Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLV:4 (Spring, 2015), 485–506.
Elise Dermineur
Trust, Norms of Cooperation, and the Rural
Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century
France Lending and borrowing money was an ordinary activity
in early modern France. In traditional communities, peasants used
credit in order to make ends meet, to pay their taxes, and to make
new investments. But as money was exchanged, trust between cred-
itors and the debtors assumed vital importance. A creditor, entrust-
ing capital to friends, neighbors, family members, or clients, had
to be reassured of his/her debtor’s capacity not only to reimburse
the money lent in due time but also to pay the annual interest.
Despite the fact that creditors often took the requisite precautions
to secure their transactions, some of them had to appeal to a local
judge to recover their loans, an extreme measure indicating that
trust between the initial parties had been lost.
This article analyzes the paradigm of trust—or, more narrowly,
the interaction between debtors and creditors—in French traditional
communities during the early modern period (with special refer-
ence to the eighteenth century), treating it as an object of historical
analysis in its own right. It explores the mechanisms, characteristics,
and evolution of trust through the prism of the credit market of
a rural seigneurie (the domain of a lord). The period considered is
critical. Indeed, the many structural changes that occurred during
the eighteenth century were key in the transition between pre-
capitalism and capitalism. These changes are evident in both towns
and rural areas.1
The case study in this article is the rural seigneurie of Delle,
located in northeastern France. It comprises a group of nineteen
Elise Dermineur is Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of History, Lund University. She is the author
of “Single Women and the Rural Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Social
History, XLVIII (2014), available at doi: 10.1093/jsh/shu041; “Les Femmes et le Crédit dans les
Communautés Rurales au 18e siècle,” Traverse Revue d’Histoire – Zeitschrift für Geschichte, II (2014),
53–64.
© 2015 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00756
1
See Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997);
Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” William and Mary Quarterly,
XLVI (1989), 120–144.
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villages that became the property of the Mazarin family at the end of
the seventeenth century. In 1720, approximately 2,200 inhabitants
populated the area; in 1766, the rural dwellers totaled about 3,400.
Most of the inhabitants of this seigneurie were farmers. Delle was the
main town (with a population of roughly 300 to 400 inhabitants
in the middle of the eighteenth century), in which several artisans
and merchants lived and worked, as well as a few millers and tanners.
Delle was also the administrative center of the seigneurie, where a
local court, one notary, and most of the seigneurial agents could
be found. The number of these operatives tended to increase during
the eighteenth century.2
Peasants in the seigneurie during the eighteenth century often
took out loans to finance their obligations or investments, some-
times resorting to deferred payments for certain transactions. In the
middle of the century, when indebtedness began to increase dramat-
ically, many rural households struggled to repay their creditors. As
Holderness put it, “In the pathology of rural life, peasants and
indebtedness often go together in the same diagnostic package-deal.”
The example of the seigneurie of Delle highlights many of the
features and patterns of debt, credit, and trust in early modern
France—specifically, in this article, the nexus between borrowers
and creditors in the context of a micro-credit market.3
2
For the history of the seigneurie of Delle, see, among others, Michel Colney, Delle au XVIIIe
siècle (Strasbourg, 1989); 21J1, Dénombrement 1720 and 1766, Archives Départementales du
Territoire de Belfort (hereinafter ADTB). During the eighteenth century, the seigneurie of Delle
had its own local courts, which met frequently in its towns. Peasants could seek justice easily since
all of the villages were located near the towns. This seigneurie was part of Alsace; there was no
royal justice in this particular region. But the peasants were satisfied with both the quality and
service of the local courts. See Dermineur, “The Civil Judicial System in Early Modern France,”
Frühneuzeit-Info, XXII (2011), 44–53.
3
For studies that highlight the mechanisms of private credit in the period before capitalism,
See Chris Briggs, Credit and Village: Society in Fourteenth-Century England (New York, 2009);
Dermineur, “Female Peasants, Patriarchy, and the Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century
France,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, XXXVII (2009), 61–84; Laurence
Fontaine, L’économie Morale: Pauvreté, Crédit et Confiance Dans l’Europe Préindustrielle (Paris,
2008); idem, “Espaces, usages et dynamiques de la dette: Dans les hautes vallées dauphinoises
(XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles),” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, XL (1994), 1375–1391; David Graeber,
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, 2011); Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-
Laurent Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago,
2001); idem, “Révolution et évolution: Les marchés du crédit notarié en France, 1780–1840,”
Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, LIX (2004), 387–424; Postel-Vinay, La terre et l’argent l’agriculture
et le crédit en France du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle (Paris, 1997); Phillipp R. Schofield, “The Social
Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review,
LXI (2008), 38–63.
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487
The contention herein is that growing indebtedness, and the
development of financial markets, changed the meaning of trust
by replacing social norms with legal, formal ones, instituting rigidity,
doubt, and risk awareness within the community. What represented
trust in the eighteenth-century France? How did the economic tran-
sition in the eighteenth century change interpersonal relations? What
was its impact on the fabric of society? An analysis of loan contracts
from 1730 to 1789 can not only help to answer these questions; it can
also contribute to the current historiography of moral emotions and
ethics. Trust—and by extension social capital—in the early modern
period has been the object of numerous studies. But trust in the con-
text of early modern micro-credit within French rural communities
remains a subject in need of research.4
The first step in grasping the meaning and significance of trust
in early modern traditional communities is to define trust and to dis-
tinguish its contours. The second step is to situate the analysis in its
proper context by taking a closer look at the mechanisms and cogs of
the credit market in general, and the rural credit market of the
seigneurie of Delle in particular. Trust has undergone an evolution
in time and place to become a modern-day norm of transaction; it
is instructive to look back to inspect the basis of an interaction
that was to become an essential element in the origins of capitalism
during the eighteenth century.
TRUST IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE: DEFINITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS
The meaning and extent of eighteenth-century trust differs from
For peasant struggles, see Thomas Brennan, “Peasants and Debt in Eighteenth-Century
Champagne,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVII (2006), 175–200; Ulrich Pfister, “Le
Petit Crédit Rural En Suisse Aux XVIe-XVIIIe Siécles,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, XLIX
(1994), 1339–1357; Rosenthal, “Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks, The Experience
of Nuits St. Georges, 1756–1776,” Journal of Economic History, LIV (1994), 288–306;
B. A. Holderness, “Credit in English Rural Society before the Nineteenth Century, with Special
Reference to the Period 1650–1720,” Agricultural History Review, XXIV (1976), 97.
