scholarly journals A subject of interest: usurers on trial in early nineteenth-century France

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Vause
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Financial Networks ◽  
Predatory Lending ◽  
French Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Lending Behavior ◽  
Cultural Constructions

This article examines perceptions and practices of habitual usury, a crime consisting of lending above the legal rate of interest on multiple occasions, in early nineteenth-century France using descriptions of usury trials found in the popular legal periodical the Gazette des Tribunaux. Following the French Revolution, French law legitimized lending at interest in principle, but punished ‘habitual usurers’ who ‘made a profession’ from lending above the legal limit. The decades that followed witnessed striking growth in banking, joint-stock companies and other financial institutions. Highlighting the connections between cultural constructions of the usurer and the actual processes deemed usurious, this article seeks to understand a paradox: that usury was deemed omnipresent in French society yet it was rarely prosecuted. By examining how habitual usury was defined and prosecuted in French courtrooms, this article shows how habitual usurers both validated and undermined stereotypical notions of predatory lending behavior found in popular culture of the time. Habitual usury trials also reveal the actual practices that allowed those excluded from formal financial networks to participate in the growth of capitalist relations. This article argues that the nineteenth-century obsession with the usurer can be explained by the crucial role played by usurious practices in the credit economy of the period. As such, prosecution of usury tended to focus on the character of the usury rather than the actual practice of illegal lending. This article suggests that by occasionally prosecuting particularly egregious ‘immoral’ moneylenders, the legal system and journals like the Gazette des Tribunaux worked to keep credit accessible to the ‘underbanked’.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
French Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National System ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

Burney's The Wanderer and Early-Nineteenth-Century Commodity Fetishism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Wanderer

This essay explores a particular moment in the history of commodity fetishism by means of an examination of Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814). The novel, which is explicitly concerned with the social changes facing early-nineteenth-century England, reveals that at this historical moment the commodity inspired emotions of a particular kind: it was idealized and perceived as attractively individualized, aloof, exotic, and changeable, and it elicited a passionate and sometimes even painful form of desire. In The Wanderer Burney explores the human repercussions of this new way of engaging with objects in the marketplace. She reveals, moreover, the extent to which the fetishism of the commodity reflected not just developments within the economy but also political change: under the influence of the French Revolution the charisma once generated by social status was transferred to the economic realm, where, embodied in the commodity, it gave rise to a pleasurable but masochistic reverence. Burney'sargument for the usefulness of economic independence necessarily leads her to appreciate the commodity fetishism she describes: even while she develops a labor theory of value, Burney promotes a mystification of the commodity by insisting on the aloof independence of both labor and its products. Thus, Burney uses the apparent autonomy of things——which Marx decries——as a means to argue for the autonomy of the makers of those things.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

scholarly journals In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Role

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

The Glut of Doctors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The West ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Attraction ◽  
The French Revolution

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.

German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Doron Avraham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
Alternative Meaning ◽  
Christian Conservatives ◽  
Prevailing View

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

Lucia and the Auscultation of Disease in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Mark A. Pottinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Symptoms ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Look ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Medical Historian ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
French Physician

As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ of Lucia di Lammermoor was not popular in the several years that followed the premiere in 1835. In fact, audiences, critics and publishers of opera selections for the salon preferred the love duet of act 1 or the final scene of the opera when Edgardo kills himself upon hearing the news that Lucia is dead. In this article, I explore early nineteenth-century notions of hysteria, a disease that manifested with both physical and emotional symptoms. If undiagnosed, the individual suffering from the disease would experience muscle contractions, pupil dilations, delusions, cardiac arrest and eventual death. One of the seminal studies of hysteria in the first half of the nineteenth century was written by the French physician and medical historian Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (1799–1873), who published in 1833 Histoire philosophique de l'hypochondrie et de l'hystérie, a 500-plus page investigation into the cause and cure of hysterics and hypochondriacs. Through an investigation of the diagnosis of hysteria in d'Amiens's work and the sound and look of hysteria in Donizetti's opera, now made more acute through familiarity with the newly invented stethoscope (1816, René Laennec) and its ability to deliver the internal sounds of the body, we can see how close the opera comes to mirroring the look and sound of the disease, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm and in some cases outright hostility to Lucia's fall into madness in the early reception of the work in France.

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