Normes et valeurs de la dette (1787–1791)
Une institution financière, sociale et politique
Doctoral thesis in political science (University of Lausanne) and philosophy (Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne), defended on 5 February 2021 under the supervision of Biancamaria Fontana and Emmanuel Picavet, and awarded the Faculty Prize. Published by Classiques Garnier (coll. « Bibliothèque de l'économiste »), 2022.
The summaries below are written from the full text. Direct quotations from the work are referenced to the published edition (Classiques Garnier, 2022).
In brief
Why did the men of 1789 — who abolished privileges, seized the Church's property and re-founded the whole of France's institutions — never cancel the state's debt, going so far as to declare it “sacred” and to prohibit, in the Constitution itself, any interference with its payment? This deceptively simple question is the guiding thread of the book. Combining the history of political thought and economic philosophy, it studies public debt not as an accounting aggregate but as a social, political and financial institution in the fullest sense — a “total social object” (p. 28), adapting Marcel Mauss's “total social fact” as applied to money by Aglietta and Théret.
The argument unfolds in three stages. A first, theoretical part establishes that the notion of interest, mobilised since the eighteenth century to explain the behaviour of debt's actors, is insufficient unless referred back to the values that define what actors deem desirable; it proposes a general articulation between norms, values and institutions (every norm concretises a value within a system), and then identifies an “ethics of public debt” (p. 14): a transhistorical set of expected behaviours and discourses organised around three principles — necessity, sovereignty, and social order.
A second, historical part reconstructs the 1787-1791 case by re-embedding it in the preceding decades: the available theories (from Law and Melon to Hume, Turgot and Steuart), the institutions of borrowing (venal offices, annuities, the Caisse d'Escompte) and the social interests at stake (the massive diffusion of debt-based savings across the Parisian population). The crisis then comes into focus: the spectre of bankruptcy threatened the savings of nearly all “active” citizens, and the July 1789 insurrection rose against a governmental plan of partial bankruptcy. A close analysis of the debates of the National Constituent Assembly shows that the seizure of Church property and the creation of the assignats followed no preconceived plan, but emerged as a compromise built vote by vote, through a ratchet effect, around the protection of the state's creditors. The ensuing overhaul of private property instituted a “hierarchising equality” (p. 24): all citizens became equal in law before property, yet the state's creditors appear, in the texts as in the decisions, “more equal” than others.
A final chapter draws a general theory from the inquiry: state institutions are formed and evolve through three distinct discursive practices — the positive (describing institutions), the normator (advocating their desirable evolution) and the normative (giving them the force of law). This tripartition, the book's methodological contribution, makes it possible to qualify the actual role of economic theories in the evolution of norms, and to understand political economy, following James Steuart, as rhetoric in the noble sense: a science of argumentation oriented towards collective action, embedded within ethics and politics rather than standing above them.
Extended summary
1. Object, question and position of the research
In 1787, nearly half the budget of the French monarchy was absorbed by debt service — roughly 4.8 billion livres, of which 3,775 million consisted of consolidated annuities, 322 million of floating debt and 736 million owed on venal offices. The ensuing financial crisis is classically recognised as one of the origins of 1789. The book proposes to go much further: to read the whole 1787-1791 sequence as a debt crisis, and to follow step by step how its resolution shaped the new institutions — up to the Constitution of 1791, whose Title V, article 2 stipulates that “under no pretext may the funds necessary for the payment of the national debt […] be refused or suspended” (p. 144).
The paradox motivating the inquiry is this: revolutions ordinarily repudiate debts (Zapata's Mexico, Russia in 1918); yet the French revolutionaries, from 1789 to 1797, did everything to honour the commitments of the very state they were overthrowing, to the point of legally “sacralising” the debt. The book sets out to explain this paradox and, through it, to grasp the phenomenon of state debt in general: how it is constituted as an institution, how it is described and instrumentalised, how it affects political horizons and the very representation of the state's missions.
The research position is doubly affirmed. It is a work of the history of thought and a philosophical work, in which history is not a complement but the raw and essential material of conceptual labour. And it is a contribution to economic philosophy understood, following Emmanuel Picavet, as the study of how principles are concretised in norms — a field where the separation between the political and the economic dissolves. The stance is institutionalist: there is no economic order outside an instituted legal order, and any nomological ambition in economics must be circumscribed to a given ethical, political and institutional situation.
