Reforming the paper life of property was thus a preoccupation of mortgage reform proponents. Plans ranged from fundamental administrative overhaul, such as combining the diverse bureaus involved in the registration of acts pertaining to property into one “central public archive,” to the reorganization of the columns formatting data on the sheets of existing registries. Decourdemanche’s treatise contained pages of sample sheets that demonstrated how a revised system of registration could work in coordination with the cadastre to make the recording and referencing of information on land parcels a simple matter of rapid cross-referencing. (Figure 2) A proposal from Jean-Louis Langlois, a deputy from the department of the Eure in 1848, aimed to “modify our civil laws to agree with commercial practice” and described directories that would combine the civil registry, the cadastre, and the mortgage registry. These directories would not merely link the personal credit of the individual to the real credit of land; by assembling different ways of knowing about borrowers and their security, they created a different kind of asset, ensuring that “the person of the borrower would weigh significantly in the decision of the creditor.” The compilation and arrangement of information in pursuit of a rationalized property and mortgage registry was not a simple matter, nor one to be taken lightly. The form of property’s existence on paper helped shape its legal standing. Figure 2: A page from the reformed property registry of Alphonse Decourdemanche, Du danger de prêter sur hypothèque (1829). Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France When considering the question of potential reorganization of mortgage administration in 1841, the Ministry of Finance not only addressed the complex expertise and legal responsibilities that would necessarily be required of new positions, but critiqued the material practices that would result: One of the advantages of the system currently in place is that acts are transcribed and mortgages registered on directories provided by the administration, each page numbered and signed by the president of the civil tribunal and closed daily by the
was no shortage of reasons undergirding opposition to the mobilization and monetization of land values. Perhaps the most intriguing were those that rejected monetization on the basis of the inadequacy of land itself. The debates surrounding the mortgage question reveal remarkably little consensus on the reliability of land as a source of value. Deputy Léon Faucher expressed the extreme position on this issue in 1848: Land is far from the best security. In fact, on its own it is no kind of security at all. It may have been reasonable to think of it as the definitive security when the origin of value was little understood, when we didn’t grasp the nature of production. But today […] what is it that produces? Is it the earth? No! It’s labour. […] Land is worth as much as the man who works it is worth. In a similar statement that seemed an outright rejection the Physiocratic truism of the productivity of land, the Ministry of Finance expressed skepticism over the viability of a market for mortgage instruments because with mortgages, unlike rentes sur l’Etat or public debt, “the opportunity for an increase of one’s capital is nonexistent.” Even if land could produce value, the conditions that would make this value evident and credible to observers were lacking. As several courts consulted in the 1841 legal consultation pointed out, a tradesman enjoyed credit because his transactions were “based on daily appeals to mutual trust, on the incessant surveillance of public opinion and the sanctions that follow any lack of good faith.” This personal network supplied the instruments he inscribed with a reliable face value. In contrast, “a mortgage’s security cannot be deduced from a glance at a title;” moreover, “a property owner’s transactions are few and secret […] nothing regulates the level of trust he should be accorded.” Indeed, Faucher based his opposition to paper mortgage money in 1848 precisely on what he saw as the wrong-headedness of replacing bills representing “a metallic value, a definitive and universal means of exchange” with bills representing “landed