Les offices, les corps, et le crédit d'État : l'utilisation des privilèges sous l'Ancien Régime - article ; n°2 ; vol.43, pg 379-404

Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations - Année 1988 - Volume 43 - Numéro 2 - Pages 379-404
Offices, Corps, and the System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Regime.
The article treats mechanisms and principles that characterized state borrowing through venal offices. It describes how those offices, a resource that kings could and did create at will, served to attract capital from both their acquirers and, in turn, from others who advanced funds to the acquirers for their pure hases. There is, further, a discussion of the king's successive demands of additional capital to be placed in the offices, and of a system of collective loans that the officiers, clustered in corps, floated for the king. This borrowing, always at a rate ofinterest considerably lower than the king could obtain by himself, locked the state into a regime of privilege that survived until 1789. Finally, it is suggested that the autonomous corps created by the state formed in their members various habits of association that unwittingly contributed to democratic practice after 1789.
26 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.