2E 4/155–159, 2E 4/194, 2E 4/222–223, 2E 4/245–246, 2E 4/257–258, 2E4/279–280,
4
ADTB. Fontaine, “Antonio and Shylock: Credit and Trust in France, c. 1680–c. 1780,” Economic
History Review, LIV (2001), 39–57; idem, L’économie morale: Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe
préindustrielle (Paris, 2008); Hoffman, “The Role of Trust in the Long-Run Development of
French Financial Markets,” in Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi (eds.), Whom
Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible (New York, 2009),
249–285. For England, see especially Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture
of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998); for early modern
Germany, Sheilagh Ogilvie, “How Does Social Capital Affect Women? Guilds and Commu-
nities in Early Modern Germany,” American Historical Review, CIX (2004), 325–359.
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modern standards, especially regarding credit exchange. Too often
has trust as an object of analysis been assimilated with modernity
and, by extension, capitalism. Baier, Frevert, Fukuyama, and
Yamagashi, among others, have been the advocates of this assim-
ilation, showing that trust represents not only an incontrovertible
element in any financial operation but also a key feature in con-
temporary decision making and risk evaluation. In recent years,
the perspective on trust has changed, and social scientists working
on this paradigm have offered alternative definitions.5
Trust, as a general concept, can be defined as a “firm belief
in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.” In
the eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie did not have a specific entry
for confiance, only employing the term within the framework of
public borrowing: “Nothing is more necessary than to pay off debts
made in good faith & no matter the standing of the State debts, they
are to be paid exactly: the delay in repayment is enough to with-
draw trust.… One can say that trust is proportional with the debts:
if one sees that the State pays, trust is returned, otherwise it is lost”
(our translation).6
In the context of transactions within the early modern local credit
market, mutual trust was necessary to reach an agreement between
parties and to execute a deal smoothly. Borrowers expected creditors
to deliver the promised sum of money, while creditors expected the
complete repayment of their capital and its interest from debtors on
time. Trust, nonetheless, was mostly based on information about a
debtor’s assets, competences, intentions, and reputation. Asymmetrical
information between lenders and borrowers, however, produced
uncertainty that made trust difficult, mostly on the creditors’ side.7
5 Annette C Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); idem, “Trust and
Antitrust,” XCVI (1986), 231–260; Ute Frevert, “Does Trust Have a History?” EUI MWP LS,
I (2009), 1–10. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New
York, 1996); Toshio Yamagishi, Trust: The Evolutionary Game of Mind and Society (London,
2011); Timothy W. Guinnane, “Trust: A Concept Too Many,” working paper, Economic
Growth Center ( Yale University, 2005), available at http://ideas.repec.org/p/egc/wpaper/
907.html: “The very term ‘trust’ has been hijacked to make warm noises about certain types
of institutions and interactions, and has been robbed of much of its analytical value” (30).
“Trust,” Oxford Dictionaries (New York, 2010), available at http://oxforddictionaries.com/
6
definition/english/trust (accessed March 05, 2013); M. Dufour, “Emprunt,” in Denis Diderot
and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des
métiers, etc (Chicago, 2013; orig. pub. Paris, 1751–1772), V, 598, available at http://encyclopedie.
uchicago.edu/.
7
For social uncertainty, see Yamagishi, Trust: The Evolutionary Game, 7–20.
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T H E R U R A L C R E D I T M A R K E T I N F R A N C E
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In cases when borrowers and creditors knew each other before-
hand, and thus had access to information about each other, uncer-
tainty was primarily confined to the conditions of repayment, since
external and uncontrollable factors could cause a temporary or per-
manent lack of income (death, disease, bad harvests, climatic incidents,
rise of taxes, etc.). Moral hazard could still take place, but its risk was
reduced thanks to social ties and available information. Members of
the same community, or of the same network, could reduce asym-
metry and uncertainties through social exchanges. In Bourdieu’s per-
spective, for instance, social capital helped to alleviate moral hazard.8
When creditors and borrowers did not know each other, the
uncertainty required some special form of trust to sustain inter-
action. Asymmetrical information in this case concerned borrowers’
intentions, competencies, assets, and reputation, as well as external
and uncontrollable factors (see Figure 1).9
A reputation for honesty—having credit—enabled debtors to ob-
tain loans more easily and to put fewer guarantees on deeds. In a small
community, information about reputation was readily available be-
cause of a high degree of social proximity. Guarantees consolidated
trust between parties. In the case of non-repayment of a loan, creditors
could seize land, livestock, or housing. Reputation showed creditors
that debtors were willing to repay their debts and secure their trans-
actions. Information, reputation, competencies, and guarantees were
the four pillars of trust in the traditional rural credit market.10
Peasants who lived and worked within the same community
shared many social norms. Their social and geographical proximity,
family ties, high rate of endogamy, and relative familiarity with each
other created strong bonds. Many authors have noted that a society
of shared values created expectations about trustworthiness that
reduced the transaction costs caused by the infringement of norms.
The idea is that the misdeed of a group member would provoke
social stigma within the community and some form of punishment—
ostracism, for instance. A peasant who borrowed money from another
Pierre Bourdieu, “Le capital social,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, XXXI (1980), 2–3.
8
9
For asymmetrical information in the early modern credit market, see especially Hoffman,
Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, “What Do Notaries Do? Overcoming Asymmetric Information
in Financial Markets: The Case of Paris, 1751,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics,
CLIV (1998), 499–530.
10
the Metanarrative of Modernity,” French Historical Studies, XXXIV (2011), 7–19.
For reputation and the different meanings of credit, see Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit and
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Fig. 1 Asymmetrical Information in the Early Modern Credit Market
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and did not repay it, even if he had the means to do so, would lose his
credit and good standing, fail to establish further loans within the com-
munity, and possibly suffer in other business transactions. Hence, ac-
cording to this view, peasants would have had fewer enforcement
and punishment costs because the community regulated itself without
the external recourse to, say, a judicial system. Hence, the percentage
of judicial proceedings that dealt with default during the late seven-
teenth century in the seigneurie of Delle was low, despite rampant
indebtedness. Evidently, peasants self-regulated their conflicts at that
time, including the repayment of loans, through unofficial means.
