the bond of a third party. The number of debtors delivered the same day of their arrest is vivid proof of the efficiency and immediacy of the procedure.