Public Debt and Democratic Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century France

Among the earliest European powers to establish universal male suffrage, France’s assiduous development of a mass market for public debt is one of the distinctive features of its economic and political modernity. To reappraise this process, the chapter reconstructs the intellectual arguments that generated a striking and robust defense of public debt in the nineteenth century. It also examines the material dimension of the marketization of public debt, to show how it was reworked with an eye to assembling a large public of investment consumers. This chapter thus uncovers how France developed a system to channel popular savings toward public debts that ultimately intertwined the issues of state responsibility and republican citizenship.