We shall return to this point later.11
For shared norms and trustworthiness, see James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the
11
Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology, XCIV (1988), 95–120; Ogilvie,
“How Does Social Capital Affect Women? Guilds and Communities in Early Modern Germany,”
American Historical Review, CIX (2004), 325–359. In Yamagishi, Trust: The Evolutionary Game,
transaction costs are associated with such economic exchanges as search and information costs,
T H E R U R A L C R E D I T M A R K E T I N F R A N C E
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491
Rural dwellers living in the same community had solid infor-
mation regarding each other’s’ assets and competencies, an incon-
trovertible element to guarantee trust between parties. Peasants
could lend to, and borrow from, each other without asking for
too many guarantees. Competencies and assets were inherently
linked; the skills necessary to manage a farm successfully, for instance,
would usually generate valuable assets. Creditors were likely to
suppose that prosperous borrowers were creditworthy. In other
words, traditional communities produced and sustained trust because
they shared norms of cooperation and reciprocity; this trust did
not need elaborate guarantees because people tended to take it for
granted.12
To illustrate this point, we can make an analogy with the sur-
vival strategy of vampire bats. Vampire bats need to find prey, from
which they suck blood, within forty-eight hours. One bat might
help another to find a victim, but only in return for an earlier kind-
ness. This norm of cooperation is strong among vampire bats;
otherwise, they could not survive. Likewise, peasants transacted
with one another just as they worked on each other’s plots of land
during the harvests or performed other cooperative acts. Charity and
solidarity were important factors in making a decision regarding the
granting or the pledging of loans; scholars such as Fontaine, fol-
lowing the path paved by Thompson and Scott, call this regime
the moral economy. The search for profit may well have existed
at this time, but it certainly had not yet become the dominant feature
in rural credit markets; norms of cooperation were stronger.13
Be that as it may, this general, theoretical pattern must be quali-
fied, since it did not completely prevent the infringement of norms.
Throughout the early modern Western world, judicial records
bargaining costs, and enforcement costs. Coleman, “Social Capital,” 99. For social norms, see
Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms (New York,
2006); Jon Elster, “Social Norms and Economic Theory,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3 (1989),
99–117; idem, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (New York, 1999).
12 Trust and ready information were especially important in a market where interest rates were
legally fixed at 5% to limit usury. Information and therefore trust, rather than price, served to
allocate capital in the early modern credit market.
13 Ken Binmore, “The Origins of Fair Play,” #0614, Papers on Economics and Evolution (2006),
17. Moral economy works horizontally among community members, creating the obligation to
provide assistance in case of difficulty. See Fontaine, L’économie morale; Edward P. Thompson,
“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, 50
(1971), 76–136; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1977).
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indicate a good number of debt proceedings. In the seigneurie of
Delle from 1680 to 1685, 19 percent of the proceedings (seventy-
two cases within a population of 2,000) were debt-related. Although
it is impossible to know how many conflicts about debt repayment
were settled through unofficial means, Garnot and Greif suggest
that they could have constituted the majority, thereby corroborating
the argument of community self-regulation. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, this pattern of cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual
trust was challenged in the credit market by structural changes.14
THE RURAL CREDIT MARKET AND THE VARIEGATIONS OF TRUST
The Credit Market in the Seigneurie of Delle Before the advent
of capitalism and the establishment of a proper banking system,
peasants relied mostly on neighbors, friends, and family members
to locate available funds and capital for their needs in a predomi-
nantly closed local credit market. Individuals or households in need
of cash for any reason, even for deferred payments, could count
on their network of sociability and the norms of cooperation and
reciprocity within the community.15
Many of the small transactions that took place between indi-
viduals still elude us, either because they were informal or because
they entailed verbal agreements between parties. Moreover, the
amounts that changed hands were often too small to require the
official charged seal of a notary. We can track some of these tran-
sactions with the help of probate inventories. On the morning of
April 17, 1704, for instance, the judge of the seigneurie of Delle
sealed the personal belongings and house of Claude Riche, the miller
For debt proceedings, see Muldrew, “Credit and the Courts: Debt Litigation in a
14
Seventeenth-Century Urban Community,” Economic History Review, XLVI (1993), 23–38; Scott
Taylor, “Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 1600–1650,” Journal of Early Modern History, VII
(2003), 8–27; Zorina B. Khan, “‘Justice of the Marketplace’: Legal Disputes and Economic
Activity on America’s Northeastern Frontier, 1700–1860,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
XXXIX (2008), 1–35. Rural credit was not confined to the eighteenth century; it has always
been present. Many authors have shown that credit existed in small communities well before
the early modern period. See Chris Briggs, Credit and Village: Society in Fourteenth-Century England
(New York, 2009); Schofield, “The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Four-
teenth Century,” Economic History Review, XLI (2008), 38–63. Benoît Garnot, Histoire de la justice:
France, XVIe-XXIe siècle (Paris, 2009); idem, “Justice, infrajustice, parajustice et extra justice dans la
France d’Ancien Régime,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, IV (2000), 103–120; Avner Greif, “Contract
Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition,”
American Economic Review, III (1993), 525.
15
For an overview of rural loans, see Fontaine, “Antonio and Shylock,” 49.
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T H E R U R A L C R E D I T M A R K E T I N F R A N C E
of Saint Dizier l’Evêque, who had died the night before. The mag-
istrate listed all of his property and his personal items, which Riche’s
widow and heirs would receive through inheritance. Among the
various objects recorded was a small wooden box that contained sev-
eral “obligations” and “cédules” owed to the deceased man. Most of
these debts had been private matters. It was indeed common to lend
or borrow money without the intercession of an external party, such
as a notary, and to inscribe the amount in a register of some sort. It
was even more common to contract credit orally, especially in
traditional, largely illiterate societies.16
But these “contrats sous seing privé” were not without risk, espe-
cially in the case of non-repayment. Default cost lenders their right
of seniority on debts, leaving them almost no chance of regaining
their capital in court, since they could not make any claim on
debtors’ estates. Hence, the local courts were more or less powerless
to force payment of an oral debt. Although popular disapproval
about borrowers’ failure to repay and the threat of ostracism from
the business community were sometimes adequate substitutes for
court enforcement, when transactions involved people familiar with
each other, traditional societies gradually came to appreciate written
contracts. Peasants certainly began to appreciate their importance. As
the case of Riche illustrates, many of them kept records at home,
including copies of their notarial transactions.
