Economic measures and interventions in France at the end of the Ancien Régime

This article focuses on two royal graces used as protection against imprisonment for debt: the arrêt de surséance and the sauf-conduit. Requested by debtors in financial difficulty, they guaranteed them temporary relief, usually for six months to a year. While the demand for and granting of these graces followed the growth of commercial disputes in the second half of the 18th century, the article sets out to question the choices made by the royal administration in issuing, or not issuing, these graces, in order to understand their economic uses and their interest in the eyes of the crown. Although grace is a wellknown instrument of government, its economic uses remain largely unknown. Two archive collections, those of the Généralités of Rouen and those of the Conseil d’État, provide an opportunity to take a comparative look at the criteria used to assess requests and the action taken by the royal authorities. Adapted to the social and economic profiles of the applicants, graces were used as a means of managing economic times. For the central state, these protections served to assert exclusive jurisdiction over an area where several forms of authority were exercised.