Solidarity, Liability, and the New Regime of Corporate Property in Post-Revolutionary France

This article examines the Sandrié-Vincourt scandal at the Paris Stock Exchange, legal liability, and the contested meaning of corporate property during the Restoration regime. Sandrié-Vincourt, a stockbroker for multiple sizable accounts, had accrued immense debts through legally questionable means. Thoroughly insolvent, he fled the country in 1823. In an attempt to recoup their losses, his creditors sought to hold the Compagnie des Agents de Change de Paris, the state-sanctioned representative body for the Paris stockbrokers, collectively liable. Invoking the legal principle of joint responsibility, in which outside parties could be held liable for the debts of others, the creditors argued that, because the professional association was charged with overseeing the stockbrokers' behaviour, it should also be charged with resolving their debts. The Compagnie disagreed, arguing that, despite collective, corporate representation, Sandrié-Vincourt's debts were his and his alone. The Compagnie's ultimately successful defence in this dramatic and jurisprudentially influential trial thus reveals the bidirectional means through which individualized economic risk, intermediary bodies, and corporate property could be reconciled in the post-revolutionary world.