Sources such as probates, however, are too scarce to per-
mit a definitive examination of changes over time concerning
credit and indebtedness; only a handful of them remain in the
archives for the seventeenth century. Several historians have un-
derlined the fact that in the eighteenth century, most lenders
preferred to register their loans with a notary to facilitate any
claims that they might have to make in court. We return to this
point below.17
A total of 1,463 contracts for loans were recorded at the no-
tary’s office of the seigneurie of Delle from 1733 to 1789, amount-
ing to 442,573 livres—a paltry sum compared to the 138 million
livres annually exchanged in Paris (see Table 1). The seigneurie of
Pfister, “Le petit credit,” calls the verbal loans “à la main” (1342). 2E4/56, Inventaire après
16
décès de Claude Riche, 17 avril 1704, ADTB. For informal credit, see Postel-Vinay, La terre et
l’argent, 42–43.
17 Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, “Role of Trust.”
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| E L I S E D E R M I N E UR
Table 1 General Overview of the Credit Market in the Seigneurie of Delle,
1733–1789
1733–39 1740–49 1750–59 1760–69
1770–79
1780–89
Volume (livres) 23,667
131
Number of
contracts
Average (livres)
Median (livres)
180.60
126.00
44,812
179
46,909
194
48,972
207
100,287
280
177,926
472
250.30
150.00
241.80
126.05
236.60
144.00
358.20
200.00
376.90
241.00
Delle had only one notary operating at a time throughout the
eighteenth century.18
The notary recorded many different contracts, including loans
(mostly obligations, or notes), in continuous registers running from
1730 to 1789. Since 1566 and the reform of justice, loans superior to
100 livres had to be registered before a notary for a fee or had to be
written down between private parties. This legal disposition reflects
the effort of the state to eradicate oral agreements, which were prob-
lematical at court. Peasants, however, do not appear to have begun
registering their loans regularly with a notary before the eighteenth
century, at which point they began to register even loans inferior
to 100 livres.19
In the eighteenth century, when peasants bought an item
on credit or when they borrowed or lent money, more often than
not they went to a notary and signed a deed. They had a strong,
almost blind, confidence in such legal documents. An examination
of probates reveals a gradual presence of registers, documents, con-
tracts, notes, and the like, kept safely in chests with locks, as a tried
and true strategy to keep track of farm management and business.20
Idem, “Information and Economic History: How the Credit Market in Old Regime
18
Paris Forces Us to Rethink the Transition to Capitalism,” American Historical Review, CIV
(1999), 76. We can assume that most of the official loans in this seigneurie were recorded
in the office of this one notarie. Although it was theoretically possible to lend and borrow
money in another seigneurie, evidence suggests that peasants tended to apply to the notary in
their own seigneurie. Access to other seigneuries’ credit markets proved to be more difficult.
Idem, “Role of Trust,” report incomplete data before 1740. Julie Hardwick, The Practice of
19
Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (Philadelphia, 1998), 5.
20 Each contract stipulates the names, places of residence, and sometimes the occupations of
both the borrower(s) and the lender(s), the amount of money lent, the interest rate, the date
of repayment, and the guarantees offered. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record:
England 1066–1307 (Malden, Mass., 2012) shows the gradual importance of written documents
in medieval England (48–58). Greif, “Contract Enforceability,” also notes the resort to written
documents for twelfth-century merchants (525).
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In early modern France, three different types of legal and
official financial tools coexisted—obligations, rentes perpétuelles
(perpetual annuities), and rente viagère (life annuity). The rente
perpétuelle was certainly the least common of the three contracts.
Rente viagères and obligations were more widespread. Accord-
ing to Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, “Over the course
of the eighteenth century, they [obligations] grew larger and more
common, and by the nineteenth century they came to dominate
the credit market.” Obligations, however, had polymorphous
and complex characteristics; in Rosenthal’s words, “Even within
the notarial system, the links between obligations and rentes re-
main unclear.” Indeed, in the seigneurie of Delle, peasants used
the term obligation for all sorts of loans, both short-term and long-
term, those with fixed duration and those with an indeterminate
duration. Since rentes and obligations seem to have been mixed
and confused, this article will not make a clear distinction between
them.21
The borrowers and creditors examined in this article agreed
on a certain amount of money at the legal interest rate of 5 percent
for a negotiable amount of time. In order to secure a transaction,
creditors could ask for a mortgage guarantee, parcels of land or live-
stock. A co-signer might also be involved because of a lack of trust
and/or a large amount of money at stake.22
Trust and Norms of Cooperation in the Seigneurie of Delle A great
many of the transactions recorded in the first half of the eighteenth
century followed the pattern described above—peasants lending
within a closed circle. The local official credit market was largely
self-contained; only a small amount of foreign capital was invested
there. Most of the exchanges were between peasants living in the
same area—32.2 percent of them between individuals living in
the same village. The majority of the contracts involved peasants,
but both the purpose of the loans and the guarantees offered varied
greatly. Deferred payments for livestock and grains and cash loans
21 Rosenthal, “Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks,” 291. The notary of Delle kept
copies of credit transactions in bound registers titled Registre des Obligations. For the purposes
of this analysis, obligations need not be distinguished from rentes. For a more developed legal
definition of financial tools, see Paul Servais, “De la rente au crédit hypothécaire en période de
transition industrielle: Stratégies familiales en région liégeoise au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: Histoire,
Sciences Sociales, XLIX (1994), 1395–1396.
22 All of the loans recorded by the notary stipulated interest fees, usually 5%, except for a
few years during the 1760s, when the interest rate was capped at 4%.
