The Revolution
This chapter focuses on the French Revolution's impact on credit markets and the long-term implications for lending. It begins with the revolution's fundamental institutional reforms, which shaped credit markets for the rest of the nineteenth century. The chapter analyzes the effect of the reforms and the consequences of the revolutionary inflation—this entails looking at how borrowers and lenders reacted, both in the short and long run. It also involves examining shifts in their demand for notaries' services, whether to draw up contracts if clients were illiterate, or to secure loans with collateral. Finally, the chapter examines the difficulty that borrowers and lenders had in the peer-to-peer matching markets where only a few loans were made each month.