2. The historiographical debate: why no bankruptcy in 1789?
The book first positions itself with respect to the historiography linking public credit and political regimes. The dominant view, stemming from North and Weingast (1989), makes the alliance of parliamentarism and marketable debt the matrix of the modern rule of law: after 1688 England invented a system — sovereign parliament, fiscal transparency, controlled debt — rendering state commitments credible, securing property and enabling markets. Two critiques are mobilised: Hoffman, Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal show that French private credit markets flourished throughout the eighteenth century despite the absence of a stable public debt, undermining the claim of a systematic advantage of the English model; Brousseau, Schemeil and Sgard shift the explanation towards the equalisation of rights and the construction of an impartial bureaucracy.
On the precise question of the absence of bankruptcy in 1789, the book discusses the two reasons advanced by Hoffman and his co-authors (public opinion's unanimous condemnation of bankruptcy; the strategic refusal to solve the king's fiscal problem without constitutional counterpart) and Florin Aftalion's “strategic rot” hypothesis. Its own contribution re-anchors these explanations in social materiality: opinion's condemnation of bankruptcy was not merely moral or theoretical — it rested on the very concrete refusal to see one's savings vanish, since the royal debt concentrated the financial interests of vast segments of the population, above all in Paris. The debt-become-national was the cornerstone of the constitutional work because it was already the cornerstone of the savings and private credit of those who made the Revolution.
3. Part I — The theoretical apparatus: interest, values, norms, institutions
Chapter 1 examines the notion of interest, whose extreme plasticity accounts both for its success and its ambiguity. Drawing on Hirschman and Lazzeri, it shows that the notion claims to rid the observer of the false reasons invoked by moral and political discourse, so as to reach actors' real motivations. But either interest strictly denotes material advantage — and then it misses most of what debt is about (the definition of a just social order, the fight against inequality, the role of the state); or it denotes any strategic pursuit of advantage — and then it becomes redundant and explains nothing. The book proposes to understand interest as a “complex of desirable ends” (p. 453), which necessarily refers back to the values defining the desirable: without values, no interest.
Chapter 2 builds, from a debate between Ruwen Ogien and Pierre Livet and from Raimo Tuomela's work, a general articulation of norms, values and institutions, condensed into five propositions to be tested against the historical case: (1) every institution pursues an objective in terms of values to be concretised by norms; (2) a norm always concretises a value, but never alone — norms, values and institutions form systems that must be analysed as such; (3) in a conflict, the interpretation of the links between norm-systems and value-systems becomes the major political stake, entrusted to political institutions; (4) one and the same norm may strengthen or weaken the realisation of a value depending on the conflict considered; (5) crises are not accidents but necessary moments in the process of bringing norms and values into coherence.
Chapter 3 sketches a general morphology of theories of state debt from the eighteenth century to the present, identifying argumentative invariants: assimilation to private debt, the risk of catastrophe, the corruption or reinforcement of moral principles, the weakening or strengthening of political regimes. The conclusion of Part I derives from this an “ethics of public debt” (pp. 121–123): the set of behaviours and discourses expected of the actors of the apparatus, ordered by three principles. Sovereignty: sovereign debt is thought in a paradoxical relation to its own cancellation — cancellation is at once the limit of sovereignty (everything must be done to prevent it) and its most striking proof (formally and absolutely prohibiting it would end the state's financial sovereignty). Social order: claims on the state, legally classified as “fictive immovables” (p. 123) under the Old Regime to circumvent the prohibition of lending at interest, tie debt to the permanence of the property-based order; yet Montesquieu and Hume recall that of all forms of property, the annuity is the most fragile — it is worth only the king's word. Necessity, finally: the legitimate source and death of debt. A state that borrows must be in urgent need; a state that cancels may do so only as a last resort — this is Crétet's argument before the Council of Elders in 1797, as it is the U.S. Supreme Court's when validating the abrogation of gold clauses in 1936. The book adds an original argument: some cancellations are accepted without market sanction because the cancelling state holds a quasi-monopoly on the safest available claim (eighteenth-century France, the United States of 1936) — savers have no equivalent alternative, and they return.
4. Part II — The long context (1720-1787): theories, interests, institutions
Three chapters reconstruct the context without which the crisis of 1787 is unintelligible. Chapter 4 maps the space of theoretical problems of state borrowing through seven major authors — Law, Melon, Dutot, Montesquieu, Hume, Turgot, Steuart — whose positions are synthesised in a systematic table (ordinary vs extraordinary borrowing, bankruptcy, paper money, the state as economic strategist, etc.). Consensus emerges on some points: in wartime nothing replaces borrowing; the tension between landowners and state creditors is a specifically French danger; economic phenomena are now conceived as systems. The fault-lines concern the nature of those systems: the nomological universalism of the physiocrats against the contextualism of Montesquieu and Steuart. Hume stands alone in advocating bankruptcy — to kill a public credit that was transforming the very perception of wealth and threatening England's social order.