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| E L I S E D E R M I N E UR
were the two main reasons for borrowing money; most of the
loans were secured by specific pieces of land. In the first half of
the eighteenth century, the parties involved in these deals tended
to be the peasants; only a handful of creditors belonged to other
socio-professional categories.23
On March 1777, Joseph Rhiat, a tailor in the village of Grosne,
and his wife Anne Thévenot borrowed 200 livres from Pierre
Bettevy, the mayor of Florimont and a successful laboureur, to
buy a house in their village, promising to reimburse the money, at
5 percent interest, within a year. Most likely, the young couple
sought independence; they had been married for just a year and half
before deciding to buy the house. In order to secure the loan, the
couple presented Pierre François de Taillefert de Breteuil, a former
soldier who enjoyed great respect within the community, as their
guarantor.24
The notary of Delle—the only one allowed to perform notarial
services there—recorded the transaction with its conditions, and
all of the parties signed the deed. A year later, because the debtors
could not meet their obligation, they asked their creditor for another
loan of 400 livres, to which he agreed, again at 5 percent interest.
To secure this transaction, however, Bettevy asked for “une arrière
caution”—an additional guarantor. Six years later, the couple were
still experiencing financial difficulties, and part of the promised re-
imbursement was still pending. Bettevy decided to claim the re-
mainder of his capital due, 300 livres, in court. On April 1784, the
seigneurial judge ruled that the debtors had to reimburse him in
full. Such examples are common in the archives.25
Loans between family members are scarce in the notarial reg-
isters, representing only 7.4 percent of the exchanges (108 loans out
of 1,463). Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal found that in
For lending within circles, see Fontaine, “Antonio and Shylock,” 49. Urban credit markets,
23
such as those in Paris, did not function hermetically; capital could come from various regions.
More importantly, most of the lenders and borrowers did not know each other.
055 E-dépôt GG 1-6, parish of Grosne, ADTB.
24
2E4/2582E4/444; 8B/159, ADTB. The reform of 1303 stated that in royal jurisdictions,
25
debtors who could not honor their debt could be imprisoned. Hence, imprisonment for default-
ing was, in theory, reserved only for royal jurisdictions with royal judges presiding. In Delle
(which was not a royal jurisdiction), a seigneurial judge could seize debtors’ (and guarantors’)
goods for auction to repay creditor(s) but only as a last resort if negotiations had completely
broken down. Although the number of such seizures and auctions is difficult to estimate, it
appears to have been small.
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Paris, 3.1 percent of the loans were between related individuals; in
Lincolnshire, 40 percent of them involved blood relations. Identify-
ing members of the same family is a delicate task, since biological
connections were not always stipulated in a contract, and in-law
relationships were difficult to determine precisely. Family ties are
most clear in the case of parents and their children. Identification
is further complicated by the fact that many peasants shared the
same name.26
Most interfamilial loans were probably private matters that did
not necessitate the costly intercession of a notary, thus explaining
their absence from the record. Trust between kin was taken for
granted. Creditors solicited a notary, however, when they antici-
pated the need to secure payment from an elderly debtor’s heirs,
or if the amount borrowed was large. After all, even trust between
blood relatives had its limits. In addition, not all families were likely
to be self-sufficient as creditors; they, too, might have had to resort
to external sources for funds.27
Debtors usually pledged their entire present and future goods
in order to secure a transaction. This traditional, general formulation
was part of the social contract and a norm of cooperation. But spe-
cific guarantees could also be sought in the form of a particular
parcel of land or livestock. The land pledge appears in more than
50 percent of the contracts before 1760. Co-signers were required
only on occasion. The fact that land appeared as collateral in the
deeds is not a sign of distrust. Even if creditors were entitled to seize
pledged land and livestock in the event of non-repayment, many
peasants were reluctant to use this last resort. They preferred to
extend repayment deadlines instead. The contention of this study
is that crops from the land pledged in deeds was more likely to
pay interest if cash was in short supply.28
Changes in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century The credit
market in this seigneurie shows a gradual increase not only in the
number of loans but also in their total monetary value throughout
the eighteenth century. Peasants progressively borrowed more
26 Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, “Private Credit Markets in Paris,” Journal of Economic
History, LII (1992), 300, cited in Peter Spufford and Dominique Taffin, “Les liens du crédit au
village: Dans l’Angleterre du XVIIe siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, XLIX (1994), 1369.
Postel-Vinay, La Terre et l’Argent: l’Agriculture et le Crédit en France du XVIIIe au Début du
27
XXe Siècle (Paris, 1997), 44.
28
Fontaine, “Antonio and Shylock,” 44.
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| E L I S E D E R M I N E UR
Table 2 Debt Proceedings in the Seigneurie of Delle, 1680–1785
1680–85
1700–5
1740–45
1780–85
72
78
386
805
19.09%
36.96%
50.58%
61.35%
Number of debt
default cases
Percentage of
debt cases in
all proceedings
NOTE 8B19, 20, 21, 31, 32, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 156, 157,
158, 159, 160, Archives Départementales du Territoire de Belfort.
money, especially after 1760, for a number of reasons—among them,
inflation and the increasing fragmentation of land due to partible in-
heritance, demographic pressure, poor climatic conditions, and bad
harvests. This trend is also evident in other parts of the Western world
at the time. This significant escalation in indebtedness is corrobo-
rated by an increased rate of judicial activity concerning the non-
repayment of debts. As Muldrew states, “It appears reasonable to
assume that with an increase in transactions there would have been
more credit, more defaults, and more litigation” (see Table 2).29
Another feature is even more striking. From the 1730s to the
1760s, the data show that peasants represented 65 percent of the total
creditors, whereas during the last decade of the Old Regime, they
represented only 35 percent of the creditors. This major change
heralded the emergence of a new group of creditors—administrators
and merchants from the liberal professions and judges, clerks, etc.,
from the official seigneurial hierarchy. In the 1730s, seigneurial agents
lent 10.7 percent of the volume exchanged, as opposed to 48.16 per-
cent by peasants, whereas during the last decade of the Old Regime,
they lent 30 percent, as opposed to 31 percent by peasants.30
For the trend in borrowing, see Holderness, “Credit in English Rural Society,” 97–109;
29
Khan, “‘Justice of the Marketplace,’” 1–35; Pfister, “Le Petit Crédit Rural en Suisse,” 1344;
Servais, “De la Rente au Crédit Hypothécaire,” 1397–1398. An increased rate of judicial
activity has been also observed in other regions. Hervé Piant, Une Justice Ordinaire: Justice Civile
et Criminelle dans la Prévôté Royale de Vaucouleurs sous l’Ancien Régime (Rennes, 2006), found that in
the late seventeenth century, 39% of the causes d’audience concerned the repayment of loan and
debt—76% in the eighteenth century (143). Muldrew, “Credit and the Courts,” 25.
