Abstract
Reviewed by: Jérôme Loiseau, Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France
This book is the second that Tyler Lange has written dedicated to the history of France from late medieval to early modern times. Whereas the first dealt with the emergence of Absolutism, looking at both the King of France and the Parliament of Paris in their politics against Lutherans, this second one explores mainly the question of debt before the birth of modern financial markets, which is a fascinating issue in contemporary society, with its problems with private and public debt.
Thanks to an impressive data base derived from sampling three church courts (Chartres, Paris and Montvilliers) including more than 11,000 sentences, Tyler Lange provides us with a useful empirical presentation of the issue, depicting the rise and the fall of excommunication for debt from 1300 to 1600. Behind these numerical trends, however, lie two major shifts that Lange analyses in an original and important way.
The first shift that Lange identifies is the disappearance of excommunication for debt after the practice peaked around 1500. He links this change to the decline in seigneurial incomes of bishops and abbots, as was the case for all landlords from the beginning of the fourteenth century. The change after 1500 shows that a transformation of religious sensibilities was underway. Officialities in France had been deprived by the edict of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) of their rights to judge lay folk, including those who had failed to repay their creditors. This shift represents the separation of credit and morality; credit no longer reflected the state of one’s soul. Therefore, the end of excommunication for debt highlights the end of a view of society as the body of Christ and the beginning of civil society (244). This change, Lange argues, represented not the ‘demoralization of credit but its ethicization’ (267). The fact that excommunication was replaced by imprisonment for debt and the notion of criminal bankruptcy demonstrate this ethicization of credit.
The second major shift, closely linked to the previous one, is the birth of a secularized credit market. During the fourteenth century the king became ‘the sole guarantor of private agreements’ (8) and particularly of the four most common types of loan (investment, seasonal, taxes and consumption) that were at the heart of the use of excommunication as a means for creditors to exercise pressure against debtors. In the course of his analysis, Lange presents evidence of profound social change, transforming the ‘society of oaths’ described by the great Italian historian Paolo Prodi into the ‘contractual society’ described by Craig Muldrew (221). In his conclusion Tyler Lange argues that the legacy of this period that he calls ‘Age of Debt’ is trust in markets and in credit, an important precondition for the development of the economy of the western world.
These two main arguments are developed throughout the four chapters of the book. The first two chapters deal with the link between credit, church courts and incomes. The third examines excommunication through three extensive case studies that could have been substantially shortened without weakening the strength of the overall argument. The last chapter offers a very stimulating interpretation of the Reformation as a ‘revolution of debtors’. Throughout the book, Lange examines and richly analyses related issues such as the mechanisms of excommunication and the social profiles of excommunicated persons, the meanings of contract and the development of bastard feudalism in relation to an agrarian crisis, and the sociogenesis of nobility. This considerably enriches the two general aims of the book and offers an opportunity to engage with the work of many historians, including most importantly Paolo Prodi, Craig Muldrew and Laurence Fontaine.
Excommunication for Debt is a very impressive book. Its great achievement is not only to outline one aspect of the process of modernization – the birth of financial markets – but also to provide us with a singular narrative of the birth of the modern state in France.