Revolutionary Debts: The Politics of Financial and Moral Obligation in the French Revolution

My project will explore the role of debt in the French Revolution. To do this, I shall focus on debt in two
distinct but interrelated registers: 1) debt as financial obligation, and 2) debt as moral obligation. The
focus of this project is based in the conviction there is always a moral basis to economic life. A historical
study of debt, therefore, must endeavour to capture both the financial and moral elements at hand. This
approach is particularly pertinent to the French Revolution. With the abolition of feudalism in 1789,
revolutionaries not only dissolved a financial apparatus and economic regime, but also a particular set of
moral codes and cultural norms - a set of expectations and obligations that had structured feudal society.
My project will investigate the tense interaction between how revolutionaries struggled to remake moral
obligation and tried to sort out who owed what to whom in financial terms. I will undertake this study by
"periodising" the Revolution according to the writings of three key finance ministers: Jacques Necker,
Étienne Clavière and Pierre-Joseph Cambon. The structure of the thesis will proceed from the debt
problem at the end of the Old Regime, to the period of Necker, the period of Clavière, the period of
Cambon, and then post-Terror finances