Pierre Labardin

Accounting prescription and practice in nineteenth-century France. An analysis of bankruptcy cases

Following Colberts Ordonnance of 1673, most of whose provisions were reiterated in the Code de Commerce, 1807 and the Law of Bankruptcy, 1838, traders in France were under a legal obligation to keep accounts of their business activities. In the event of bankruptcy, traders were potentially subject to severe sanctions for failure to comply. However, research carried out by Lemarchand (1994) has shown that the obligation on traders to keep books had no significant practical impact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Utilising 500 bankruptcy case files covering the period 1847 to 1887, contained in the archives of the Paris Court of Commerce, the paper sets out to investigate the impact of the legal obligation on traders’ accounting practices in a later period. The object is to shed light on the extent to which legislation influenced the diffusion of accounting practice in nineteenth-century France. The study offers insights to the divergences between accounting prescription and accounting practice.

From order to organization: The origins of the division of labour in French accounting manuals

Abstract This article analyses the emergence of a new area of interest in the French accounting literature of the nineteenth century: the definition and redefinition of the division of accounting labour. This approach to organizational issues is examined through accounting works listed in the Union Catalogue of France whose titles contain the terms ‘accounting’ or ‘bookkeeping’ and the first management works of the period. This study focuses on the role of management texts in the establishment of the accountancy division of labour and highlights the importance of cultural factors in the development of a new type of organization for accounting activities.

Foucault and social and penal historians: the dual role of accounting in the French overseas penal colonies of the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT This study sheds light on the role of accounting in the French penal colonies of Guiana in the nineteenth century. The historiography of prisons is characterised by a dichotomy: On the one hand, Foucauldian studies focus on the changes in the methods used to govern prisoners in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the social historiography highlights practices that differed greatly from the normalising practices highlighted by Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality. Our research demonstrates how accounting was part of this two-faceted dynamic: A reading of accounting practices used by the mother country corroborates Foucauldian research by showing how accounting was used to influence French public opinion by presenting penal colonies as a moralising and profitable utopia. Conversely, local practices, which contrasted sharply with the mother country’s intentions, show that accounting contributed to a widespread system of corruption that kept the penal colonies under control. Our study highlights the dual role of accounting to reconcile the contradictions between the mother country and the penal colonies, and to link the moral rehabilitation of individuals to the profitability of the penal colonies.

Book review: Stuff and Money in the Time of the French RevolutionSpangRebecca LStuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 360 pp.: ISBN 9780674047037 (hbk)

Review of the book Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution by Rebecca L Spang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 360 pp.: ISBN 9780674047037)