Chapter 5 restores social practices and interests: the financial, social and political networks built by royal borrowing, in France and abroad, make it impossible to separate the fate of public finances from that of private fortunes. Every royal bankruptcy strikes the bankers and, depending on its design, the savings of the humblest — Terray deliberately spared the Hôtel de ville annuities in 1770. In the 1780s, the growing complexity of exchange-based finance (the Caisse d'Escompte, speculative constructions) made the consequences of any bankruptcy unpredictable for everyone, which is what gave the spectre its charge of dread.
Chapter 6 traces the evolution of borrowing institutions: the venality of offices as a fully-fledged form of indebtedness (capital against social status and remuneration), the Hôtel de ville annuities, and the English-style “public credit” borrowing introduced from 1774. The power of bankruptcy, signature of monarchical sovereignty, was officially renounced in 1774; from Turgot to Calonne, every government dismissed rumours and projects of bankruptcy, up to the convocation of the 1787 Assembly of Notables, meant to avert it through sweeping fiscal reform.
5. Part II (continued) — The crisis (1787-1791): pamphlets, Assembly, property
Chapter 7 analyses the pamphlets of 1787-1789 through five corpora: Sieyès, Clavière, Linguet, Condorcet, and the grievance register of the hamlet of Madon. Each gives form and meaning to savers' anxiety while sketching a desirable future. Clavière applies Steuart's ideas; Sieyès builds his economic thought against the physiocrats; Linguet sets aside financial technique for ethics and law; Condorcet evolves from a physiocratic starting point towards a consideration of the circuits of savings. Strikingly, the moral reading is never abandoned for a technical one — Condorcet calls bankruptcy a “crime”; the debt is said to be “sacred.” Another notable result: the position finally adopted by the Constituent Assembly (sacralisation) matches the programme of none of these authors, except partially Clavière's; and the radicalisation of positions turns on whether everything should be changed to save the debts, or the debts destroyed to save the institutions.
Chapter 8 completes the analysis with the social history of 1787-1789: the acceleration of financial concentration around the debt, and above all the role of the “gens de finances” — intendants, office-owning Treasury administrators, subaltern clerks — whose technical mastery made the financial administration nearly untouchable, and whose interests converged massively on a stable order founded on property. First exposed in case of bankruptcy, almost all tied to masonic networks, they were active or “positively passive” (p. 323) participants in the Revolution; their adhesion stemmed not only from financial interest but from a moral and political hope for a virtuous disciplining of institutions.
Chapter 9 — the longest — follows almost day by day the debates of the National Constituent Assembly from July to December 1789: the failure of the August and September loans (the Old Regime's financial circuit would not bend to the new rules), the competing plans, the placing of creditors “under the guard of the honour and loyalty of the French Nation” (p. 301), the integration of offices into the immediately payable (criarde) debt, Talleyrand's proposal, the failure of Necker's National Bank project, the seizure of Church property and the creation of the caisse de l'extraordinaire and the assignats. The book shows that this outcome followed no structured plan: it was an ad hoc solution, aggregated vote by vote. Mobilising Pascal Engel's distinction between belief and collective acceptance, it describes the progressive formation of an Assembly “we” through successive integrative acceptances (“avoiding bankruptcy is the priority,” “the Church's property belongs to the nation,” “a National Bank is a danger”), locked in by a ratchet effect. Against Elster's severe judgement (debates “heavily tainted with rhetoric” compared to Philadelphia), the book argues that the decisions of 1789 display great coherence — aggregative, not preconceived.
Chapter 10 analyses the overhaul of private property (1789-1791) in dialogue with Rafe Blaufarb's “Great Demarcation”: the legal invention of “feudalism” made it possible to carve out a new property — personal, liquid, circulating, fully alienable — modelled on the creditor-debtor relation. The equal dignity granted to all forms of property concretised citizens' equality in law while leaving the inequality of distribution intact: a “hierarchising equality” (p. 24). The book here brings the constituants into dialogue with Hume, who as early as 1752 had described how public debt transforms the perception of wealth — land ceases to be an identity and becomes an investment compared with the yield of annuities — and with Steuart, for whom the slow modification of a people's norms of action is the very aim of the economist and the statesman. As for the officeholders, integrated at the top of the payable debt and reimbursed, they merged into the new notability: the century-old rivalry between officers and commissaires was resolved by absorption.
