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THE ILLIMITABLE RIGHT: DEBATING THE MEANING OF PROPERTY AND THE MARCHÉ À TERME IN NAPOLEONIC FRANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2016

TYSON LEUCHTER
TYSON LEUCHTER*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

At a critical moment during the Napoleonic era, the stockbrokers of Paris were summoned before the Council of State to defend the marché à terme, or futures contract in public debt. Surprisingly, despite official disdain and ample legal opportunity for prohibition, the brokers’ argument was successful, and the marché à terme escaped repression. The defense of the marché à terme turned on the nature of property. To critics, it divided property from possession, severing property from any concrete anchors. Advocates, by contrast, pointed to the inherent abstraction of property encoded in legal norms. These debates helped shape a concept of property in which economic utility, legal validity, and moral grounding converged. As a central pillar of the new regime, this concept of property also constrained political authority. The successful defense of the marché à terme shows that property was a right that not even authoritarian regimes could restrict arbitrarily.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , April 2018 , pp. 3 - 32
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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3 The year 1724 marked the establishment of the modern Paris Stock Exchange. Carine Romey observes that the edict creating the exchange also appeared to curtail the marché à terme, by requiring possession of both funds and securities before transacting. See Romey, Carine, “Les opérations de Bourse,” in Gallais-Hamonno, Georges and Hautcoeur, Pierre-Cyrille, eds., Le marché financier français au XIXe siècle, vol. 1 (Paris, 2007), 109–58Google Scholar, at 138. As John Shovlin has argued, this reproach of speculation fit into a wider discourse of “patriotic political economy,” which emerged with particular force in the latter half of the eighteenth century. See Shovlin, John, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 2006) 4–12 Google Scholar, 124–5, 170–72.

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26 Lagneau-Ymonet and Riva, Histoire de la Bourse, 21.

27 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 3.

28 Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue, 212.

29 Ibid., 219.

30 Ibid., 218.

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32 Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue, 151–9.

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34 Jean Bouchary claims Baroud as the author of the pamphlet, as does a handwritten “Note historique” on the pamphlet itself. See Bouchary, Jean, Les manieurs d'argent à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1943), 3 Google Scholar: 179; anonymous, Considérations sur les avantages de l’éxistence d'une dette publique, et sur la nécessité d'un plan général et complete de bonne conduite en finance (Paris, 1800), 1, AN AF/IV/1086.

35 Bouchary, Les manieurs, 167–74.

36 In the last half of 1787 alone, the volume of Baroud's transactions reached as high as 63,000,000 livres. See Taylor, “The Paris Bourse,” 968.

37 Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth, 149–50. See also Malick W. Ghachem, “At the Origins of Public Credit: A Story of Stock-Jobbing and Financial Crisis in Prerevolutionary France,” in “The Financial Crisis of 2008: French and American Responses,” Proceedings of the 2010 Franco-American Legal Seminar (2011), 171–82.

38 Anonymous, Considérations, 1.

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40 The tiers consolidé was a 5 percent perpetual annuity. See Lagneau-Ymonet and Riva, Histoire de la Bourse, 19–20. On the Bankruptcy of the Two-Thirds see Crouzet, François, La grande inflation: La monnaie en France de Louis XVI à Napoléon (Paris, 1993), 466–8Google Scholar.

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43 Anonymous, Considérations, 2–3. All emphasis original.

44 Though the French state did attempt to amortize the loan, retiring portions of it from circulation. See Bruguière, Michel, “Les techniques d'intervention de la Caisse d'amortissement dans le cours de la rente, 1816–1824,” Revue historique, 258/1 (1977), 93–104 Google Scholar.

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46 Ibid., 12.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 298–301, 306–7.

50 Anonymous, Considérations, 2.

51 Ibid, 4.

52 The Old Regime French state defaulted on its debt in 1559, 1598, 1634, 1648, 1661, 1716, 1722, 1759, 1770, and 1788. See Bossenga, “Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” 38. The Revolutionary state continued this tradition with the Bankruptcy of the Two-Thirds in 1797.

