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Book Review
| Amalia D. Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 391. $55.00 (ISBN 978-0-300-11397-6).
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| The Parisian merchant court, composed of judges elected each year from the Paris guilds, had jurisdiction over suits between merchant litigants, and over cases involving negotiable instruments (whether or not the litigants were merchants). Amalia Kessler uses the history of the court as a window on the ways commerce was reconceptualized in the eighteenth century by communities engaged in the mercantile world. Over the course of the century the court moved away from a corporatist vision in which commerce was viewed as the peculiar preserve of merchants. In the older perspective commerce was conceived as a potential hazard to the public requiring police and guild regulation to contain its dangers. In place of this vision, the court came to embrace an abstract conception of commerce as the beneficial, credit-driven, exchange relations that encompassed and bound together a whole society. It is, perhaps, a stretch to describe this shift in thought and representation as a "revolution in commerce," as Kessler does. It was a long, gradual process of accommodation to new realties, never unambiguously embraced or completed. However, in showing how the court developed new discursive resources to navigate a changing reality, Kessler offers an incisive means to connect discourse to social practice—the concern of many scholars involved in mapping the cultural and political effects of economic transformation in eighteenth-century France. |
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One of Kessler's key insights is that while merchants accepted the "public hazard" understanding of commerce, they simultaneously held that a properly regulated commerce was fully compatible with merchant virtues—harmony with one's fellows, good faith and honesty, charity and leniency—and that the court's chief business was to foster such mercantile virtue. The Paris merchant court, and the arbiters who transacted most of its business, sought to discern and reward good faith and to punish dishonesty; they used a self-consciously equitable style to restore harmony to relations between litigants. The court took into account the reputation of merchants in its rulings, relied heavily on oaths to establish good faith, and sometimes used "sentimental legal reasoning" that represented conflicts as a struggle between virtue and vice. The court was more interested in ensuring fairness than it was in adhering to the letter of contracts. It intervened to lower prices it thought were too high, and it routinely granted delays to needy debtors as a measure of fraternal charity. |
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Over the course of the century, the court reconceptualized commerce. It drew strategically on functional rather than corporate conceptions of commerce, and on claims that commerce was socially beneficial, in disputes with rival bodies over jurisdiction and status. It was also forced to rethink its norms in response to new commercial practices that proved refractory to the traditional virtue-centered representations of commerce. Partnerships (sociétés) were regarded as the paradigmatic commercial relationship, embodying the ideal of fraternal relations dear to the merchant court. (They even served in natural law treatises as basic evidence of human sociability.) Traditional understandings of partnership were troubled by the development, from the late seventeenth century, of impersonal forms of business association, notably limited partnerships, and sociétés en commandite par actions (a cross between limited partnership and the joint-stock company). It was difficult to assimilate these impersonal forms of business association to the ideal of lasting, fraternal relations that was supposed to be the foundation of merchant sociability. The use of negotiable instruments—promissory notes and bills of exchange—also troubled older notions of commerce. The use of bills of exchange was expanded by the establishment of the Bourse in 1724, the proliferation of private banking houses, and the foundation of a discount bank (the Caisse d'Escompte) in the 1770s. Moreover, negotiable instruments brought non-merchants under the jurisdiction of the court as never before. Negotiability placed the court in the position of having to find individuals liable for payment even when they had acted in good faith and were themselves the victims of the bad faith of others. Negotiability was ultimately made acceptable only by adopting "a new conception of commerce as the credit-fueled, private exchange engaged in by individuals across the social order, which in aggregate inured to the benefit of society as a whole" (226). There was a corresponding shift in the role of the court from restoring harmony and rewarding virtue to fostering the optimum conditions for the availability of credit. |
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Kessler's account of these changes is clear and persuasive. Her work offers access to the way merchants, and the communities in which they were embedded, rethought the moral dimension of their own social practice. In so doing, she makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the cultural mediations of commercial society. |
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| John Shovlin
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| New York University |
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