Prof. James Munson's latest publication, "The 'Interests of Commerce': Business Failure in the Commercial Code Debates, 1801-1807" has been accepted for publication in the premier journal French History (from Oxford U. Press) in late 2016. The online version of the paper has already appeared.
In the article, Munson uses the reform of bankruptcy law under Napoleon to demonstrate evolving ideas about the function and culture of business and commerce in early nineteenth-century France.
From the article's abstract: By rejecting guilds, the French Revolution heightened the importance of law in defining legitimate market activity. The debates on bankruptcy law in the Commercial Code from 1801 to 1807 were structured by a perceived crisis in credit following the Revolution. The debates involved two competing visions of the ‘interests of commerce’: buttressing market discipline for the market as a whole and smoothing debt recovery for creditors. The focus here is on the business representatives taking part in the debate, who faced the issue of defining commerce as an occupation within a legal framework. Since insolvency procedure was guided by local businessmen in the form of commercial courts, it became a debate on how commerce fit into the civic culture of post-revolutionary society. ‘Commerce’ as an entity ended up being both legitimated and delimited in ways that went beyond the usual stress on its special public utility.