53 Anonymous, Considérations, 7.

54 Ibid., 16, original emphasis.

55 Ibid., 28–9.

56 Ibid., 24.

57 Ibid., 9–10.

58 Ibid., 10–11.

59 Ibid., 17.

60 Ibid., 18.

61 Ibid., 25–6.

62 Ibid., 26.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., 92–3.

65 Ibid., 93–4.

66 Anonymous, Lettre à l'auteur du mémoire intitulé: Considérations sur les avantages de l’éxistence d'une dette publique, et sur la nécessité d'un plan général et complet de bonne conduite en finance (Paris, 1800), 1, AN AF/IV/1086.

67 Ibid., 3.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid., 11. The author mentioned Smith and Forbonnais in particular.

70 Ibid., 2–3.

71 Ibid., 5–6.

72 Ibid., 22.

73 Ibid., 4.

74 Ibid., 20.

75 Even the author of the Lettre never claimed that public debt was formally prohibited by law.

76 Gontard, La Bourse de Paris, 23–4.

77 Ibid., 24.

78 Bordo, Michael D. and White, Eugene N., “A Tale of Two Currencies,” Journal of Economic History, 51/2 (1991), 303–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 303–6, 310; Crouzet, La grande inflation, 555–9. Britain's departure from the gold standard was by no means uncontroversial. See Poovey, Mary, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago, 2008), 171–218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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82 Ibid., 372–9.

83 AN AF/IV/1089B.

84 Mollien au Premier Consul, undated, AN AF/IV/1074. Given that the majority of new regulations on the exchange were issued between 1801 and 1802, it seems likely that the letter was composed sometime within that span.

85 In canceling the marché à prime, the purchaser's losses would thus be limited to forfeiting the premium to the seller.

86 de Frayne, L. Ch. Bizet, Précis des diverses manières de spéculer sur les fonds publics, en usage à la Bourse de Paris, 3rd edn (Paris, 1818), 4–5 Google Scholar.

87 Assuming gambling debts are promptly paid off, of course.

88 Mollien au Premier Consul, AN AF/IV/1074.

89 Or, at least, property was conceptually illimitable in the private domain. Disturbances of the public order would not, presumably, be justified according to the law of property.

90 This new definition of property was quite close to the common-law concept Mollien cited; Article 544 defined property as “the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided one does not make usage prohibited by laws and regulations.” See Code Napoléon: Edition originale et seule officielle (Paris, 1807), 142.

91 Portalis, Jean-Etienne-Marie, “Exposé des motifs du projet du loi sur la propriété, Titre II, Livre II du Code civil, présenté le 26 nivôse an XII,” in Portalis, Frédéric, ed., Discours, rapports et travaux inédits sur le Code civil (Paris, 1844), 209–32Google Scholar, at 212.

92 Ibid., 214.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., 215.

95 Titre V, Article 90, Code de commerce (Paris, 1807), 103. On the nature of the Commercial Code see Kessler, Amalia D., A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, 2007)Google Scholar.

96 CSCAC, 17 December 1807, CAEF B-0069360/1.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 CSCAC, 5 March 1808, CAEF B-0069460/1.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid. The “Grand-Livre” was the ledger in which public debt transactions were recorded.

108 Ibid.

109 CSCAC, 5 March 1808, CAEF B-0069360/1.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.

112 Ibid. Article 2059 of the Civil Code concerned fraud, specifically stellionate. See Code Napoléon, 527.

113 Gontard, La Bourse de Paris, 10–15.

114 CSCAC, 5 March 1808, CAEF B-0069360/1.

115 Desan, Suzanne, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004), 283–9Google Scholar. Desan notes that discussion of the code was focused in the Council of State, with Napoleon himself attending over half the sessions. However, the code “sailed through the two legislative bodies without difficulty or dispute.”

116 White, Eugene N., “The Paris Bourse, 1724–1814: Experiments in Microstructure,” in Engerman, Stanley L., Hoffman, Philip T., Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, and Sokoloff, Kenneth L., eds., Finance, Intermediaries, and Economic Development (New York, 2003), 34–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 68. The Council of State and the prefect of police did weigh in on the exchange in 1809, with further regulations coming in 1819, 1826, 1830, and 1831. However, these regulations mainly dealt with the usurpation of professional office, trading hours, and admission to the exchange; the legality of the marché à terme did not seem to be an object of concern. See Archives de la préfecture de la police, DA/31.

117 Articles 421 and 422, Code pénal (Paris, 1810), 99.

118 On a similar controversy in the American context, see Levy, Jonathan Ira, “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905,” American Historical Review, 111/2 (2006), 307–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.