It is not true that in France the death penalty was decreed against
bankrupts without distinction. Simple failures involved no penalty;
fraudulent bankrupts suffered the penalty of death in the states of
Orleans, under Charles IX., and in the states of Blois in 1576, but
these edicts, renewed by Henry IV., were merely comminatory.

It is too difficult to prove that a man has dishonoured himself on
purpose, and has voluntarily ceded all his goods to his creditors in
order to cheat them. When there has been a doubt, one has been content
with putting the unfortunate man in the pillory, or with sending him to
the galleys, although ordinarily a banker makes a poor convict.

Bankrupts were very favourably treated in the last year of Louis XIV.'s
reign, and during the Regency. The sad state to which the interior of
the kingdom was reduced, the multitude of merchants who could not or
would not pay, the quantity of unsold or unsellable effects, the fear of
interrupting all commerce, obliged the government in 1715, 1716, 1718,
1721, 1722, and 1726 to suspend all proceedings against all those who
were in a state of insolvency. The discussions of these actions were
referred to the judge-consuls; this is a jurisdiction of merchants very
expert in these cases, and better constituted for going into these
commercial details than the parliaments which have always been more
occupied with the laws of the kingdom than with finance. As the state
was at that time going bankrupt, it would have been too hard to punish
the poor middle-class bankrupts.

Since then we have had eminent men, fraudulent bankrupts, but they have
not been punished.