6. Chapter 11 — The tripartition of discursive practices
The final theoretical chapter generalises the inquiry. Institutions neither exist nor evolve without discourse, and these discourses necessarily belong to three practices: the positive practice (exposing and resolving questions within a space of theoretical problems — the treatise, the scholarly article), the normator practice (criticising institutions and describing their desirable evolution according to a situated interpretation of values — the pamphlet, the platform), and the normative practice (giving norms institutional form with the force of law — the constitution, the decree, the official word that commits the institution). Each practice has its own temporality: the positive aims at the long run, the normator at the here-and-now, the normative at the in-between of stability. Practices are not assigned to persons: a scholar becomes a legislator, a minister defends his policy; but every utterance must be situated, and unavowed transgression of the boundaries calls for sanction — there is an ethics of normative discursivity, of which Weber had formulated a fragment for the professor at the lectern.
Public debt is then qualified as a sociologically political institution in the sense of Delphine Dulong's three criteria: it exercises normative power over other institutions (the very hierarchy of the state's missions is altered by indebtedness); its control is de facto reserved to a social elite (from Old Regime officeholders to central banks); its rules are codified at the summit of the hierarchy of norms — a table recapitulates the mentions of debt in every French constitutional text from 1791 to 2020, showing its explicit guarantee until 1848, then its silent naturalisation. The Greek crisis of 2010-2015 serves as the contemporary case: access to markets as a solvent borrower has become so essential a quality of states that protecting it may demand the momentary sacrifice of all normative independence.
The chapter closes with two gestures of methodological honesty. First, an avowal of limits: the influence of discourse on institutions is “minimal but certain” (p. 412), impossible to weigh exactly against social interests, path dependence and unforeseeable events — the continuity of financial personnel before and after 1789 (Bruguière) reminds us that practices outlive texts. A computational research programme (automated cross-analysis of positive, normator and normative corpora) is sketched to overcome this limit. Second, a reflexive return to the five propositions of chapter 2: the first and third are validated (with the decisive amendment that institutions hold no monopoly on legitimate interpretation — the crowd of the revolutionary journées seizes it too); the second is amended against any organicism; the fourth is judged too fluid (the interpretation of values has inertia — Steuart's warning about the necessary slowness of change, and Burke's misgiving); the fifth is refined: crises intensify the discursive work of coherence but do not inaugurate it.
7. General conclusion: results and openings
The general conclusion answers the three research axes posed in the introduction. Axis 1: the theories prior to 1787 did influence the Assembly's debates — not as applied doctrines, but as a shared vocabulary and space of problems (debt, circulation, public credit, public faith) that made possible the aggregation of opinions, compromise and decision; the inherited institutional organisation and the rapidly reconfigured social interests (the swift isolation of the court and clergy) did the rest. Axis 2: the influence of the debt problem on the institutional architecture in gestation appears immense — the sanctity of private property and the prohibition of bankruptcy are linked, and the 1789-1791 sequence reads as an attempted general social compromise whose losers (impoverished nobles without capital, the fourth estate without savings) chose emigration or the street, that is, exteriority to the institutions. The constituants' focus on debt may also partly explain their inability to grasp the food and social crisis rumbling from October onwards. Axis 3: the value “social order” was redefined but protected; the more ambiguous value “equality” was concretised through the equal dignity of properties — but the state's creditors, exempted and prioritised, were “more equal” than other citizens.
Two dialogues frame these results. First with Bertrand Russell, whose In Praise of Idleness (1932) serves to interrogate the link between debt, generalised work and productivism: massive indebtedness obliges states to guarantee the growth of their revenues, hence to foster the measurable growth of exchange — from the eighteenth century's “circulation” to today's GDP. Then with the Smith-Steuart pair, erected into the archetype of a still-active epistemological divide: either political economy is a potentially exact science of natural objects with eternal laws, founded on axiological neutrality; or it always serves a determinate system of values, assembling reasons for action while predicting nothing with certainty — a rhetoric of systems destined for obsolescence. The book embraces the second branch, specifying that “rhetoric” carries nothing pejorative: it is a pedagogy and a science of argumentation oriented towards an object.
The final opening is deliberately and measuredly normative: brutal transformations of debt systems historically occur only after exogenous catastrophes (1797, 1918, 1935, 1946), and such a catastrophe has already begun — the collapse of environmental systems. If debt plays a role in the obsession with growth, its reform will be an obligatory step of the ecological transition. But the outright erasure of debts is neither feasible nor desirable: such calls are merely the mirror image of debt's supposed sanctity. Overcoming the excessive antagonisms surrounding this object appears to be the only way to secure the stability of institutions — and a political theory of public debt remains to be written.
The book — Normes et valeurs de la dette (1787–1791). Une institution financière, sociale et politique, Classiques Garnier, coll. « Bibliothèque de l'économiste », 2022, 479 p. Publisher’s page
Reviewed by Jérôme Loiseau in the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 2023/2 (no. 412), p. 213. Read the review