How Parisians Transformed Popular Credit at the Revolutionary Justice of the Peace: A Hidden Groundwork of Nineteenth-Century Capitalism in France?

During the French Revolution, the National Assembly instituted a ground-breaking justice of the peace system to allow citizens to resolve small disputes in local courts. With no minimum bar for legal action and no exorbitant fees, everyday men and women could suddenly address nearly all conflicts over retail trade, personal debts, and living spaces. From an archival standpoint, these cases offer unparalleled insights into the usually inaccessible financial arrangements and socioeconomic relationships that sustained most individuals’ lives. This article analyzes all 174 contentious cases of 354 court-goers from the Parisian section of les Arcis in 1792 to empirically unearth how citizens refashioned popular credit through new judicial practices. While the legal distinction between commercial debt and noncommercial debt remained unchanged, citizens’ procedural decisions in resolving quotidian debts offer rare, concrete proof that the Revolution catalyzed a widespread transformation in credit practices. For the first time in French history, the popular classes effectively seized on local courts to differentiate consumer debts from personal debts. Court-goers also dramatically upended rent repayment practices, which gave landlords unprecedented advantages over tenants. This article suggests how these new credit norms and matrices of risk may have opened the door to capitalist innovation in urban retail and rental markets in the nineteenth century. It calls for further studies into these questions from below and offers a new methodology for doing so. Ultimately, the initiatives of the revolutionary popular classes spurred the pivotal distinctions in mass credit that may have helped shape salient arenas of postrevolutionary capitalism.