Riflessioni sulla relazione tra procedure fallimentari e declassamento sociale in età moderna (con note a margine sul caso veneziano)

As a practice reserved for the merchant world, bankruptcy proceedings made several exceptions to the general principles of Roman civil law, and like the developing of commercial law from judgements and customs they made up a separate legal world which was usually supplemented by the use of commercial arbitration to speed up the development of legal actions. Bankruptcy legislation tended to provide protection nets for those who had failed without their fault, due due to adverse economic conditions or as a result of fraudulent behaviour on the part of others ; however, it reserved severe penalties for those who sought to make illegal profits through bankruptcy proceedings, often by declaring their intent to flee (fugitive failures). In both, the prospect of a bankruptcy coincided with a loss of livelihood, temporary or continuous, and therefore with the impossibility of continuing to present itself in the social context of reference, marking a difference between the situation before the bankruptcy and after it. This situation had knock-on effects on those who went bust : requests for help and support, appeals to the authorities, refuge in relief institutions, sometimes even family dismemberment. The consequences of a failure from the point of view of social belonging, and of the representation of oneself and one's family, were generally very serious, and yet very difficult to reconstruct: the losers disappear from the documents, rarely re-emerging in the petitions addressed to the government by the family members. However, it was the fugitives who were perceived as anomalous bodies within the merchant community, as disruptors of the good reputation of merchandise in general and of the reputation of a merchant place in particular.