Loans registered by the notary rarely specified the occupations of debtors, largely because
30
most of them were peasants. Yet, 60% of creditors’ professions were given. Rosenthal, “Rural
Credit Markets,” observed that most of the borrowers in Nuits Saint Georges were farmers
(291). Among the new creditors, only a handful seemed to have good information about
potential borrowers—the seigneurial judges, for instance.
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T H E R U R A L C R E D I T M A R K E T I N F R A N C E
|
499
The Taiclet family, who dominated the bailiwick position,
extended credit to various individuals throughout the eighteenth
century, especially in the second half, for a total of 29,723 livres.
Other social categories, such as merchants and Anabaptists, gradually
lent more and more money to the peasants and became regular par-
ticipants in the local credit market. Peasants remained, by a large
majority, the main recipients of these loans throughout the eighteenth
century, but their number as creditors decreased significantly.31
The new group of investors lived principally in the town
of Delle, which mutated from a large village to an administrative
center dominated by the Mazarin family’s agents. Delle also
attracted textile merchants and artisans, creating more wealth.
The rapid development of Delle in the eighteenth century—like
many other towns in early modern France—and the accumula-
tion of wealth by the service-oriented professions had a considerable
effect on the credit market. Paradoxically, these new investors had
access to certain information about the borrowers’ assets and com-
petences because of their occupations, especially those who served
as seigneurial agents of one sort or another or were members of
agents’ families.32
These new investors altered the traditional pattern of trust.
Coming from a different socio-professional category, they had
different goals, financial strategies, and expectations, which did
not match the traditional pattern of cooperation and norms of
reciprocity among the peasants. Seigneurial agents and other
service-oriented workers (lawyers, wealthy merchants, etc.) were
eager to make a profit and to create a network of obligés. Moreover,
their saving capacity was undoubtedly a determining factor in the
increased amount of money that peasants borrowed.
The combination of a changed credit market, an unfavorable
climate, inflation, demographic pressure, etc., created an anxiogenic
atmosphere. The indebtedness that continued to mount in the
2E4/155–9, 194, 222–3, 245–6, 257–8, 279–281, ADTB. Well-known for their agricultural
31
skills, Anabaptist families from Switzerland responded positively to the invitation of the lord of
the seigneurie to settle in the area in the early seventeenth century. Hired as laborers on share-
cropping farms, they rapidly proved to be efficient and successful farmers. See Charles Mathiot
and Roger Boigeol, Recherches historiques sur les anabaptistes: de l’ancienne principauté de Montbéliard,
d’Alsace et du territoire de Belfort (Belfort, 1969).
32
had about 750 inhabitants.
For the investors in Delle, see Colney, Delle au XVIIIe siècle. In 1790, the city of Delle
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| E L I S E D E R M I N E UR
500
seigneurie of Delle at a rapid pace fostered defiance and distrust.
The breaking point came in the 1760s.33
THE MIGRATIONS OF TRUST
Guarantees, Trust, and the Household The major change in the
nature of the borrower/lender transaction in the seigneurie of
Delle during the 1760s was that trust was no longer the privilege
of a lone debtor. Traditionally, male heads of household had been
legally responsible for all of the financial transactions, decisions,
and expectations associated with the management of their family’s
affairs. In the Christian tradition, a man’s good name by itself
provided sufficient security for credit, but the growing peasant debt
convinced the new breed of creditors that less volatile sources of
trust were necessary to protect its interests.
Meanwhile, the number of married couples who borrowed
money increased throughout the period from 22 percent of the total
during the 1730s to almost 50 percent during the 1780s. Men began
to attach their wives’ names to deeds instead of borrowing alone
in the credit market. Married women’s properties had become an
attractive security alternative to the land parcels that by the 1760s
had all but dried up (the notary laconically inscribed on most con-
tracts that the debtor(s) would mortgage “tout ses biens tant meubles
qu’immeubles”). Married couples employed wives’ assets, in the
form of lineage properties and dowries, to secure transactions and
obtain greater loans. In return, creditors could now legally expect
widows to pay their share of a debt in the event of their husbands’
death.34
Although creditors now placed their confidence and trust in
a household rather than in just its head, this development did not
always bring them enough guarantees when dealing with peasant
clients. In this climate of distrust, third-party co-signers were added
in large numbers to the deeds after 1760. During the 1730s, only
15 percent of the contracts carried an external guarantor, whereas
in the last decade of the century, 54 percent of them did.
33 Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, Priceless Markets, describes an explosion of private
borrowing in the eighteenth century, with a sudden acceleration in the 1760s in the Parisian
credit market, suggesting that new instruments of credit and intermediaries were responsible
for this increase (graph, 101).
34 Dermineur, “Female Peasants, Patriarchy, and the Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century
France,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, XXVII (2009), 61–84.
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Table 3 The Evolution of Guarantees over Time, 1730–1789
1730–39
1740–49
1750–59
1760–69
1770–79
1780–89
N
%
N
% N
%
N
%
N
%
N
%
20 15.3 42 23.5 54 27.8 86 41.5 112 40
48 36.6 55 30.7 35 18
3.9
7
8
2.5
247 52.3
2.1
10
13
9.9 25 13.9 20 10.3
2
0.9
5
1.8
4
0.8
Co-signers
Specific piece(s)
of land
mortgaged
Specific piece(s)
of land
mortgaged
and guarantor
NOTE All of the contracts mentioned a general claim on borrowers’ assets.
In September 1788, Pierre Xavier Cottet and his wife Margueritte
Louison, a farming couple in the village of Bourogne, borrowed
300 livres from Marie Ursule Taiclet, the daughter of the bailiff,
who probably did not know the couple personally, since they lived
more than 10 km from her. Apparently, the notary’s information
about the couple’s assets, competencies, and honesty did not fully
reassure Taiclet. Therefore, the couple promised to repay her within
a year at 5 percent interest, and they added Jean Claude André, the
mayor of their village, to the deed to serve as a pledge. André’s
prestige—as a social, moral, and economic pillar of the community—
was sufficient to ensure the creditor that the loan would be covered in
case of default, and this endorsement was indirect testimony of the
couple’s trustworthiness. The transitory nature of this relationship
reinforced and developed the local economic network and sustained
the norms of cooperation. The use of various guarantees (collaterals,
co-signers, and wives’ participation) served to overcome asymmetri-
cal information, thereby reducing creditors’ sense of risk. Whenever
husbands were unable to repay a loan because of defaults, bad harvests,
death, or other contingencies, creditors had their wives and co-signers
for recourse—according to the validity and precedence of their
claims, as determined in court, and co-signers’ ability to pay.35
Pledges of specific pieces of land dropped out of the picture be-
cause most of it had already been mortgaged, but the new creditors,
who were not farmers, had other reasons not to deal in land (see
Table 3). First, they anticipated that land might be difficult to sell or
35
2E4/281, ADTB.
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| E L I S E D E R M I N E UR
to rent under certain economic conditions, and, second, more im-
portantly, they did not want peasants to use pledged land to pay
interest in kind.36
The Institutionalization of Trust The migration of trust con-
cerned not just the displacement of sole male agents in favor of
household units but also the emergence of legal institutions to en-
force terms of agreement. Indeed, trust migrated from a one-to-
one relationship and moved to new locations and new figures of
authority—the judicial system and the notary.
In an attempt to dispense with oral agreements, the Crown in
1566 gave notaries greater scope, entrusting them with, among
other tasks, the writing of contracts involving more than 100 livres.
Thanks to this legal disposition, notaries eventually turned into
expert contract writers, gaining authority and a heightened official
standing. By the eighteenth century, they had become extremely
active in the credit market, serving as intermediaries and offering
advice about good matches for creditors and borrowers. Hoffman,
Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal show that Parisian investors depended
on their notaries to supply them with detailed information that
would otherwise have been difficult to procure in such a large,
anonymous, city; competition between notaries to fulfill these ex-
pectations resulted in a high level of service and trust, if not lower
costs, since the government largely fixed the fees.37
In the seigneurie of Delle, where only a single notary oper-
ated, clients were not as uninformed about the availability of trust-
worthy borrower(s) as were those in Paris. Lenders in Delle needed
extra information only when they did not happen to know poten-
tial borrowers personally. Nonetheless, even within a local credit
market that tended to function hermetically and a seigneurie that
featured a high rate of endogamy, people became accustomed to
making their transactions official with a written document. Whereas
36 Holderness, “Credit in a Rural Community,” showed that the eviction of tenant farmers
was not common (94–116). The payment of interest in kind involved considerable uncertainty.
The volatility of crop prices, the vagaries of the harvest, and the costs associated with the trans-
portation, storage, and sale of grains often repelled investors. Moreover, peasants sometimes used
payment in kind as a strategy to avoid making cash outlays.
For the notaries’ greater scope, see François Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises:
37
depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la révolution de 1789 (Paris, 1829), XIV, 203. In early modern France, notaries
were entrusted with the writing of a wide range of legal documents—probates, marriage contracts,
wills, donations, sales, loans, etc. The fee varied according to the type, length, and value of the
transaction. Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, “Information and Economic History,”
69–74; idem, “What Do Notaries Do?” 499–530, 4–5.
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503
in Paris or other urban areas with existing competition among
notaries, clients trusted their notaries as business confidants, in Delle,
people trusted their notary as the representative (or symbol) of legal
authority. Although it is difficult to quantify precisely the extent
to which notarial reliance in Delle—compared to, say, demographic
pressure—grew, the number of legal documents registered before
the notary in Delle appear to have increased significantly by the
end of the eighteenth century. Official legal documents had all
but replaced the informal notes and various receipts that appeared
regularly in late seventeenth-century probates.38
One argument against the wide proliferation of legal documents
is that the notary might have been engaged to draw up loan contracts
mostly when one of the parties was illiterate. If so, a large fraction of
the loan contracts should show some indication that at least one of
the parties, presumably the lender, was illiterate. Although the level
of peasant literacy is not easy to determine, the signatures of debtors
and creditors on the contracts of this period are a likely sign of liter-
acy. More than 74 percent of debtors were able to sign their names,
as were more than 53 percent of lenders (a figure that should be
taken with a grain of salt, given that creditors did not begin to sign
the notary’s copy of a loan contract until the mid-1750s). The data
presented in Table 4 reveal that a majority of lenders and creditors
were able to sign their names on the same contract. In fact, the pro-
portion of people with this capability increased throughout the
period. Debtors and creditors clearly did not enlist the notary’s ser-
vices on account of their illiteracy but on account of his expertise.39
38 The inhabitants of the seigneurie of Delle had to register their transactions with this specific
notary. In early modern France, it was unlikely that rural dwellers had a choice in their notaries.
Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society, observes, “Credit in the local economy was particularly
unlikely to stretch over long distances. In the southeastern village of Grillon, at the end of the
sixteenth century, 57 percent of the loans recorded in notarial archives linked parties living
within Grillon itself, and the average distance between borrower and lender was slightly over
3 kilometers” (77). According to Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, “What Do Notaries
Do?” in Paris, “lenders would unlikely find suitable borrowers on their own” (8).
39 The correlation between literacy and signatures requires caution. A signature alone did
not mean that a person was able to read or write properly. This study uses the correlation only
to determine whether the notary helped parties to draw up their contracts or simply served as
a counsel and guarantor of veracity. Before the middle of the 1750s, notary registers contain
almost no creditor signatures. Either creditors signed the lender copy only or they tacitly
agreed to the deal by delivering the money. The change in the middle of the 1750s might
be connected with an increase in court proceedings and judges requiring proper agreements
between the parties. For literacy, see Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et écrire: L’alphabétisation
des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, tome 1 (Paris, 1977).
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Table 4 The Literacy of Lenders and Debtors, according to Signatures on
Loan Contracts, 1730–1789
1730–39 1740–49 1750–49 1760–69 1770–79 1780–89
N % N % N % N % N % N %
79 60.3 115 64.2 130 67
n/a n/a n/a n/a
n/a n/a n/a n/a
157 75.8 221 78.9 390 82.6
75 38.6 144 69.5 194 69.2 357 75.6
54 27.8 115 55.5 152 54.3 303 64.2
Debtors
Creditors
Both debtor(s)
and creditor(s)
NOTE Percentages for creditors are not available for the first two periods of the sample because
creditors’ signatures did not appear on contracts before the mid-1750s. Moreover, a number of
creditors had proxies sign for them.
The new socio-professional category of investors, more numer-
ous and more active in the local credit market than the much-
displaced one, might have also tapped notary expertise to overcome
asymmetrical information. Marie Elisabeth Taiclet, the daughter of
the baillif of the seigneurie and the aunt of Marie Ursule Taiclet,
became heavily involved in the credit market after the death
of her parents. From 1762 to her death in 1779, she extended
credit twenty-two times to artisans and peasants living in different
villages around Delle for a total of 4,568 livres, giving her one of
the largest portfolios in the seigneurie. Most of her investments
had a fixed-term repayment policy, stipulating interest fees and
collateral that ensured her profit and security. The notary, a close
acquaintance of hers, was likely to have found safe clients for
her whenever personal information was lacking. When Jacques
Vieillard from the village of Meroux, 15 km from Delle, needed
funds to finish building his house, Taiclet lent the money to him,
sealing the transaction with the pledge of his house and collat-
eral. In this instance, the notary of Delle probably introduced a
debtor in need of cash to a potential creditor interested in a fruitful
investment.40
The institution of justice also gained more leverage during the
eighteenth century. In the traditional historiography, local justice
suffered from being slow, costly, and biased. But lately, several
studies have shown that this image has probably been exaggerated
and that local justice was efficient in certain regions of early modern
France. The number of proceedings in the seigneurie of Delle
40
2E4/245, ADTB.
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505
was on the rise during this period, from 377 cases at the end of the
seventeenth century to 2,663 a century later. Demographic pressure
alone does not explain this development. Many conflicts were settled
by law rather than by private negotiation. The traditional form of
conflict resolution did not completely disappear, but the judicial
institution managed to gain public confidence. The gradual increase
of cases presented before a local judge corroborates the idea that
peasants had begun to trust the state apparatus in matters of justice
at the expense of informal regulation by the community.41
According to Muldrew, the increase in the number of defaults
brought to court can be understood through the prism of legal
changes that occurred during the period, especially in contract
development. However, this migration of trust from a one-to-one
relationship to judicial institutions is not only attributable to the crisis
of trust that struck the seigneurie after 1760 but also to the complex
economic relationships that gradually developed within society. In
the new complex networks of financial exchange that emerged
during the eighteenth century, agents sometimes did not know each
other and had only partial, if any, information about debtors’ assets
and competencies. Therefore, trust had to migrate to institutions
with enough authority and power to enforce contracts. More im-
portantly, these institutions could, in theory, enforce anyone’s rights
and privileges on a legal basis, thus erasing the social inequalities that
existed within the society—provided that plaintiffs could pay the
requisite fee.42
The rise in proceedings for indebtedness evident after 1760
means that more people owed more money and that the mecha-
nism of contract enforcement had become efficient enough for
41
For local justice, see, for instance, Jeremy Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice
and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (Rochester, 2008); Zoë A. Schneider,
The King’s Bench: Bailiwick Magistrates and Local Governance in Normandy, 1670–1740 (Rochester,
2008).
42 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 179. Paul R. Milgrom, Douglass C. North, and Barry
R. Weingast, “The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private
Judges, and the Champagne Fairs,” Economics and Politics, II (1990), argue that the need for a
judicial system in the fairs of Champagne emerged as more merchants became involved in
exchanges and transactions and needed to keep track of everyone’s else credit and reputation.
“The role of the judges in the system, far from being substitutes for the reputation mechanism,
is to make the reputation system more effective as a means of promoting honest trade” (3).
The new market, with its influx of newcomers and strangers, disrupted the fragile equilibrium
of social relationships. Moreover, a greater number of women gradually became creditors,
using the court to enforce their loans.
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injured parties to trust it. Judicial institutions reduced uncertainty
and risk but usurped trust. Courts could now enforce repayment
or seize property that had been pledged when the need arose.
Nonetheless, the migration of trust to households and institu-
tions did not affect the dynamism of investment or have any notice-
ably negative effect on investors. Lenders continued to extend credit
for profit and even continued to increase the number and value
of their loans. The migration of trust to more solid institutions
sustained credit activity. The confidence placed in the judicial sys-
tem, for instance, favored the extension of loans; cooperation seems
to have been higher when punishment and enforcement became
legal norms. In fact, the willingness of a new group of investors
to place their capital in the local credit market for profit in steadily
increasing proportions, regardless of the risks, may well have trans-
lated into the need for more trust and security, which the traditional
one-to-one exchange could not satisfy.
These changes in the local credit market in the seigneurie of Delle—
due to the transition between pre-capitalism and capitalism and the
weight of indebtedness on peasant households—had a tremendous
impact on social capital and the social fabric of the community, chal-
lenging the old pattern of trust. Male heads of household saw their
natural authority in financial matters devolve more to the household
per se, the province of both husband and wife. Trust also migrated
toward the courts, departing definitively from the regime of self-
regulation—the traditional modus operandi of rural societies.
Contrary to one entrenched view, trust is not a modern con-
cept, born with the emergence of capitalism. Trust existed in tradi-
tional societies, only to be challenged by new economic conditions
that relocated it in state institutions—a model that still holds good
today. The paradigm of trust, or what we call trust today, has
changed with the development of capitalism. In fact, trust may have
become otiose with the emergence of social norms and enforce-
ment agencies that reduced the risks and uncertainties of coopera-
tion. Additional studies of this concept will shed light not only
on financial markets but also on economic history, using behavioral
and qualitative approaches.
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